Jupiter Retrograde in Leo (December 13, 2026 – April 13, 2027): Every Date to the Minute, the Saturn Trine Nobody Is Talking About, and a Checker for Your Own Chart

Depending on which website you read, Jupiter turns retrograde on December 12, 2026, or on December 13. The Farmers' Almanac says the 12th. Astrostyle says the 12th. Café Astrology says the 12th. Zodiscope, Soularmap and the Vedic sites say the 13th. Nobody is wrong: the planet stops at 01:39 UTC on the 13th, which is 8:39 PM on the 12th in New York and 2:39 in the morning on the 13th in Paris. The disagreement is a time zone with no referee.

This guide is the referee. Below you will find every date of the cycle computed to the minute — stations, shadows, the aspects that surround them — in UTC and US Eastern, with the clock changes handled. Then the part almost nobody publishes: what the retrograde actually audits, house by house, the 2014–2015 echo you can mine for clues, the Saturn trine folded around the direct station, and a calculator that checks your own chart against the exact degrees instead of asking you to trust a table of dates copied between websites that cannot agree on the day.

One thing to settle before anything else, because it is the first thing everyone asks: Jupiter retrograde is not Mercury retrograde with a bigger budget. Mercury retrograde is a three-week logistics outage — emails, trains, contracts, the small print of daily life. Jupiter retrograde is a four-month audit of meaning: what you believe, what you are growing, what you said yes to and why. It breaks almost nothing. It re-prices things. That distinction, and what to do with it, is the whole article.

The complete timeline

All times are computed from our own ephemeris (JPL-derived Keplerian elements, the same engine that powers the calculator below) and cross-checked against published monthly positions; agreement is within a couple of arc-minutes of longitude. "ET" is US Eastern, switching between EDT and EST where the clocks change.

Three things jump out of that table. First, the retrograde proper is 121 days and about an hour — but the full story, shadow to shadow, is 297 days, meaning eighty per cent of Jupiter's year in Leo is either shadow or retrograde. The clean, full-speed windows are June 30 – September 17 at the start (already gone) and April 13 – July 26 at the end.

Second, look at the second week of November: Mars catches Jupiter on the 16th at 25°55′ Leo, and the Sun squares the pair from Scorpio two days later. That is the loudest, most photographed week of the whole approach — the "big ambitious plan announced loudly" week — and it happens while Jupiter is nearly stationary, five degrees short of its stop. Whatever gets promised in mid-November gets re-negotiated in February.

Third, the station itself falls while the Sun is in Sagittarius — Jupiter's own sign, the one it rules. Traditional timing logic (and Café Astrology's "best of the best" lists) treats the Sun-in-Sagittarius stretch, November 22 to December 21, as the strongest window of Jupiter's whole year. The planet of perspective stopping dead in its own season, at the very top of its form in Leo: if retrograde stations have sponsors, this one is well funded.

Does this retrograde touch your chart? (and were you born with Jupiter retrograde?)

Enter your birth date. The time and time zone only matter if you were born within a few hours of Jupiter changing sign or direction — which is rare, given that Jupiter moves about a fifth of a degree a day — so don't worry if you don't know them. Nothing is stored, nothing is emailed.

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What it checks: your natal Jupiter (position, direct or retrograde, stationary or not), your natal Venus and Mercury as a bonus, and whether any planet from the Sun to Pluto sits inside the retrograde zone — 17°01′ to 27°03′ Leo — or squares or opposes it, with a 2° orb. For every contact it gives the exact dates Jupiter crosses that degree, usually three passes spread across ten months. The Moon and Ascendant need an exact birth time and place, so they are left out rather than guessed.

What a Jupiter retrograde actually is (and why it is not rare)

The astronomy is the easy part. Jupiter does not reverse. It appears to, because we watch it from a planet that overtakes it on the inside track. Earth laps Jupiter roughly every thirteen months, and for about four months either side of the overtaking — while our line of sight swings past — the big planet seems to back up through the zodiac. Draw Jupiter's position against the fixed stars every night for a year and you get a loop: forward, slow, stop, backwards, slow, stop, forward. Every planet outside Earth's orbit draws that loop. Jupiter's is just the widest and the calmest.

The numbers for this particular loop: Jupiter backs up from 27°03′ Leo to 17°01′ Leo — ten degrees and two arc-minutes — over 121 days. Its fastest backwards speed, reached in mid-January, is about a tenth of a degree per day. For comparison, Mercury retrograde at its swiftest covers that much sky in a single afternoon. This is one reason Jupiter retrogrades feel like a mood rather than an incident: nothing outpaces you fast enough to be an incident.

