July Horoscopes 2026
Your guide to this month for each sign
I was in London last week and went to the Tate to see the Whistler Nocturnes — which are extraordinary, and worth going for, but ended up, as I always do in that building, with Turner. His late unfinished works are all in their own room right now and I think it might be my favourite room in any gallery anywhere. These are paintings that were found in his studio after he died, never shown, never finished, never given titles. Just Turner alone, experimenting, dissolving everything he knew how to paint until almost nothing remained. No subject, no story, no firm edge anywhere. Just colour becoming light becoming atmosphere. They look like nothing else made in the 19th century and honestly not much made since.
In that same room is one of the last paintings he did exhibit publicly, Mercury Sent to Admonish Aeneas, from 1850, the year before he died. It is Turner's response to Virgil's Aeneid, that moment in the epic when Jupiter loses patience with Aeneas, who has fallen for Dido and settled in Carthage and seems to have entirely forgotten that his destiny is to found Rome. Jupiter sends Mercury to find him and remind him. In Turner's version, Mercury appears not as a god or a figure but as a plume of smoke, a smear of gold and white against the air. You can barely make him out (pictured above). The message is there but the messenger is dissolving into the light around him.
That is exactly what Mercury is doing right now. In July, Mercury turns retrograde and then disappears completely under the beams of the Sun, what astrologers call a cazimi, burnt up and invisible, subsumed into solar fire before it emerges again on the other side, changed.
Also in the room: a Rothko. Which makes strange sense when you stand between them, and yet it doesn't feel like an accident either. There's a kinship in how little either painter needed, in the end, to hold a viewer's attention — colour alone, doing all the work. He was obsessed with Turner, and donated a set of his own paintings to the Tate in the hope they'd be hung beside his. The Tate honoured it. One painter across a century, just wanting to be near the work he loved most.
Enjoy your month, and as always, read for your rising sign first. All the paintings below are from Turner's unfinished series, along with the Rothko hanging alongside them in that same room..
And if you are traveling this summer, or are thinking about where to live or spend time, check out Maphrodite. It is the first astrocartography app and it tells you not only which places in the world are most aligned with your chart and when to go. One-off payment, no subscription. Or check out my book Astrocartography. An Astrologer’s Guide to Where you’ll thrive. Lastly, If you want to book a personal reading you can do that here.
Aries
You know that phenomenon when a wild friend comes to town and suddenly you find yourself doing things you don’t usually do, staying out too late, saying yes to everything, wondering who exactly you’ve become by 2am? That’s the energy of July. Jupiter, planet of abundance and revelry, has just entered your 5th house of sex, creativity, and tavern life, and the raucous Leo Sun follows from the 22nd onwards. You and Leo are both fire signs of considerable appetite, and when you get together, it’s Thelma and Louise: exhilarating, slightly dangerous, and probably ending somewhere unexpected.
Mercury, planet of wit and chatter, is otherwise engaged this month, retrograde in Cancer and your home zone. So even though you might be having the time of your life out on the tiles, some family or domestic commitments may need tending to, particularly around things you thought were already settled. Mercury retrograde has a way of dragging the past back to your door, sometimes literally. Let’s just hope it’s not your landlord, your mother, or both, standing together on the doorstep looking unimpressed while you arrive home Monday morning still in Saturday’s outfit after a lost weekend at KitKat.
Meanwhile, Mars, your celestial drill sergeant, spends the whole month in Gemini, lodged in your 3rd house of neighbours and siblings. Expect both to be louder, needier, and more annoying than usual. Someone is going to knock on your wall. Someone is going to send a passive-aggressive message in the group chat. Someone may actually bring up the bins. Consider it karmic training, or more likely, cosmic payback for the noise complaints.
