Mars in Capricorn has two lengths, and nothing in between. Most of the time, Mars crosses the sign in about 40 days. About once every 15 or 32 years, it stops, turns back, and stays close to six months. I ran the sky for 800 years to check. There is not one stay between 57 and 173 days.
That gap matters if you want to know whether you have this placement. It also changes how the placement feels in a chart. This page gives the dates, the method, and what the old books say about Mars in the sign where they rank it highest.
Six weeks or six months: the two shapes of a stay
Mars is the planet of drive, anger, courage and the will to act. It moves through the twelve signs in about two years. So on average it spends a little under two months in each one. That average hides a lot.
From 1600 to 2400, Mars made 425 separate visits to Capricorn. I counted each visit from the first entry to the final exit. Here is how long they lasted.
| Visits in 800 years | 425 visits. |
| Short visits, with no turn | 393 visits, or 92.5 percent. |
| Length of a short visit | 38.6 to 56.7 days. |
| Middle value of all visits | 40 days. |
| Long visits, with a turn inside | 32 visits, or 7.5 percent. |
| Length of a long visit | 173 to 198 days. |
| Visits between 57 and 173 days | None at all. |
So there is no “medium” Mars in Capricorn. Either Mars walks straight through, or it gets caught in a loop. The long visits are few, but they are heavy. They hold 23 percent of all the time Mars spends in this sign.
Why the long stays happen
Every 26 months or so, Earth passes Mars on the inside track. For about two months, Mars then seems to move backward against the stars. Astrologers call this retrograde motion. The planet does not really reverse. It only looks that way from a faster car.
When that backward stretch falls inside Capricorn, the visit swells. Mars enters, walks on, stops, backs up, stops again, and walks out. The stop points are called stations. Each loop adds four months or more to the stay.
The 2018 stay shows the full dance. The dates below are in UTC, which is London winter time.
| 17 March 2018 | Mars enters Capricorn. |
| 16 May 2018 | Mars moves on into Aquarius. |
| 26 June 2018 | Mars stops at 9 degrees Aquarius and turns back. |
| 13 August 2018 | Mars slips back into Capricorn. |
| 27 August 2018 | Mars stops at 28 degrees 37 minutes Capricorn and turns forward. |
| 11 September 2018 | Mars leaves Capricorn for good. |
That is 177 days from first entry to last exit. Look at the second stop. Mars turned forward at 28 degrees of Capricorn. That is the very degree the old tables name as its point of honour. More on that below.
The next long stay comes in 2033, and it is even longer. Mars enters on 6 April 2033. It stops at 12 degrees 30 minutes Capricorn on 26 May and backs up. On 27 July it slips out into Sagittarius for eleven days. It turns forward on 1 August at 29 degrees 48 minutes Sagittarius. It comes back on 7 August and leaves on 17 October. From entry to final exit, that is 195 days.
Were you born with Mars in Capricorn?
Mars changes sign every six weeks or so, which makes a birth date a good first clue. Here are all the visits from 1995 to 2035. The times are UTC, so a birth on the first or last day needs a check with the hour.
| Mars enters Capricorn | Mars leaves Capricorn | Length of the stay. |
| 30 November 1995 | 8 January 1996 | 39 days. |
| 9 November 1997 | 18 December 1997 | 39 days. |
| 17 October 1999 | 26 November 1999 | 40 days. |
| 8 September 2001 | 27 October 2001 | 49 days. |
| 4 March 2003 | 21 April 2003 | 48 days. |
| 6 February 2005 | 20 March 2005 | 42 days. |
| 16 January 2007 | 26 February 2007 | 40 days. |
| 27 December 2008 | 4 February 2009 | 39 days. |
| 7 December 2010 | 15 January 2011 | 39 days. |
| 17 November 2012 | 26 December 2012 | 39 days. |
| 26 October 2014 | 4 December 2014 | 40 days. |
| 27 September 2016 | 9 November 2016 | 43 days. |
| 17 March 2018 | 11 September 2018, with a gap from 16 May to 13 August | 177 days in all. |
| 16 February 2020 | 30 March 2020 | 43 days. |
| 24 January 2022 | 6 March 2022 | 41 days. |
| 4 January 2024 | 13 February 2024 | 40 days. |
| 15 December 2025 | 23 January 2026 | 39 days. |
| 25 November 2027 | 3 January 2028 | 39 days. |
| 4 November 2029 | 13 December 2029 | 39 days. |
| 10 October 2031 | 20 November 2031 | 41 days. |
| 6 April 2033 | 17 October 2033, with a gap from 27 July to 7 August | 195 days in all. |
| 26 February 2035 | 12 April 2035 | 46 days. |
Two things stand out. First, the short visits creep back through the calendar by about three weeks each time. They move from March to February, then January, then December, and so on. Second, the loop years break that march. A loop year resets the clock and the creep starts again.
