The lunar nodes move slower than almost anything else a chart tracks, and they move backwards. Rahu and Ketu take about eighteen months to cross one sign, which means a nodal transit is not a mood for a week. It is the background of a year and a half.
The next change is on 6 December 2026, at about 01:00 IST. Rahu leaves Aquarius for Capricorn; Ketu leaves Leo for Cancer. The axis then holds until 24 June 2028, when it moves on to Sagittarius and Gemini.
What the nodes actually are
This is worth getting straight, because the fear attached to Rahu and Ketu is mostly the fear of something unnamed. They are not planets. They are not objects at all. The Moon's orbit is tilted about five degrees against the path the Sun appears to take, so the two circles cross at exactly two points, opposite each other. Those two crossings are Rahu and Ketu.
That is also why eclipses only happen near them. An eclipse needs the Sun, Earth and Moon in a line, and they can only line up where the orbits intersect - which is precisely why the tradition gave those two points a mythology in the first place. The head that swallows the Sun is a very old, very good description of a real geometric fact.
Because they are intersection points rather than bodies, they always sit exactly 180 degrees apart, and they always move retrograde, drifting backwards through the zodiac at roughly 19 degrees a year.
Why your almanac may print a different date
If you check this against another source and find a date some weeks away, neither of you is necessarily wrong. There are two defensible ways to locate a node.
The mean node is the smoothed average position, moving at a perfectly steady rate. The true node is where the crossing actually is at that instant, and it oscillates about 1.6 degrees either side of the mean on a roughly 173-day cycle, because the Sun keeps tugging the Moon's orbit around. Near a sign boundary that wobble can push the true node across, back, and across again - so a true-node table can show three ingress dates where a mean-node table shows one.
The date above is the mean node, which is what standard North Indian kundli software uses and what the Vimshottari dasha system is built on. It is the convention this site follows throughout, so the transit page, your chart and your dasha timeline all agree with each other. That internal consistency matters more than picking the theoretically purer option and then disagreeing with your own kundli.
Reading the axis, not the point
The common mistake is to read Rahu's new sign and ignore Ketu. They are one axis and they only make sense together. Rahu is appetite - the direction you are pulled toward, where you will overreach, and where you will get results that feel unearned. Ketu is the opposite pole: the area already saturated, where you have nothing left to prove and where effort produces a strange flatness.
From December 2026 that pull runs toward Capricorn - structure, authority, the long climb, the institution - and away from Cancer, which is home, comfort and the people who knew you before you were anyone. The tradition is fairly blunt about how that feels: the ambition works, and the cost is charged to the household.
Which part of your life carries it depends entirely on which houses Capricorn and Cancer occupy in your chart, and that comes from your ascendant, not your sign. The same axis is a career transit for one person and a property transit for the next. A complete kundli report is what settles which one you are.
What not to do with this
Rahu-Ketu transits attract more remedial selling than any other placement, most of it aimed at people who have been told they have Kaal Sarp dosha. Two things worth holding on to. First, a transit is not a dosha - the axis moving through a sign says nothing on its own about whether your natal chart has any nodal affliction at all. Second, the classical condition requires every one of the seven planets hemmed inside the Rahu-Ketu arc in the birth chart, which is a genuinely uncommon configuration and not something a December sign change creates.
If you want the eighteen months read against your own chart rather than the sign, the Year Ahead report covers the nodal shift alongside your running dasha, which is the combination that actually determines whether a transit is felt at all. And if the fear is the part you came here with, Rahu and Ketu explained without the fear is the longer version of the first section above.
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