Bars over time
S&P 500 Total Return by Year
Return on the S&P 500 in each calendar year, including dividends, %
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
Price change plus dividends paid in each calendar year; earlier years use the large-company indexes that preceded the S&P 500. Not adjusted for inflation; before fees and taxes. Data: Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern (histretSP), pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/histret.html
What the U.S. stock market returned in every year since the late 1920s, counting dividends as well as price. Up years far outnumber down years, but the bars show how wide the swings are: the Depression, the 1970s, 2008 and 2022 sit beside long runs of gains.
What this chart reads
- S&P 500 Annual Total Return (with Dividends)as “Total return”latest 2025-12-31
Sources
S&P 500 Annual Total Return (with Dividends). Source: Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern (histretSP): Historical Returns on Stocks, Bonds and Bills, https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/histret.html. Shown with Professor Damodaran's permission, with credit; the data is not redistributed. Refreshed monthly by Palanor; he adds each new year in January.
Charts are drawn from Palanor's signal library and recomputed from source data on every view. Transformations (changes, indexing, year-on-year rates) are Palanor's.