Stats › Annual and index returns › Annual returns
S&P 500 annual returns
A calendar year return answers one question. If you had put money into the index on the first trading day of January and left it completely alone until December, what would you have at the end? Simple question. The answers turn out to be all over the place, and that spread is the whole point of this page.
What you'll find below is the year by year record for the S&P 500 going back to 1928, which is ninety eight of those answers. The long run compounding figures, the best and worst years anyone has on record, and the same calendar years lined up against the Nasdaq 100 and the Dow so you can see how differently three US large cap indices behave over the exact same twelve months. I put this together because "stocks return about 10% a year" is one of the most repeated lines in investing and one of the most quietly misleading, and the year by year table is the clearest way I know to show why.
There's also a short section on total return versus price return, and on geometric versus arithmetic averages. Those sound like technicalities. They're not. They're the difference between two numbers that look almost the same on the page and describe very different outcomes for your money. Three sources feed this page, each one dated and linked at the bottom. Pull them up and check the arithmetic for yourself.
The S&P 500 has compounded at 9.79% a year since 1928 on a total return basis, turning $100 into $1,157,599 by the end of 2025. About 73% of calendar years have been positive. The best year on record is 1954 at +52.56% and the worst is 1931 at -43.84%. 2025 returned +17.88%, the third consecutive year above 17%, and 2026 was up +7.58% through late July.
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Below this point there are 8 sections, 2 charts, 1 table and 3 named sources, roughly 1150 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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