Taurus
Keats opens To Autumn with an inventory of abundance so precise it is almost physical: fruit bending the branches, gourds swelling, hazel shells plumped with a sweet kernel, the bees so drunk on fullness they think warm days will never cease. He was writing about a season. He could have been writing about Venus in Leo, angular in your 4th house, which is where your ruling planet opens July. She has just cleared her opposition with Pluto, that long grinding aspect that made desire feel like something to be managed rather than inhabited. Now she moves through the first nine days of the month unencumbered, and the quality of those days will have something of Keats about them: tactile, generous, slightly excessive in the best possible sense. Spend a little more than you should on something that fits you perfectly. Eat the thing. Send the text. Make your life feel as though it was designed on purpose.
Then on the 9th, Venus shifts into Virgo and your 5th house, and Keats shifts stanzas. The second movement of To Autumn is not the abundance of the first but its accounting: autumn sitting careless on the granary floor, hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind, taking stock of what the season produced. This is Venus in Virgo exactly. The 5th house is a fun house and Venus here picks up accidental dignity, meaning the placement suits her in principle. But Virgo is Venus’s fall, which means she is in that fun house wearing slightly sensible shoes, carrying a tote bag, and quietly making a list. She wants to enjoy herself, she genuinely does, but she also cannot quite stop noticing what needs fixing. Less velvet robe, more spreadsheet with very good lighting.
That said she is still Venus, and what she asks of you in this sign is to take your value seriously, what you have, what you earn, and how you speak about both. A financial opportunity may come through words: a pitch, a proposal, a flirtation that quietly becomes a project. Venus in Virgo wants your voice to make money and your ideas to be taken seriously. Insist that they are.
Gemini
Mars entered your sign at the start of the month and is already behaving badly, which for Gemini is not entirely unwelcome. You are the sign that runs on electrical current and Mars in Gemini is a live wire: everything faster, sharper, more combustible than usual, the mind generating ideas faster than the hands can catch them, the mouth moving slightly ahead of the thought.
Mars meets Uranus in your 1st house, which is the kind of transit that does not build gradually. It arrives. People who work in technology, writing, communications, media, or anything that moves information from one place to another may find that something breaks open here in the best possible sense: a door that was flush with the wall suddenly has a handle. The rest of you: the charge is still real, it just needs directing. Mars in the 1st house is engine energy and an engine without a destination is just noise. Have a project. Set August 10th as your deadline, the day Mars leaves your sign, and work backwards from there with the particular urgency this transit provides. Write furiously. Pitch the thing. Build it before the current moves on.
The other side of this: Mars-Uranus in your 1st house in an air sign is not an energy that tolerates provocation gracefully. Do not be around people who trigger you in general this month. Do not put yourself in situations where you might be the one who says the thing that cannot be unsaid.
Mercury, your ruler, is retrograde until July 22nd. Some of the brilliance you generate this month will arrive faster than it can be properly formed. Capture it anyway. The refinement can wait. The idea cannot.
Cancer
You may feel Jupiter’s absence the way you feel it when someone leaves after an intense weekend, that particular quality of Sunday evening light in a room that was, until an hour ago, entirely occupied by another person. The glass they used is still on the nightstand. The indentation in the pillow. A smell that is already beginning to lift. You are not bereft exactly, more suspended, inhabiting the afterglow of something that was, while it lasted, quite complete. That is Jupiter leaving Cancer. It has not abandoned you. It has simply moved on to its next appointment, as the most desirable people always do, leaving you with everything it gave you and the faint, particular ache of its absence.
And yet. The ache is not the whole story. Jupiter in Cancer was never loud. It did not announce itself. It worked the way light works in a north-facing room, so constant and so ambient that you stopped seeing it entirely, and only its absence will tell you what it was doing there. The confidence that arrived without your noticing it arrive. The connections that seemed inevitable only in retrospect. The slow expansion of what you believed yourself capable of. These things do not leave with the planet, any more than the impression in the pillow disappears the moment the person does. They remain. They are yours now. The past is not behind us but beneath us, a sediment quietly accumulating, and what Jupiter has left you is not a memory but a new floor to stand on. You may not feel it yet. You are standing on it.