The long visits over the last 120 years fell in 1907, 1939, 1954, 1986 and 2018. The next ones come in 2033, 2065 and 2080. The gap between them is either 15 or 32 years. Add the two and you get 47 years. That is the old Mars cycle: after 47 years, Mars comes back to nearly the same place against the stars on nearly the same date.
How much of the time Mars sits in Capricorn
If the twelve signs shared Mars’s time evenly, each would hold 8.33 percent. Capricorn holds less. Over 800 years, from 1600 to 2400, Mars sat in this sign 7.21 percent of the time. That is about one chart in 14, against one in 12 for a fair share.
A short window can mislead here, so I checked four of them.
| Window of years | Share of time with Mars in Capricorn. |
| 1600 to 2000 | 7.14 percent. |
| 2000 to 2400 | 7.28 percent. |
| 1900 to 2100 | 7.23 percent. |
| 1950 to 2010 | 7.20 percent. |
| 1600 to 2400, the full run | 7.21 percent. |
The figure barely moves. On the 800-year run, Capricorn is ninth of the twelve signs for Mars. So Mars in Capricorn is a little less common than chance. It is not rare. Being exalted does not make a planet show up in more charts. The honour is about quality, not about count.
Why does Mars hurry here? Its path around the Sun is an oval, not a circle. Mars comes closest to the Sun on the side of the sky that lines up with early Pisces. Near that point it moves at its top speed. So the signs on that side, Capricorn among them, get crossed fast. The signs on the far side, around Virgo, get crossed slowly.
The same speed trims the loops. A backward stretch centred in Capricorn lasts 65 days on average, against 74 days for Mars loops in general. Only 23 of the 374 loops in 800 years sat mostly in this sign. And Mars spends just 6.9 percent of its Capricorn time moving backward, against 9.5 percent overall.
What “exalted” means, in the old books
Each planet has a sign where the tradition treats it as a guest of honour. That seat is called its exaltation. The opposite sign is its fall, the seat of least honour. Across the circle, Mars in Cancer is a fall, the place where the old books rate Mars lowest. The full scheme is set out on our page on exaltation in astrology.
Claudius Ptolemy wrote the Tetrabiblos in Alexandria around 150 AD. He gives a reason for this one. In the Robbins translation, Mars “is fiery and becomes all the more so in Capricorn because in it he is farthest south”. So Mars received Capricorn as its exaltation, and Cancer as its fall.
Mars also rules Scorpio, so this honor links Capricorn to Scorpio, a tie our page on Scorpio and Capricorn compatibility measures in real charts.
Note what Ptolemy does not say. He names the sign but gives no degree. The degree comes from other lists. William Lilly printed the full table in Christian Astrology in 1647, and he puts the exaltation of Mars at 28 degrees of Capricorn. That is the degree where Mars stood still in August 2018.
Ptolemy’s reason is one we can test. Is Mars really lowest in the sky when it is in Capricorn? I found every time Mars bottomed out well south of the sky’s equator, from 1600 to 2400. There were 505 such low points. Mars was in Capricorn for 343 of them, or 68 percent. Sagittarius took most of the rest. The ten deepest lows all fell in late July or early August, in loop years. Nine of the ten were in Capricorn. At those times Mars sank to about 29 degrees south. Seen from New York, it then climbed no higher than 20 degrees above the horizon all night.
So the sky backs Ptolemy on the fact. Whether “farthest south” should mean “most honoured” is a matter of doctrine, not of measure. Robert Hand has pointed out that fiery Mars honoured in cold Capricorn is one of the odd cases in the scheme. The tradition kept it anyway.
What the placement means in a birth chart
Mars in a chart shows how you go after what you want. Stephen Arroyo reads it as the way you use your energy and assert yourself. Capricorn is the earth sign of structure, time and rank, ruled by Saturn. Put together, you get drive that plans first and strikes later.
Chris Brennan, in his book on Hellenistic astrology, explains exaltation as a place of raised status. The planet is given power it did not earn by owning the sign. For Mars, that power is aimed force. The anger is cold rather than hot. The effort is paced. The goal is a result that lasts.
In daily life, this shows up in a few clear ways:
- Work comes first, and it comes with a plan. You would rather climb the ladder than kick the door in.