Now the part that recalibrates the whole topic: this happens constantly. Jupiter is retrograde about 120 days out of every 399 — we clocked it at 29.7% of all days between 2000 and 2030. Pick a stranger at random and there is roughly a three-in-ten chance Jupiter was retrograde the day they were born. There is a retrograde of some outer planet happening, or about to happen, for most of your life. If retrograde Jupiter truly cancelled anything, civilisation would have noticed by now.

What the tradition actually says is narrower and more interesting: Jupiter is the principle of expansion — growth, luck, meaning, the bigger yes. When it retrogrades, the expansion turns inward. The outer wins slow down; the inner accounting speeds up. Astrologers who work with this cycle treat it as a review period for anything that got big fast: faith, plans, promises, purchases, philosophies, the identity you built during the direct phase. Not a punishment. An audit.

What it means: the audit of the summer's growth

Here is the specific shape of this audit, and why it is worth more attention than the average Jupiter retrograde.

Jupiter entered Leo on June 30, 2026, for a thirteen-month stay — its first since July 2014 to August 2015, and its last until June 2038. Leo is the sign of the creative self: what you make, how you shine, the risky business of being seen as yourself rather than as a role. Jupiter in Leo is the twelve-year window when that part of life gets funding. The first phase, June 30 to December 12, has been the outbound phase: new projects, new visibility, new confidence, new commitments made in the flush of it. The retrograde from December 13 to April 13 is the inbound phase: Jupiter walks back over every degree it covered between mid-September and December, re-examining what got built there.

Practically: any opportunity, project, relationship, purchase or promise that opened up between July and early December 2026 comes up for a second look between December and April. Some of it passes and gets bigger in 2027. Some of it turns out to have been performance — yours or someone else's — and quietly deflates. The retrograde does not usually tear anything down; it just stops inflating it, and you find out what was holding its own weight. If something falls away over this winter, the honest reading is that it was gravity, not sabotage.

Because Jupiter is involved, the review is about meaning more than logistics. The questions this cycle asks are not "did the emails send" but: Is the work I am becoming known for actually mine? Did I say yes to this because I believe it or because it applauded? Is the bigger life I am building bigger in the directions I actually care about? A retrograde in Leo makes those questions personal rather than abstract. It is one thing to audit your beliefs; it is another to audit your persona.

One more framing that helps: the winter of 2026–27 is a stacked review season, not a one-off. Venus retrograde ran its course in Scorpio and Libra from October 3 to November 14 (see the Venus retrograde guide), Mercury retrograde overlapped it from October 24 to November 13 in Scorpio (see the Mercury retrograde guide), and now the slowest, gentlest member of the family takes the baton for four months. By the time Jupiter stations direct in April, everything from your relationships to your emails to your beliefs will have been through a second draft. The spring is unusually well edited. That is the payoff.

The set-up: June 30 – December 12, the best launch window of the year

To know what the audit will audit, look at what the direct phase actually did. The highlights, all in Leo, all before the station:

• July 29 — the Sun met Jupiter at 6°26′ Leo. The transit's opening headline: a "who am I becoming" moment, roughly a month after the ingress. Anything begun around that week carries extra Leo-Jupiter signature.
• September 17 — the shadow begins. Jupiter crosses 17°01′ Leo, the degree it will eventually return to in April. From this date the zone under audit is fixed: everything that happens in mid-to-late Leo from here on is inside the loop.
• November 16 — Mars conjunct Jupiter at 25°55′ Leo. The once-every-two-years meeting of drive and growth, in the sign of the performer. Energy, courage, the unstoppable pitch. The catch: Jupiter is five degrees from its station, which is like flooring the accelerator in a car that is already braking. Bold moves made this week get revisited.
• November 18 — the Sun squares Jupiter from 26°05′ Scorpio. The reality-check follow-up, forty-eight hours later. Oversized confidence meets the fine print.
• December 2 — Jupiter trine Chiron in Aries at 26°50′ Leo (per standard ephemerides; our engine puts Jupiter at 26°51′ at the stated minute). A quiet, healing-flavoured aspect in the last direct days: the confidence question meets the old wound about being seen. Whatever this touched in early December is raw material for the retrograde's deeper work.
• December 13, 01:39 UTC — the station. Five days later the Sun, now in Sagittarius, throws Jupiter a perfect trine from fellow fire sign (December 18, 26°59′) — the tradition's equivalent of a stamp of legitimacy on the turn. Reviews that begin under a trine from the Sun in Jupiter's own sign are, if you like the old rules, well aspected reviews.

Where it lands: the house-by-house guide

The simplest reliable way to place a slow transit in your life is the whole-sign house: find where Leo starts in your chart, count that as your Leo house, and the whole retrograde — shadow to shadow — happens there. If you know your rising sign, the table does it for you. (If you only know your Sun sign, that works too, with the looser "solar house" logic the big astrology sites use — your Sun plays the role of the Ascendant. Rising sign is better; the calculator above takes either.)

And the readings, one per placement. Read yours; skim your loved ones'; the Leo flavour runs through all twelve.