Jupiter moves next into your house of money, which is the universe asking, with some impatience, whether you are ready to be paid for what you’re worth. The seeds planted this past year want to yield something material now. Which of your ideas has been waiting long enough? Which one is ready to stop being a potential and start being an invoice?
Mercury is retrograde in your sign until July 22nd, turning your attention inward and backward, asking you to account for the past year before you race into the next one. What did you learn? What did you lose? What did you gain that you haven’t fully acknowledged yet, because acknowledging it would make it real, and making it real would mean you’d have to do something with it? Nostalgia is always a theme in Cancer season. This month, let it be useful rather than merely decorative.
On July 14th, a New Moon arrives in your sign, following closely on Mercury’s cazimi. That rare and clarifying moment when Mercury aligns exactly with the Sun and steps out of shadow, blinking, wide awake. Think of it as the universe pressing refresh. This is your Moon of the year, sweet Crabs. Guard it. Fill the day only with what you love. Set intentions that belong entirely to you, not what you think you should want, not what looks good, not what anyone else needs from you. Yours.
Leo
I am Leo rising so I may be biased, but July belongs to us. Jupiter has just entered our 1st house, where it will remain until 2027, and Venus joins it for the first nine days. What this means practically is difficult to separate from what it means atmospherically. The 1st house governs the self as it appears to others, that curious interface between what we are and what we project, and Jupiter there is not subtle. It is the planet of plenty in the house of presence. People notice you before you have done anything to be noticed. Rooms adjust slightly when you enter them. You may not see this happening. It is happening.
The counterpoint: Mercury is retrograde in our 12th house all month, the house of what is hidden, withheld, not yet formed. There is always, in the most outwardly radiant people, an interior that the performance doesn’t reach, a room behind the room. Mercury retrograde in the 12th is time spent in that room. Mercury’s cazimi falls on July 12th, the moment it aligns exactly with the Sun and something surfaces that couldn’t have been arrived at any other way. Spend that day quietly enough to hear it.
Mars is in Gemini and our 11th house of friendship and social life all month. Night chart? This can translate to a lively social season, more out, more circulating, more of the right people finding you. Day chart? You may find the social field more draining than usual, and certain friendships more effort than they’re worth. Trust that instinct.
The Full Moon in Aquarius on July 29th falls in our 7th house, and Jupiter is cazimi the same day. Jupiter cazimi in Leo is the moment the planet is most itself, most generous, most expansive, and it asks the same of us. The most Leo thing you can do on this day is give something away.
Virgo
Mercury, your ruler, begins the month retrograde, and no sign feels this particular weather more acutely than you. You like your i’s dotted and your t’s crossed, your systems clean and your margins free of red ink. A retrograde Mercury is, in essence, the universe’s invitation to make peace with imprecision, and that, for you, is the deeper work of this transit.
There is a type of person, and Virgo knows this type intimately because Virgo often is this type, who cannot leave a room without checking that the windows are closed. Not once. Several times. Who goes back up the stairs not because they genuinely believe they left the gas on but because the alternative, the acceptance of uncertainty, the willingness to proceed without absolute confirmation, feels like a kind of moral failure. Proust spent years in a cork-lined room revising the same sentences. He understood that the desire for perfection is really the desire to stop time, to hold the thing still long enough to get it exactly right, and that this desire, however beautiful, is also a way of never finishing, never sending, never letting the work leave the room it was made in. Three times a year Mercury turns back. Three times a year you are being offered the same lesson: perfectionism is not the same thing as excellence. The most rigorous thing you can do this month is resist the urge to over-correct. If something goes wrong, fix it, then move on. Don’t audit the whole system. Don’t reassess everything. Just move on. (I say this with love).
Mars and Uranus are meeting in your 10th house of career on July 3rd. Some of you will have already initiated the professional change that’s been building; others are waiting for it to arrive. Uranus rarely announces itself, and redundancies, difficult and disorienting as they are, have a strange tendency to become, in retrospect, exactly the clearing that was needed. If you’ve already made the leap: good. This month is new, potentially electric, and you are built for exactly this kind of methodical reinvention.
