Stats › Long run returns › Long run returns
Long run returns and asset class comparison
If you put money into something and left it there for ninety eight years, what would you have at the end? That's the question this page answers for four things: US stocks, ten year government bonds, three month Treasury bills and gold. Same start date, same end date, all income reinvested along the way.
I built it because these figures get quoted constantly and misquoted almost as often. There are two different averages you can compute from a return series and they give different answers. There's a before inflation number and an after inflation number and they're miles apart. And gold's figure carries a caveat that hardly anybody attaches to it. All of that is on the page rather than buried in a footnote somewhere. If you only take one thing away, take the difference between the two averages, because it's the mistake I see made most often and it's the easiest one to stop making.
The main dataset is Damodaran's at NYU Stern, updated in January 2026 and linked at the bottom. A second source turns up in the note because it gives a different equity figure from a different series. I've left that disagreement standing instead of quietly picking the one I preferred, and I'd rather you looked at both than believed either on my say so.
$100 invested in the S&P 500 at the start of 1928 became $1,157,599 by the end of 2025, compounding at 9.79% a year. The same $100 in ten year Treasuries became $7,753 at 4.76% a year, in gold $21,025 at 4.78%, and in three month Treasury bills $2,578 at 3.72%. In real terms, after inflation, equities returned about 6.9% a year. The gap between equities and everything else over ninety eight years is not a small edge, it is two orders of magnitude of final wealth.
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Below this point there are 7 sections, 1 chart and 2 named sources, roughly 1200 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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