• First house (Leo rising). This is your Jupiter year, and the retrograde is its mid-term exam. Since June you have been handing out a newer, bolder version of yourself; from December to April you find out which parts of it are load-bearing. People who reinvent themselves under Jupiter in Leo usually need this winter to let the identity settle. The verdict that survives until April 13 is the one the next twelve years run on.
• Second house (Cancer rising). The audit is about money and self-worth, which in Leo are the same conversation. Income that grew quickly since summer gets re-priced: are you charging what the work is worth, or what feels safe? Rates, budgets and negotiations opened in the flush of summer optimism come back for a second, calmer draft. This is one of the better placements for finally fixing your pricing.
• Third house (Gemini rising). The natural house for going back to a subject. Re-enrol, re-read, finish the half-done course or manuscript; siblings and neighbours from an earlier chapter reappear with useful information. Watch the upgrade-to-the-upgrade impulse: the equipment buys made in November get regretted in February.
• Fourth house (Taurus rising). The home front. A move or renovation first sketched in summer gets redrawn; family expectations get renegotiated; an old address or an old relative looms larger than expected. The real question is what "home" means — the retrograde tends to relocate it from the impressive to the nourishing.
• Fifth house (Aries rising). The headline placement: creativity, romance, children, play. Projects launched in the summer get the honest second look; an old creative work — or an old flame — asks to be finished; anything performative about your joy gets pruned. Of all twelve houses this one pays out best, because Leo's domain is exactly what Jupiter audits here: what you make and whether you love it.
• Sixth house (Pisces rising). Systems and the body. Day-job routines built fast during the summer expansion now show their seams; health habits get re-committed, not for the first time. The fix to make is to the workflow, not the ambition.
• Seventh house (Aquarius rising). Partnerships, business and personal. Commitments made in the flush of Jupiter-in-Leo optimism between July and December get re-worded — or revealed as all stagecraft. An ex-partner or old collaborator returns. The move is to renegotiate scope while keeping substance, not to walk away from the whole contract.
• Eighth house (Capricorn rising). Shared money and depth: investments, debts, inheritances, the accounts you hold with other people. The honest conversation you have been deferring since summer is the one that pays. Intimacy gets audited with the same ledger: who is actually showing up.
• Ninth house (Sagittarius rising). Jupiter's own house — the retrograde is strongest here, and it rules your chart, which doubles the volume. A worldview you adopted wholesale gets tested against your actual experience; travel plans get rebooked; the book returns for its second draft; the course of study changes shape. Philosophies that survive this winter are yours for life.
• Tenth house (Scorpio rising). Career and public reputation. The visibility you gained since June gets re-examined: which parts of the new profile are substance, which are stagecraft? Titles, roles and long-game plans get re-negotiated rather than abandoned — and with Saturn trine from your own first house in the spring, the re-negotiation has structural support behind it.
• Eleventh house (Libra rising). The network that expanded over the summer gets pruned to the people who are actually there for you. A five-year plan gets rewritten with fewer, better commitments. Group affiliations get audited — the community you joined in the flush of enthusiasm either deepens or dissolves.
• Twelfth house (Virgo rising). The quiet one, and possibly the most productive. Old dreams recur, a therapeutic thread picks back up, and something you outgrew finally gets a funeral. Nobody will see this retrograde happening to you, which is rather the point of a twelfth-house Jupiter.

A note for the fixed signs: if you have planets between roughly 15° and 29° of Leo, Taurus, Scorpio or Aquarius, this retrograde hits them personally — three passes each. The calculator above finds them, with dates. Everyone else experiences the cycle through the house.

The echo: December 2014 – April 2015

Jupiter returns to each sign every twelve years, and its retrogrades land in suspiciously similar places. The last Jupiter retrograde in Leo ran December 8, 2014 (station at 22°35′) to April 8, 2015 (station at 12°33′). This one runs December 13, 2026 to April 13, 2027, five degrees higher in the sign. The pattern is not exact, but it is close enough to be useful: whatever house Leo occupies in your chart now, it occupied then too.

So do the unglamorous, high-yield thing: go back to that winter in your own life. What did you commit to between December 2014 and April 2015? What got scaled back, admitted, renegotiated, given up? For the cohort that was a teenager then, this retrograde is the first adult rerun of a story whose first draft you lived at fourteen or fifteen. For everyone else, 2014–15 is the template: the themes that surfaced then — creative confidence, recognition, the question of who gets to be seen — surface again now, at twelve years' more distance from the original wound and twelve years' closer to the answer.

And if you want the wider arc: the retrograde before that was in Leo's neighbour — Jupiter was retrograde in Cancer into early March 2026 — and the one after this will run January 12 to May 13, 2028, entirely in Virgo. The audit migrates one sign, and one house of your chart, roughly every thirteen months. You can, in principle, keep one clean window per year for the rest of your life.

