S&P 500 100-Year Returns: Annual Returns by Year, CAGR & Worst Years (1928–2026)

From 17 points in 1928 to over 5,000 today — what almost a century of S&P 500 data actually says about long-term equity returns.

The headline numbers

Across the 98 finished calendar years from 1928 onward, the S&P 500 has delivered:

• Price-only annualized return: 6.3%
• Total return (with dividends reinvested): 10.1% CAGR
• Real total return (inflation-adjusted): ~6.5%
• Arithmetic mean of yearly returns: 11.9%

The gap between the arithmetic mean (11.9%) and the geometric mean / CAGR (10.1%) is the volatility tax: 1.8 percentage points eaten by the math of compounding through losses. A dollar left alone since the end of 1927, dividends reinvested, is $11,976 today.

How often does the S&P 500 go down?

Out of 98 finished calendar years, 72 were positive and 26 were negative. That's a 73% base rate of an up year. But "up year" hides enormous variance:

• Only 7 years in a century landed within ±2% of the long-term mean.
• 36 years returned more than 20%; 6 years returned less than −20%.
• "Average" is almost never "typical" — equity returns live in the tails.

Worst years for the S&P 500

Best years for the S&P 500

Note the pattern: the best years are almost always the year after a bottom. The crowd that fled in the worst year typically missed the snap-back. 1928 is the exception that sets up the rest of the table: it was the last full year before the crash that produced 1931.

Rolling-period probability of a positive return

The single most useful framing for long-term investors:

• 1-year holding period: 73% chance of positive return
• 5-year rolling period: 88% chance of positive return
• 10-year rolling period: 94% chance of positive return; the losses cluster around the 1929 and 2000 peaks
• 20-year rolling period: 100% positive — never a negative 20-year window in the recorded history

Windows are calendar-year windows over the finished years charted above, so every figure here can be checked against the raw series.

See the interactive buy-year/sell-year return matrix for the full picture.

What about the 2000s "lost decade"?

The S&P 500's total return from year-end 1999 to year-end 2009 was −9% cumulative — a flat-to-negative decade. This is the most cited counter-example to the "buy and hold always works" narrative.

Two important framings:

1. The decade started at a CAPE of 44× — the most extreme valuation in U.S. history. A flat decade was almost mathematically required.
2. An investor making monthly contributions through the period — i.e. dollar-cost averaging — earned a positive return because they bought heavily at the 2002 and 2009 lows.

Should you expect 10.1% going forward?

Probably not. The historical 10.1% includes:

• An era of falling interest rates (10Y from 15% in 1981 to 0.5% in 2020)
• Multiple expansion (CAPE rising from single digits to 35×)
• U.S. economic dominance over the period

None of those tailwinds is guaranteed to repeat. Most return-forecast models built off CAPE / AIAE / Buffett indicator currently predict 3–5% real returns over the next decade — well below the historical average. See the valuation analysis for details.

Total-return figures come from /api/sp500/annual-tr.json, price-only figures from /api/sp500/annual-returns.json, and the drawdown from /api/sp500/drawdowns.json — all refreshed daily, and the numbers above are regenerated from them rather than typed. Free for research and citation.

Further reading

• Shiller PE Today: Is the U.S. Stock Market Overvalued?
• 标普 500 近 100 年走势：1928–2026 完整复盘 (Chinese counterpart)
• 美股历史最大回撤完整名册 (Chinese)
• Annualized return matrix — pick any entry year, any exit year
• Valuation × EPS driver decomposition — what drove each year's return
• Magnificent 7 share of S&P 500 cap — concentration not seen since the Nifty Fifty
• Annual returns interactive panel
• Historical drawdowns interactive panel
• 5-year rolling annualized return panel