Investing

What 98 years of S&P 500 returns say about long-term investing

Headlines report the stock market a day at a time. The record that matters for saving runs in decades. Here is what the S&P 500 did over every multi-year stretch since 1928, computed from the year-by-year series, and what it does and does not promise.

Updated October 29, 20269 min readData as of calendar years 1928–2025; index level October 28, 2026

The long record

The S&P 500 is an index of about 500 large US companies, weighted by size. Its total return counts price changes and dividends reinvested. Aswath Damodaran at NYU's Stern School of Business maintains a widely used series of its calendar-year total returns back to 1928, and every figure in this guide is computed from that series.¹ Before 1957 the index tracked 90 companies, so the earliest years describe a narrower market.

$10,000 invested at the start of 1928 would have been worth $115,759,084 at the end of 2025. The same $10,000 invested at the start of 1976 became $2,794,987 over 50 years; at the start of 1996, $187,172 over 30 years; at the start of 2016, $39,354 over 10 years. The 10-year figure is unusually strong (14.7% a year) and is not a reasonable thing to expect from the next ten.

Compound annual returns with dividends reinvested, before inflation. US consumer prices rose 3.7% in the 12 months to September 2026, so a nominal return has to clear that to add anything real.⁴

How often it loses

26 of 98 calendar years were negative. The worst year, 1931, lost 43.8%; the best, 1954, gained 52.6%. The 2000s had three losing years in a row (2000 to 2002), then 2008 lost 36.5%. 2022 lost 18.0% and was followed by 26.1%, 24.9% and 17.8%. The point is not that losses are rare. They are a normal part of the record, and nobody has reliably predicted which years they would be.

The pattern is the whole argument for long-term investing. One year at a time, the index lost money about 27% of the time. Over any 15 years, it lost money once (1929–1943, which includes the Depression, at -0.2% a year). Over 20 or 30 years, never, and the weakest 30-year stretch still compounded at 8.0% a year. These are calendar-year windows; stretches that start or end mid-year, and the effect of inflation, can make individual cases worse.

2026 so far

The index fell in the first quarter of 2026 and rebounded in the second, for a first-half total return of about 10.2%.² On October 28, 2026 it closed at 7,744.³ None of that changes the long-run figures above by more than a rounding, which is itself the lesson: a single year, good or bad, barely moves a 30-year average.

What about Canada?

The S&P/TSX Composite, Canada's main index, is more concentrated in banks, energy and materials, and its long-run return has been lower than the US index's. S&P Dow Jones Indices reported annualized price returns, not counting dividends, of 9.2% over 10 years, 11.7% over 5 and 19.5% over 3 as of July 31, 2026.⁵ Canadian investors usually hold both, and the tax-sheltered accounts to hold them in are covered in our Canada accounts guide.

What the record does not promise

• Any particular year. The averages are made of years like 1931 and 1954. A plan that needs the money in two years should not be in stocks.
• Returns after costs. The figures are before fund fees, trading costs and taxes. A fund charging 1% a year takes roughly a tenth of a 10% return, every year, compounding. Broad index funds charge a fraction of that.
• Returns after inflation. Inflation of 3% turns a 10% nominal return into about 7% in buying power.
• That you will stay invested. The 20-year record only applies to people who held for 20 years, including through the years that felt like the end. Automatic monthly contributions, described in our guide on money habits, are the usual way to make that happen.
• The future. 98 years is a long record, not a law. Diversify beyond one country and one asset class.

Putting it to use

The practical version of all this fits in three sentences. Invest a fixed amount on a schedule in broad, low-cost funds. Hold them inside tax-advantaged accounts first, which in the US means a 401(k), IRA and HSA and in Canada a TFSA, RRSP and FHSA. Then leave them alone for decades, and judge the result in decades.

This guide is general information, not financial, tax, or investment advice. Rules and limits change; check the sources for the current figures before acting.

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