The part nobody else tells you: the Saturn trine at the direct station

Search "Jupiter retrograde 2026" and you will find the dates, the crystals, and twelve nearly identical paragraphs about reviewing your beliefs. What none of the ranking pages mention — we checked — is the most useful fact of the whole cycle, and it sits at the end of it.

This is the rare and desirable geometry: growth that has passed its audit being handed, at the moment it resumes, directly to the planet that builds things to last. In practice, astrologers read a Jupiter–Saturn trine as the "sustainable expansion" aspect — the promotion with the workload priced in, the project funded on real numbers, the yes that survives contact with the calendar. That this corridor wraps the direct station means the things Jupiter re-approved over the winter get a structural runway from mid-April onward.

The sequencing is worth marking in a calendar. First exact pass: April 3 — the deal is drafted. Direct station: April 13 — the growth resumes. Second exact pass: July 12 — the deal is finalised, one day after the post-shadow closes on July 11. Then Jupiter leaves Leo on July 26 and the whole twelve-year chapter in your Leo house closes until 2038. In other words: April to July 2027 is the collection window — the stretch where the audited, trine-to-Saturn version of your Jupiter-in-Leo year gets converted into things you keep.

Born with Jupiter retrograde

About 3 in 10 people were — 29.7% of all days between 2000 and 2030, by our count, and the rate barely varies across the decades the calculator covers. If that includes you, the description below is your owner's manual; the calculator above will confirm it in one step.

The traditional reading of natal Jupiter retrograde is inner rather than outer: faith that has to be earned rather than inherited. People with it tend to re-examine the beliefs they were handed — family, cultural, religious, professional — and either rebuild them from experience or quietly keep searching. The cliché is "late bloomer", and like most clichés it is half true: outer luck often arrives later and lands deeper, because it was built on foundations rather than momentum. The shadow version is a person who never quite trusts their own expansion, who audits every piece of good fortune for the catch. The gift version is someone whose optimism, once it settles, is unshakeable — because it survived the audit.

If you were born with Jupiter retrograde in Leo — roughly August 1978 to September 1979, or July 2014 to August 2015 — this transit is also a Jupiter return under revision: Jupiter comes home to its natal place, finds it moving backwards, and re-underwrites the whole twelve-year chapter. The calculator flags this and gives the exact passes.

How to use the season: what to do, what to hold

Because Jupiter retrograde is slow and internal, the rules are gentler than Mercury's, and mostly about timing rather than prohibition. The honest summary:

And the two clean launch windows of Jupiter's Leo year, for anything you want the full tailwind on: June 30 – December 12, 2026 (already underway; the best stretch of it, with the Sun in Leo and then the Sun in Sagittarius, runs to early December) and April 13 – July 26, 2027, the direct phase with the Saturn trine inside it — the stronger of the two for anything that has to survive long-term.

Nothing here is a prohibition. Jupiter retrograde does not cancel weddings, launches, or house purchases; it changes what you should read the fine print for. If the only date the venue has is in January, take the venue — and re-read the contract twice.

After it is over: July 2027, 2028, and the next Leo retrograde in 2038

The tail of the cycle, for the completists. Jupiter stations direct on April 13, 2027 and re-crosses the shadow zone through the spring — the Sun opposition of February 11 has its echo in the direct passes of late March — finishing the post-shadow on July 11, perfecting the second Saturn trine on July 12, and entering Virgo on July 26, 2027. Your Leo house then rests until June 2038, when the whole twelve-year story begins again.

The next retrograde is January 12 to May 13, 2028, entirely in Virgo (27°33′ back to 17°34′) — the audit migrates to the next house over, as it does every thirteen months. If you are mapping the years: beliefs now, work and systems next.

One housekeeping note on the dates you will see around the web. Sites that list the station as "December 12" are reporting US Eastern or IST-adjacent conversions; sites that say "December 13" are on UTC or European time; a few Vedic listings add that sidereal Jupiter is still in Cancer, a full sign back, because of the ayanamsa — the ~24° gap between the tropical and sidereal zodiacs. None of these are errors. But if a site promises "exact times" and then rounds the station to a whole day, you now know what it is rounding away.

Method: all positions and times computed with our Keplerian ephemeris (JPL/Standish elements, 1800–2050, tropical zodiac, UTC), validated against Café Astrology's monthly Jupiter longitudes to within about 2 arc-minutes (e.g., our December 1, 2026 position of ~26°50′ Leo against their 26°48′). The one date we did not compute independently — the Chiron trine on December 2 — is taken from published ephemerides and marked as such. Whole-sign houses throughout; if you use quadrant houses, subtract nothing but expect the occasional one-house shift. Related guides: Venus Retrograde 2026 and Mercury Retrograde October 2026, both with their own calculators.