- Anger is slow to show. It gets filed, not thrown. When it does come out, it is exact.
- You respect rank and earned skill. You test people before you trust them.
- Desire is steady rather than wild. In love, you show it by building something together.
- The risk is grinding on too long. Rest can feel like a loss of ground.
Mars in Sagittarius brings scope and conviction instead. Where Mars in Capricorn sets the pace of action, Venus in Capricorn sets the price of affection.
The sign alone never tells the whole story. The house where Mars falls shows the part of life it works on. The aspects, the angles Mars makes to other planets, show who helps and who blocks. Modern authors such as Liz Greene and Demetra George treat the sign as a colour on the planet, with the house and aspects doing much of the work. For the wider picture of the sign itself, see our guide to the Capricorn sign. For all twelve, start with our overview of the zodiac signs.
Short stay or long stay: does it change the reading?
The old texts do not split Mars in Capricorn into a short type and a long type. That split is mine, and it comes from the measure. But it does point to one real difference in the chart.
If you were born in a loop year, your Mars can be retrograde, or near a station. A station is the point where Mars stands still before it turns. Traditional astrology reads a planet’s speed as part of its state. In his table of scores, Lilly marks a swift planet up and a slow or backward one down. A fast planet acts fast. A slow or still one gathers force before it acts.
Take the 2018 cohort. Anyone born from 13 to 27 August 2018 has Mars in Capricorn and moving backward. Anyone born in the days around 27 August has Mars almost still, right on the 28th degree of Capricorn. That is a rare chart. Within 800 years, Mars stood still inside Capricorn only 45 times.
A born-retrograde Mars reads, in modern practice, as drive that turns inward first. The plan gets checked twice. The move gets made late, and then made well. For a sign that already likes to wait, the loop doubles the habit.
The short-stay majority, 92.5 percent of all visits, carries the plain version. Mars walks through in six weeks at a steady clip. The drive is clean and forward.
How I measured this, so you can redo it
A number that no one can check is worth nothing. Here is the recipe.
- I used the astronomy-engine library to get the place of Mars on the tropical zodiac, as seen from Earth, with light-time and the wobble of Earth’s axis built in.
- I stepped through time every twelve hours from 1 January 1600 to 1 January 2400. Each time the sign changed, I split the gap in half again and again, down to one second, to find the exact moment.
- I added up the time between each entry and exit. That gives the share of time in each sign with no sampling at all.
- I joined the pieces of a visit when Mars left backward and came back. That gives the length from first entry to final exit.
- I found each station by the same halving trick, on the day Mars’s speed changed sign.
Then I checked it by a second road. I wrote my own model of the orbits of Mars and Earth from the simple orbit figures that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory publishes. It shares no code with the first. I sampled it once an hour for the same 800 years. It gave 7.21 percent for Capricorn, the same to two decimals. It found the same 425 visits and the same gap with no stays between 57 and 173 days. Its dates for 2018 to 2035 match the first run within two hours.
Last, I checked the 2018 to 2033 entries and stations against the ephemeris server this site runs. Every date matched to the day.
Frequently asked questions
How long does Mars stay in Capricorn?
Most visits last 39 to 57 days, and the middle value is 40 days. About one visit in 13 includes a backward loop and lasts 173 to 198 days. Across 800 years, no visit fell between those two ranges.
When is Mars in Capricorn next?
Mars is in Capricorn from 25 November 2027 to 3 January 2028, then from 4 November to 13 December 2029. The next long stay runs from 6 April to 17 October 2033, with a short dip into Sagittarius from 27 July to 7 August.
Is Mars in Capricorn rare?
Not really. Mars sits in Capricorn 7.21 percent of the time over 800 years, which is about one chart in 14. A fair share would be one in 12. It ranks ninth of the twelve signs.
Why is Mars exalted in Capricorn?
Ptolemy says Mars is fiery and grows more so in Capricorn, where it is farthest south. The sky agrees with the fact: 68 percent of Mars’s deepest southern lows happen in Capricorn. William Lilly’s table places the exact point of honour at 28 degrees of the sign.
What happens when Mars is retrograde in Capricorn?
The stay stretches to about six months. The last one ran from 17 March to 11 September 2018, and the next runs from 6 April to 17 October 2033. A loop centred in Capricorn lasts about 65 days, shorter than the 74-day average for Mars.
Is Mars in Capricorn good in a chart?
The tradition rates it as one of the strongest seats for Mars, beside Aries and Scorpio, which Mars rules. Strong means focused and well aimed. It does not mean easy. The house and the aspects decide where that force goes.
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