Mercury stations direct on July22nd. That is your green light. Until then, observe, revise, and resist the temptation to launch anything that isn’t ready.
Libra
Frank O’Hara was an Aries, which makes him your opposite sign, your cosmic other, the sign that sits directly across from you on the zodiac wheel and represents everything you are reaching toward in partnership. It is fitting, then, that he wrote the most Libra poem in the English language. Having a Coke with You, written in 1960, makes a simple argument: being with the right person is more interesting than any painting in any museum, more pleasurable than any city in Europe, more worth your attention than anything the art world has ever produced. He will concede the Polish Rider at the Frick, occasionally. But that is more or less it.
Jupiter entering your 11th house of friendship, networks, and social belonging is that poem. It is the transit that says: the right people, in the right room, matter more than almost anything else you could be doing. And for the next year, you are going to find some of them.
Venus, your ruling planet, opens July in Leo — deliberate, a little theatrical, right where she performs well — moving through that same 11th house and amplifying the Jupiter energy with charm and visibility. By July 9th, she moves into Virgo, and the quality of that socialising sharpens rather than fades. This isn’t a quieter Venus so much as a more selective one: less about how many rooms you’re in, more about who you actually want to keep talking to once you’re there. Virgo Venus is good at telling real value from mere pleasantness, so trust her judgment on who’s worth your energy this month.
July 12th may bring clarity about a friendship — an insight, a message that reorients something you thought you understood. Stay open to it, whichever direction it arrives from.
The connections made now have the potential to become something significant. You are in a season of genuine social fortune.
Scorpio
Mars moves through Gemini all month, lending your already considerable intensity a surgical edge, less emotional, more strategic. This is not the season for sloppy confrontations or reactive decisions. It is the season for precision. If something is no longer serving you, this is the month you’ll know it beyond doubt, and likely act on it. Consider it your personal clearance: quiet, efficient, and thorough.
You should be aware though that your ruling planet Mars also meets up with Uranus in your 8th house of shared resources, funding, and other people’s money. Mars-Uranus is never a quiet conjunction and in this particular house it can show up as a sudden no, an unexpected pushback on funding, or a financial curveball you didn’t see coming. Don’t sweat it and don’t engage in drama. Uranus is the planet of the unexpected, which means the surprise can go either way: what looks like a setback may turn out to be a redirection toward something considerably better.
Mercury is retrograde in Cancer until July 22nd, sitting in your 9th house of travel, philosophy, and higher learning. On travel: build in more time than you think you need. Delays are possible; none of them will be fatal. But the more interesting invitation of Mercury retrograde in this particular house is the philosophical one. In grad school, one of the electives I signed up for was the Philosophy of Time, having convinced myself of two things: first, that it would be about time travel, H.G. Wells, the seductive possibility that the past is still somewhere and you could get back to it, and second, that it would be considerably easier than taking the class on ‘The Critique of Pure Reason’. Both were wrong. It was hardcore physics. It was the question of whether time actually exists as a forward-moving phenomenon at all, or whether past, present, and future are simultaneous, spread out like a landscape that we move through in one direction only because our consciousness obliges us to. I was out of my depth within the first ten minutes but fascinated for the rest of the semester.
Mercury retrograde in your 9th house is that course. And I mean that literally as well as metaphorically. This is the month to sign up for the thing that intimidates you slightly, the language you keep saying you will learn, the book that has been on the shelf because you suspect it will ask something of you, the subject you have been circling without committing to. Not the easy version. The real one. It is not going to be what you thought. It is going to be harder and stranger and more rewarding than the version you signed up for. That is the point.
The Leo Sun enters your 10th house of career and public life on July 22nd, a spotlight moment, and one you can use. The more Scorpio risings I encounter, the more I respect that particular quiet power: the ability to appear not to need anything while wanting everything. What you want this month is recognition. Let yourself be seen receiving it.
