Stock prices rise over the long run, but the path is rarely smooth. Every few years, a steep, sustained decline pushes the market into what investors call a bear market. A review of research from Hartford Funds, Investopedia, Morningstar, The Motley Fool and Vanguard, together with a market commentary published in June 2022, compiles the key figures behind those declines: how often bear markets occur, how far stocks fall, how long the drops last and how quickly markets have recovered. Because each source defines and counts bear markets slightly differently, the totals vary across studies, and those differences are noted where they appear.

What Counts as a Bear Market

A bear market is generally defined as a decline of at least 20% from a recent high. Hartford Funds marks an index as being in bear territory when its closing price falls 20% or more below its most recent peak. A milder drop of 10% to 19.9% is called a correction, and a new bull market is said to begin once the closing price climbs 20% above its low.

Investopedia cautions that the 20% threshold is arbitrary, just as the 10% line for corrections is. It also offers a broader reading: a bear market can describe any stretch, lasting months or years, in which investors favor safe assets over risky ones.

Nor are bear markets confined to broad indexes. Oil prices spent time in a bear market from May 2014 to February 2016, and several large stock indexes around the world fell into bear territory in 2018. The downturns also vary in character: some are deep and slow, like the 2007 to 2009 decline, while others are fast, such as the collapse of early 2020.

Bear Markets vs. Bull Markets: Losses, Gains and Length

Bear markets cut deeply, but bull markets have added more — and lasted longer. Hartford Funds, drawing on Ned Davis Research data as of March 31, 2025, puts the average bear-market loss at 35%, against an average bull-market gain of 112%. The average bear market has run 289 days, or about 9.6 months, while the average bull market has run 988 days, or 2.7 years.

Vanguard's chart of the MSCI World Index, which covers developed markets from 1970 to 2025, shows a comparable pattern: an average bull stretch of 5 years and 7 months versus an average bear stretch of 9 months. The two sets of figures differ because they track different indexes over different time frames, but both point the same way — bear markets are far shorter than bull markets. Investopedia makes a similar point using First Trust data; its chart of market durations since 1942 shows bear markets as brief episodes relative to the bull markets around them.

Hartford Funds counts 27 bear markets and 28 bull markets in the S&P 500 since 1928, a span over which stocks have compounded substantial long-term gains.

How Often Do Bear Markets Happen?

Bear markets are a routine feature of investing. Hartford Funds counts 27 of them in the S&P 500 since 1928, which works out to one about every 3.5 years. Investopedia's tally yields a longer gap: bear markets have arrived roughly every 4.8 years since 1929, and it counts 25 since 1928 using other data. Morningstar reaches back further still — using data from 1871, it 19 market crashes in about 150 years, roughly one each decade.

The totals diverge because the sources use different start dates, different indexes and different rules for separating one decline from the next, but the overall pattern is consistent across all of them.

Frequency has declined over time. Hartford Funds records 12 bear markets between 1928 and 1945 — about one every 1.5 years, a period that includes the Great Depression — versus 15 since 1945, or about one every 5.1 years. First Trust data cited by Investopedia finds 14 bear markets between April 1947 and April 2022, ranging from one month to 1.7 years in length.

Hartford Funds estimates that an investor with a 50-year horizon can expect to live through about 14 bear markets, give or take. Over the past 95 years, bear markets have absorbed about 21.4 years in total, meaning stocks have been rising roughly 78% of the time.

How Deep Do Bear Markets Fall?

The average S&P 500 bear market has been a 35.24% peak-to-trough decline, according to the Hartford Funds table built from Ned Davis Research data; the median is a bit lower at 33.51%. The range is wide. The shallowest decline was a 20.57% drop in 1948 and 1949, while the deepest was a 61.81% plunge from November 1931 to June 1932.

Eight of the 27 declines were worse than 40%. Three exceeded 50%: the 1931 to 1932 collapse, the 54.50% drop of 1937 to 1938 and the 51.93% slide of 2007 to 2008. The 48.20% decline of 1973 to 1974 came close to that mark. Depth matters as much as duration, because percentage losses require larger percentage gains to reverse — a stock that falls 50% has to gain 100% just to return to where it started.

Other measures show even larger losses. Investopedia notes that the 1929 crash and the years that followed stripped roughly 89% from the Dow Jones Industrial Average over about three years, while Morningstar — adjusting for inflation and using total market data back to 1871 — puts the Great Depression loss at 79%.

Not every bear market is a disaster. Declines that occurred without a recession averaged about 27%, compared with 35% across all bear markets, according to the June 2022 market commentary. Recent episodes have been comparatively mild by this measure: the 2022 decline was 25.43% and the 2020 decline was 33.92%. The underlying Hartford Funds table catalogs all 27 S&P 500 declines of 20% or more from 1929 to 2022.

How Long Do Bear Markets Last?

Most bear markets end within a year or two. In the Hartford Funds table, the average length is 289 days and the median is 250 days; Investopedia cites a nearly identical average of about 9.6 months.

