On this page is a Dow Jones Drawdown History Calculator. It shows how far the Dow has fallen from its prior peak, how long each decline took, how long the recovery took, and how any current drawdown stacks up against Dow history back to 1896.
The Dow Jones Drawdown History Calculator
Using the Dow Jones Drawdown Calculator
The default view shows total-return drawdowns (dividends reinvested, nominal). Everything updates in real time as you toggle a setting.
- Reinvest Dividends – default is on. Off gives you the price-only view that matches other published lists.
- Adjust for Inflation – switches the drawdown calculation into real (CPI-adjusted) terms.
- Underwater chart – sits at zero whenever the Dow is at a new high, and runs negative the rest of the time. The brush at the bottom defaults to the last 30 years; drag it back to 1896 or in on a particular crisis.
- Highlights cards – eight summary stats covering current and historical drawdowns: today's depth, the deepest ever, the longest decline (peak to trough), the longest recovery, the longest total time underwater, the count of bear markets (≥20%), the count of corrections (10–20%), and the most recent 10%+ drawdown.
Top 10 worst Dow Jones drawdowns
Below is the static reference table of the ten worst Dow drawdowns on record – total-return based, peak month through trough month through new-high recovery month. Click to expand.
Top 10 Dow Jones drawdowns table
| Peak | Trough | Recovery | Depth | Decline | Recovery | Underwater |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 1929 | Jul 1932 | Sep 1945 | -85.02% | 34 mo | 158 mo | 192 mo |
| Oct 2007 | Mar 2009 | May 2011 | -45.77% | 17 mo | 26 mo | 43 mo |
| Jan 1906 | Nov 1907 | Nov 1908 | -39.10% | 22 mo | 12 mo | 34 mo |
| Jan 1973 | Dec 1974 | Jan 1976 | -36.60% | 23 mo | 13 mo | 36 mo |
| Jun 1901 | Nov 1903 | Nov 1904 | -35.43% | 29 mo | 12 mo | 41 mo |
| Oct 1919 | Aug 1921 | Aug 1922 | -34.79% | 22 mo | 12 mo | 34 mo |
| Oct 1912 | Dec 1914 | Aug 1915 | -33.11% | 26 mo | 8 mo | 34 mo |
| Nov 1916 | Dec 1917 | Apr 1919 | -28.52% | 13 mo | 16 mo | 29 mo |
| Aug 1987 | Dec 1987 | Jun 1989 | -27.28% | 4 mo | 18 mo | 22 mo |
| Jan 2000 | Feb 2003 | Jan 2004 | -25.66% | 37 mo | 11 mo | 48 mo |
Famous Dow Jones drawdowns in context
- 1929–1932 (Great Depression) – the deepest drawdown in the dataset (by a wide margin). Even with dividends reinvested, the Dow fell about 85% from September 1929 to July 1932. Recovery to a new total-return high didn't happen until September 1945 – 16 years underwater. On a price-only basis (no dividend reinvestment), the recovery took until November 1954.
- 1973–1974 (Stagflation bear) – ~37% total-return drawdown from January 1973 to December 1974. Recovery to a new TR high came in January 1976 – a fast bounce on the TR side, 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) – the Dow's dot-com drawdown was much shallower than the broader market's. Peak January 2000, trough February 2003, about a 26% total-return drawdown – versus the S&P 500's ~42% and the NASDAQ Composite's much deeper hit. The Dow was less tech-heavy at the turn of the century, and it shows.
- 2007–2009 (Global Financial Crisis) – peak October 2007, trough March 2009, recovery to a new TR high in May 2011. About a 46% total-return drawdown, the second-deepest in the dataset after the Great Depression.
- 1987 Black Monday – the daily-close drawdown that October – famously ~-22% in a single session. The monthly-average data this tool uses smooths over that single day, so the episode shows up as a ~27% drawdown over four months rather than the headline one-day move.
- COVID 2020 – similar story: the daily-close peak-to-trough was about −37%, but peak (Feb), trough (Mar), and new high (Nov) all happened within nine months. This monthly-average methodology doesn't catch the depth – but it happened, so I'll flag it here.
Methodology and sources
Daily Dow Jones Industrial Average prices come from the Federal Reserve's DJIA series on FRED, with each monthly value being the average of that month's daily closes. Per-share monthly dividends are derived from the gap between the Dow price index and the S&P DJI total-return DJIA index, allocated across the months of each quarter.
For detail on how the underlying historical Dow level and dividend series are populated and estimated back to 1896, see DQYDJ's Dow Jones Return Calculator.
What is a drawdown?
A drawdown is the running gap between an investment's current value and its highest value to date. Whenever the index hits a new all-time high, the drawdown is zero. Whenever it's sitting below the prior peak, the drawdown is negative – the percentage distance from that peak.
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).
A reminder on the methodology: short, fast crashes – the one-day Black Monday move in 1987, or the COVID waterfall in March 2020 – get smoothed away by monthly averaging, and look milder in this tool than they did on a daily-close chart.
