Mercury (Budha) Transit Dates — Next 12 Months

Vedic Mercury (Budha) transit schedule for the next 12 months — sign entries, retrograde periods, sign lord, and dwell duration. Sidereal Swiss Ephemeris.

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How to read this page

The positions shown are sidereal, calculated with the Lahiri ayanamsa — the standard used across Indian panchang. They update daily from live ephemeris data rather than from a fixed table, so the sign and degree shown are the current ones, not an approximation.

Budha is the only graha exalted in a sign it also owns

Mercury owns Gemini and Virgo, takes its moolatrikona in Virgo, and exalts in Virgo as well. It is the only one of the seven to stack all three in one sign — ownership, root-trine and exaltation together — and the exaltation degree is 15°, the exact midpoint of the sign.

The debilitation mirrors it at 15° Pisces, which is Jupiter’s own sign. So the sign where Mercury is weakest is the sign where the graha it is usually paired against is at home.

Seventeen years of the Vimshottari cycle belong to Mercury, second only to Venus, and it crosses a sign in about twenty-five days.

Mercury rules the three nakshatras that close the water signs

Ashlesha, Jyeshtha and Revati carry Mercury as their dasha lord, and the three of them share something no other lord’s set does: each one ends a water sign. Ashlesha runs out at the end of Cancer, Jyeshtha at the end of Scorpio, Revati at the end of Pisces.

Those three endings are the gandanta junctions — the knots where a water sign hands over to a fire sign. Classical muhurat treats the last degrees of them with real caution, and a Moon there at birth is one of the standard reasons a chart is read more carefully rather than more confidently.

Mercury and Venus grade identically across all twelve ascendants

Mercury is a functional benefic from Taurus, Gemini, Virgo, Libra, Capricorn and Aquarius, and a functional malefic from the other six. Venus draws exactly the same line — the two split the twelve ascendants into the same halves, which is a consequence of where their signs fall relative to each other and not a coincidence of judgement.

Mercury is never a yogakaraka despite owning two signs. From every ascendant its two houses are either both angles or both something else; the angle-and-trine pair it would need never lands on it.

Where Mercury is, and when it next changes sign

Position when this page was last built: 9.2° of Cancer (Karka), sidereal, Lahiri ayanamsa. The live panel above recomputes for the instant you load the page, so the two will differ once the graha has moved.

No forward ingress date is stated here. At 25 days per sign the graha moves fast enough that a printed date would be stale before most readers arrived; the panel above is the place to read it.

What this page can and cannot tell you

What this page cannot do: it has no birth time, so it cannot place a single graha in a single house of a real chart, and nothing here is a reading. Everything above is structural — it is true of the sign or the graha itself, for everybody, and it stays true next year. A chart turns that structure into an answer only once a date, a time and a place fix the ascendant and the dasha clock; where the birth time is unknown or approximate, the ascendant is unreliable and we say so rather than guessing.

Retrograde Mercury is the question this page gets asked and cannot answer usefully. Whether a station matters to you depends on the house it falls in from your own Moon, and there are twelve of those.