Jupiter has also entered your 10th house, where it will remain until July 2027. 1 year of professional expansion, reputation-building, and authority-gathering in the house built for exactly that. On July 20th, Jupiter meets Pluto in opposition. This can be about power dynamics, money, and high-stakes negotiations at work. If the Philosophy of Time taught me anything it is that the people who understand time differently, who can hold the long view while everyone else is reacting to the moment, are the ones who tend to win. That is Scorpio. I know who I’d put my money on.
Sagittarius
Jupiter, your ruling planet, has moved from Cancer, where it held exaltation like a guest star in another sign’s show, into Leo, where it holds a different kind of authority. Leo is triplicity for Jupiter: a more natural alignment, a more comfortable house. Technically it carries less dignity than the exaltation, but the truth is this placement suits you far better. Jupiter in your 9th house is Jupiter in its natural domain: adventure, expansion, foreign lands, teaching, publishing, the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. This is the house the planet was practically invented for.
There is a particular feeling: returning to a place you loved so completely that you assumed it would wait for you unchanged, and discovering that it has, that the light still falls the same way through the same window at the same hour, that the smell of it reaches you before you have even opened the door, and that you are the one who changed, and that this is both a loss and a homecoming simultaneously. That is Jupiter entering your 9th house. You have been away from yourself. The version of you that moves through the world with appetite and curiosity and a complete willingness to be changed by what you find has been waiting, not impatiently, just waiting, the way a room waits, and now the door is open again.
You may still be in full 9-of-Wands mode, that battered figure, bandaged and guarded, gripping the staff like someone who has been through it and is not ready to trust the quiet yet. I see you. But I am telling you: you can put the batons down. Let yourself go back to that.
Mercury is retrograde across your houses of relationships and home until July 22nd. An ex, or someone from the past, may surface before then. Stay open but discerning. Some of what returns may not be a person at all but an old wound, an old debt, a piece of yourself you left somewhere and didn't go back for. This is the other thing about returning: not everything that comes back deserves a second residency. There is lots of new coming in so don’t get clouded by the old. And in any case, Mars and Uranus are colliding in your 7th house of the Other this month, which tends to drop someone entirely unexpected into your orbit. We are talking disruptive, intense, possibly a little rude, probably nothing like your type. You may even be horrified at this crush. Go outside your type. You are a centaur. Half human, half something wilder. Act accordingly. You are not a sign built for looking backwards. The new is already on its way in. Keep moving toward it.
Capricorn
There is a particular kind of memory that belongs specifically to the houses we grew up in, not the large events, but the texture of them: the quality of light on a particular afternoon, the sound a door made, the smell of a room that no longer exists in that form and perhaps never will again. The work of adulthood is not to demolish what was built before we were old enough to have opinions about it, but to work out which walls are load-bearing and which can come down. Saturn in your 4th house is exactly that work.
Neptune is here too, and goes retrograde on the 10th, softening the edges of what you thought you understood about where you come from. You don’t need to resolve the uncertainty, only the structure needs to be sound, not every question about how it was built. Seamus Heaney’s Scaffolding comes to mind: “We may let the scaffolds fall / Confident that we have built our wall.” July is about checking the scaffolding, making sure the supports hold before the visible work begins.
Mercury is retrograde in Cancer until July 22nd, sitting in your 7th house of relationships and partnership. Mercury retrograde here tends to surface unfinished conversations, old partners or collaborators circling back, and things that were said, or not said, in significant relationships that need to be revisited. Do not make any major relationship decisions before the 22nd. Do not sign contracts or begin new formal arrangements. Do use this period to have the conversations you have been avoiding, because Mercury retrograde in this part of the chart has a way of bringing them up regardless of whether you initiate them.
The Sun moves through your 7th house until July 22nd too, which means relationships are doubly lit up. While you are busy with foundations, do not forget the people standing beside you. If you are partnered, show up, literally and emotionally. If you are single, ask the better question: is there space in your structure for someone else? Even a passing spark cannot land if your scaffolding is too tight.
