Stats › Active, passive and flows › Index fund growth
The growth of index funds
Index funds don't try to beat anything. They buy the market in the proportions the market already has, charge very little for it, and that's the whole product. Over the past few decades that idea went from a curiosity to the default setting, and this page is about measuring how far it actually got.
The headline moment was December 2023, when index funds passed active funds in total assets. It was close, $13.29 trillion against $13.23 trillion, and by April 2026 the gap had opened up to $20.82 trillion against $18.19 trillion, a rise of about 57% in index assets that the published figures don't split between new money and markets going up. But the reason I made the page is the second number, the one that rarely travels alongside the first. Index funds hold about 19% of the actual US stock market. Active funds hold about 11%. The remaining 69% belongs to pension schemes, insurers, foreign investors, companies and people holding shares in their own names.
Both figures are correct. They simply have different denominators, and once you've seen that, most arguments about passive investing taking over become much easier to referee. There's a section on price formation too, because the strong version of the concern, that nobody is left doing the work of setting prices, needs the ownership numbers to be a good deal bigger than they are. Both sources are linked below, and the second is a Fact Book chapter you can read in a few minutes.
Index funds passed active funds in total assets in December 2023, at $13.29 trillion against $13.23 trillion. By April 2026 the gap had widened to $20.82 trillion against $18.19 trillion, an index share of 53.4% of long term fund assets. But funds are not the market. Index domestic equity funds hold about 19% of total US stock market capitalisation, active funds about 11%, and everything else, meaning pensions, insurers, foreign investors, corporations and direct household ownership, holds the remaining 69%.
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Below this point there are 7 sections, 2 charts and 3 named sources, roughly 1050 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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