Stats › Bear markets and drawdowns › Recovery times
How long bear markets take to recover
How long does it take to get back to even? That is the question everyone asks after the market has fallen a long way, and it feels like it should have a tidy answer. It doesn't. What it has is a number that gets repeated everywhere and a source that doesn't actually publish it.
So this page is a bit different from the rest of the library. Most of these pages report a figure. This one reports the fact that a figure is missing. You'll find the 26 month and 17 month recovery averages that circulate online, where they are supposed to come from, and what happens when you go and look. You'll also find the recoveries that can genuinely be checked one at a time: about five months after 2020, about fifteen months after 2022, and over twenty five years after 1929. Those three don't average into anything useful, which is more or less the point.
I built it because I got tired of seeing the same round number quoted with a confident attribution attached, and because I think "we don't know" is a perfectly respectable answer when it happens to be the true one. Every source I checked is linked at the bottom, including the ones that don't contain what people say they contain. Click through and see for yourself.
Figures of roughly 26 months to recover from an average bear market, or about 17 months post war, circulate widely and are usually attributed to Ned Davis Research or Hartford Funds. Neither publishes a per bear market recovery column in their public documents. What is documented is depth and duration to the trough. The recoveries that can be verified individually are wildly dispersed: 25 years after 1929, about five months after 2020, and about fifteen months after 2022.
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Below this point there are 8 sections, 1 chart and 4 named sources, roughly 1300 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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