Aquarius
I am an Aquarius Sun, so I hold a particular affinity for the water bearer, and the good news this month is real. Jupiter is in your 7th house of partnership for the next year, and this is no small thing. The 7th house governs significant one-on-one relationships: romantic partners, business partners, the person across the table from you who changes the shape of your life. Jupiter here tends toward expansion, which can mean the deepening or beginning of a meaningful relationship, and can equally mean the clarity to leave one that has stopped serving you. Jupiter is also freedom, and it does not allow you to remain in situations that have become cages, however comfortable they look from the outside.
On July 29th, a Full Moon arrives in your sign, an illumination of self, a moment of personal visibility, while Jupiter makes its cazimi conjunction in your relationship house. This is a rare convergence of self and other, of what you need and what you are willing to offer. There is something worth saying here about what it means to be truly seen by another person, not the performance of yourself that you offer most people, which is considerable and carefully assembled, but the underneath of it, the part that exists before you have decided what you think. Aquarius spends so much energy constructing the version of itself it presents to the world that it sometimes forgets there is a person underneath the architecture, and the 7th house, when Jupiter is in it, has a way of finding that person out. Something that has been forming quietly may clarify itself this day, or begin, which for Aquarius amounts to the same thing.
Mercury is retrograde until July 22nd, moving through the part of your chart that governs health, routine, organisation, and the small daily structures that quietly determine everything. This is not a glamorous transit, but it is a useful one. Book the appointment you’ve been putting off. We don’t get this particular Mercury retrograde often and it is asking you, specifically, to handle the small things. The dentist. The paperwork. The thing on the list that has been on the list for too long.
Leo season arrives on the 22nd, shifting the Sun into your 7th house and intensifying the relational theme. Power dynamics between you and significant others will clarify. If you are entangled in something unresolved, expect a brief but illuminating reckoning. If you are unattached, a new figure may enter, likely under circumstances that are inconvenient, beautiful, and slightly chaotic. Aquarius rarely gets love delivered tidily.
Pisces
Your ruling planet has just changed signs, and with it, your entire operating frequency. Jupiter has moved from the 5th house, romance, creativity, pleasure that doesn’t ask permission, into the 6th house of health, routine, service, and the daily structures that make life work rather than just look good. Sounds like a demotion. It isn’t.
The pleasure hasn’t gone anywhere, and it wasn’t wrong. You needed it, no apology required. But Pisces is capable of a different satisfaction too, one that doesn’t come from a feeling. It comes from small, unglamorous things repeated: the body tended to, the practice returned to, the work nobody claps for because nobody’s watching. Jupiter in your 6th house is asking whether you’re ready for that kind of pleasure. Quieter. Longer-lasting.
So ask yourself honestly what routines and health practices would actually serve you, not what looks good or sounds virtuous, but what would genuinely change your daily life, and start building them now.
Mercury retrograde moves through your creative zone until July 22nd. Find one thing you made, and make it better. Not a new thing. The thing you already made and left unfinished, because finishing felt like an ending, which for Pisces it often does. When Mercury stations direct on the 22nd, release it, or send it to someone who should see it. Leo season begins the same day, lighting up your house of work and service further. Pisces and Leo don’t always speak the same language, fire wants spectacle, water wants depth, but the translation here is simple: bring some rigour to your rituals. Schedule your days like you’ve got something worth protecting. You do.
RISE & ALIGN // NEW APP
I’m also, as it happens, launching something new on July 8th: an app called Rise & Align. It goes rather further than a horoscope, it tracks planetary hours against the real sky, tells you when the Moon has gone void of course and what that ought to mean for any decision you’re weighing, offers a rolling 90-day map of the retrogrades ahead, and a set of rituals, each with its own ideal window, calibrated to your chart. There’s a morning briefing too, so you know what kind of day you’re walking into before you’ve left the house. It’s free, and I’d love for you to be there from the start. [Sign up here.]