On this page is an S&P 500 Drawdown History Calculator. It shows how far the S&P 500 has fallen from its prior peak, how long each decline took, how long the recovery took, and how any current drawdown stacks up against history back to 1871.
The S&P 500 Drawdown History Calculator
Using the S&P 500 Drawdown Calculator
The default view shows total-return drawdowns (dividends reinvested, nominal). Everything updates in real time as you toggle a setting.
- Reinvest Dividends – on by default. Toggle off for the price-only drawdowns that closely match most published "biggest crashes ever" lists. But note, dividends meaningfully cushion drawdown depth and shorten time-to-new-high, so the price-only and total-return numbers can differ by a lot for the long episodes.
- Adjust for Inflation – when on, drawdowns are computed in real (CPI-adjusted) terms.
- Underwater chart – always zero or negative. It shows how far the index sits below its prior all-time high at every month. New highs reset the line to zero; bear markets pull it deep. The brush chart at the bottom defaults to the last 30 years; drag the handles to zoom out to 1871 or zoom in on a single crisis.
- Highlights cards – eight headline stats: current drawdown depth and months underwater, deepest drawdown ever (and when), longest decline (peak → trough), longest recovery (trough → new high), longest total underwater stretch, bear-market count (≥20% drawdown), correction count (10–20% drawdowns), and the most recent 10%-plus drawdown.
Top 10 worst S&P 500 drawdowns
Below is the static reference table of the ten worst S&P 500 drawdowns on record – total-return based, peak month through trough month through new-high recovery month. Click to expand the chart.
Top 10 S&P 500 drawdowns table
| Peak | Trough | Recovery | Depth | Decline | Recovery | Underwater |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 1929 | Jun 1932 | Jan 1945 | -81.76% | 33 mo | 151 mo | 184 mo |
| Oct 2007 | Mar 2009 | Aug 2012 | -49.04% | 17 mo | 41 mo | 58 mo |
| Aug 2000 | Feb 2003 | Oct 2006 | -41.56% | 30 mo | 44 mo | 74 mo |
| Jan 1973 | Dec 1974 | Jul 1976 | -39.16% | 23 mo | 19 mo | 42 mo |
| Sep 1906 | Nov 1907 | Dec 1908 | -33.89% | 14 mo | 13 mo | 27 mo |
| Mar 1876 | Jun 1877 | Feb 1879 | -33.06% | 15 mo | 20 mo | 35 mo |
| Nov 1916 | Dec 1917 | May 1919 | -27.85% | 13 mo | 17 mo | 30 mo |
| Aug 1987 | Dec 1987 | May 1989 | -26.04% | 4 mo | 17 mo | 21 mo |
| Sep 1902 | Oct 1903 | Nov 1904 | -25.74% | 13 mo | 13 mo | 26 mo |
| Dec 1968 | Jun 1970 | Mar 1971 | -25.31% | 18 mo | 9 mo | 27 mo |
Famous S&P 500 drawdowns in context
- 1929–1932 (Great Depression) – the deepest drawdown in the dataset, by a wide margin. Even with dividends reinvested, the S&P 500 fell about 82% from September 1929 to June 1932. Recovery to a new total-return high didn't happen until January 1945 – over 15 years underwater. On a price-only basis (no dividends), the recovery took until September 1954.
- 1973–1974 (Stagflation bear) – ~39% total-return drawdown from January 1973 to December 1974. Recovery to a new TR high came in mid-1976 – a fast bounce, helped by the era's high dividend yields. In real terms (toggle Adjust for Inflation), it was much worse: inflation was eating returns even as the nominal index recovered.
- 2000–2003 (Dot-com bust) – peak August 2000, trough February 2003. About a 42% total-return drawdown, with recovery to a new high in October 2006 – just over six years total underwater.
- 2007–2009 (Global Financial Crisis) – peak October 2007, trough March 2009, recovery to a new TR high in August 2012. A 49% total-return drawdown, the second-deepest on record after the Great Depression.
- COVID 2020 – the daily-close drawdown reached about −34%, but on a monthly-average basis (what this tool uses) the shock barely registers in the top 10. The peak (Feb), trough (Mar), and new high (Aug) all happened within six months – too fast for monthly averages to capture the depth.
Methodology and sources
S&P 500 monthly prices and dividends come from Robert Shiller's compiled dataset, which extends back to 1871 by splicing the modern S&P 500 onto its pre-1957 predecessor indexes. Each monthly price is the average of that month's daily closes. The total-return series is built by reinvesting each month's dividend into more index shares at that month's price (the shares-purchased method). The underwater series at each month is the gap between the current level and the running maximum so far.
For detail on the construction of the underlying series, see DQYDJ's S&P 500 Return Calculator.
What is a drawdown?
A drawdown is how far an investment has fallen from its prior all-time high. At any moment, the drawdown is the percentage gap between the current value and the highest value the investment has ever reached. When the investment makes a new all-time high, the drawdown resets to zero. When the price drops below the prior peak, the drawdown is negative.
Formally, for any month t:
\text{drawdown}_t = \frac{V_t - \max(V_0, \ldots, V_t)}{\max(V_0, \ldots, V_t)}That always produces a number between 0 (at a new high) and −1 (a 100% loss).
One caveat on my data: because we work from monthly-average prices, short sharp drawdowns like COVID 2020 and Black Monday 1987 understate the peak-to-trough depth that a daily-close chart would show – and the panic an investor might have felt in the moment.
