Stats › Volatility and VIX › Single stock halts

Single stock trading halts

Volatility/LULD · 2023 to 2025 · LULD Plan · 3 sources · data as of 31 Jul 2026

If a single stock moves far enough, fast enough, trading in it stops for five minutes. That's the limit up limit down mechanism, brought in after the flash crash of May 2010, and it fires thousands of times a year without anybody noticing. It's plumbing. It's supposed to be boring.

The confusion starts when people mix it up with market wide circuit breakers, which halt the entire US equity market and have fired on five days in history. Those two things share the word halt and almost nothing else. One happened over ten thousand times last year. The other hasn't happened since March 2020.

So this page sets out how the bands actually work, what triggers a pause versus what just triggers a warning state, how many of each happened over the last three years, and why the count keeps climbing. There's a nice detail buried in it: nine times out of ten a stock touches its band and nothing gets halted at all, because the rules give the market a fifteen second grace period to sort itself out first. I put it together because halts are one of those bits of market mechanics that traders bump into occasionally and rarely have explained properly, and because the gap between the two mechanisms is a good example of a headline word doing too much work. Three sources sit at the bottom, including the annual reports the counts come from. They're public PDFs, so the numbers here are checkable line by line.