Market history

Every sharp fall in US stocks since 1928

How deep each one went, how long it lasted, and how long it took to get back — computed from 98 years of annual returns, in nominal and real terms. No advice, no prompt to act.

Falls of 10% or more: 7
Deepest: −64.8%
Typical time back to level: 5 years

These depths are floors, not measurements

The series behind this page is annual, December to December, so a fall that recovered inside its own calendar year does not appear at all. March 2020 fell about 34% and the year closed up 18%: it is not in the table below. Read every figure here as the smallest the fall could have been.

In nominal terms

What a statement showed. This is the version people remember, and the one that understates what was lost.

S&P 500 annual total return, dividends reinvested. Source: Damodaran, NYU Stern: Historical Returns on Stocks, Bonds and Bills.
Peak	Trough	Fall	Years down	Back to level
1928	1932	−64.8%	4	1936 · 8 years
1936	1941	−35.6%	5	1944 · 8 years
1956	1957	−10.5%	1	1958 · 2 years
1972	1974	−36.5%	2	1976 · 4 years
1999	2002	−37.4%	3	2006 · 7 years
2007	2008	−36.5%	1	2012 · 5 years
2021	2022	−18.0%	1	2023 · 2 years

In purchasing power

The same series deflated by CPI. Two things change: the 1970s stop looking like a four-year round trip, and the 2000s become a single fourteen-year hole rather than two separate crashes.

Stock returns deflated by US CPI-U, December to December. Source: Damodaran, NYU Stern: Historical Returns on Stocks, Bonds and Bills.
Peak	Trough	Fall	Years down	Back to level
1928	1931	−54.8%	3	1936 · 8 years
1936	1941	−41.8%	5	1945 · 9 years
1945	1947	−25.1%	2	1950 · 5 years
1956	1957	−13.0%	1	1958 · 2 years
1961	1962	−10.0%	1	1963 · 2 years
1965	1966	−13.0%	1	1967 · 2 years
1968	1970	−15.2%	2	1972 · 4 years
1972	1974	−48.0%	2	1984 · 12 years
1999	2008	−42.3%	9	2013 · 14 years
2021	2022	−23.0%	1	2024 · 3 years

What the evidence says about falls like these

Read these before acting on anything above. None of them tells you what to do; all of them describe what tends to happen to people who decide during one.

The order of returns decides retirements that averages cannot explain
Two retirees experiencing identical average returns can face opposite outcomes depending on when the bad years arrive.
Market timing requires being right twice, and the good days cluster in the bad times
Being out of the market for a small number of the strongest periods removes a large share of long-run returns, and those periods occur disproportionately during drawdowns.
Investors underperform the funds they own
The return the average investor earns is measurably lower than the return of the funds they hold, because of when they buy and sell.
Losses hurt about twice as much as equivalent gains feel good
People weight losses substantially more heavily than equal-sized gains, which systematically distorts investment decisions.

This page is education, not advice, and nothing on it is a signal to buy or sell. If you want to see what a fall of this size does to a specific plan rather than to an index, the sequence risk explorer and the decision simulator both run on this same series.