The longest bear market ran 630 days, from January 1973 to October 1974. The next longest were 622 days in 1980 to 1982 and 546 days in 2000 to 2001. The shortest lasted just 33 days, from February 19 to March 23, 2020 — a 33.92% decline that was both fast and deep.

Length and depth do not always go together. The 1929 decline lasted only 67 days yet fell 44.67%, while the 1948 to 1949 decline stretched 363 days but fell just 20.57%. Nine of the 27 declines ran longer than a year; the other 18 ended in less than a year. The 2022 bear market ran from January 3 to October 12, or 282 days, while the 2007 to 2008 decline lasted 408 days.

Do Bear Markets Mean a Recession Is Coming?

Not always. Hartford Funds, citing the National Bureau of Economic Research, notes that there have been 27 bear markets since 1928 but only 15 recessions in that time. Bear markets often coincide with a slowing economy, but a falling market does not by itself mean a recession is on the way.

Investopedia counted 25 bear markets since 1928. Of those, 14 — 56% — occurred alongside a recession, while 11, or 44%, did not. In some cases the market turned down first: the 36.1% decline of the late 1960s and the 48.2% decline of the early 1970s both began before their recessions and ended shortly before those recessions hit bottom.

The dot-com crash of 2000 to 2002 was driven by a loss of confidence in stock prices that had reached historic highs. The S&P 500 fell 36.8% over about 1.5 years, with a short recession in the middle. The 2007 to 2009 bear market lasted 1.3 years and cut the S&P 500 by 51.9%; the economy had entered a recession in 2007, and a crisis in subprime mortgages grew into a wider financial crisis by September 2008. Central banks responded with large cash injections through quantitative easing, which pushed interest rates to record lows and helped support stock prices.

Morningstar adds that the United States avoided both a recession and a bear market in 2025, even though stocks came close to bear territory in April of that year.

The Biggest Crashes and How Long Recovery Took

Morningstar's study of US stock returns back to 1871 identified 19 market crashes. Adjusted for inflation, one dollar invested in 1871 grew to $35,082 by the end of February 2026 — though the path was anything but smooth. Morningstar also tracked what would have happened to $100 invested at the start of each of the five worst crashes.

The Great Depression, which began with the 1929 crash, was the worst, producing a 79% loss — the largest of the past 150 years. Second was the Lost Decade, which spanned the dot-com bust and the Great Recession and produced a 54% loss; the market did not return to its earlier level until May 2013, more than 12 years after the first crash.

Morningstar also built a "pain index" that combines how deep a crash was with how long it took to recover, setting the 1929 crash at 100% as the benchmark. In raw size, the 1929 drop was 3.5 times as large as the 22.8% fall around the Cuban missile crisis; once recovery time is included, the first phase of the Great Depression was 28.2 times worse.

More recent crashes look different. The downturn that began in December 2021 included a 28.5% decline over nine months, with the market taking 18 months to recover. In March 2020, Morningstar's monthly data shows a 19.6% decline over about a month; the market recovered in four months — the fastest recovery of any crash in 150 years and the least painful of the 19 on the pain index.

Long-term results still favored patient investors. Morningstar calculates that $100 invested at the start of 2000 would be more than $300 by February 2026, while $100 invested in 1870 would be worth $3,508,200.

What Happens After the Bottom

Stocks have often bounced back quickly. The June 2022 market commentary found that since 1950, the S&P 500 has risen in 75% of the years that followed a bear-market low, with average gains of 6% over the next three months and 17% over the next 12 months. The commentary noted that stocks lagged over the 12 months after the lows of 2009 and of the early 1970s.

Hartford Funds highlights how difficult timing a recovery is: about 42% of the S&P 500's strongest days over the last 20 years occurred during a bear market, and another 36% came within the first two months of a bull market — before it was clear a new bull had begun. That leaves 22% of the best days at other times. An investor who sold during a decline and waited for clear confirmation could have missed many of those days. Morningstar reaches a similar view, saying it is impossible to predict how long a recovery will take. The one marker the sources do define is mechanical: by convention, a new bull market begins when the closing price climbs 20% above the bear-market low — the same threshold that, falling from a peak, signals a bear market.

The Motley Fool notes that the S&P 500 has delivered average annual returns of 9.98% since 1928; at that rate, $1,000 would grow to $1,099.80 after one year, though the return is not guaranteed in any given year. It also points to dollar-cost averaging — investing a fixed amount on a regular schedule, which spreads purchases across high and low prices.

Some investors try to profit from falling prices. Investopedia lists short selling stocks or ETFs, buying inverse ETFs, buying put options and selling futures, each of which carries its own risks. Hartford Funds likewise reminds readers that diversification does not ensure a profit or protect against a loss in a declining market.

The Bottom Line

The data points in one direction. Bear markets happen often, hurt while they last and have always ended. Across 27 S&P 500 declines since 1929, the average loss was 35.24% and the average length was 289 days, while bull markets averaged gains of 112% over 988 days. Over the past 95 years, stocks have been rising about 78% of the time. Recovery times have ranged from four months to more than a dozen years, and no source claims to predict the next one.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice.

Sources

• 10 Things You Should Know About Bear Markets (Hartford Funds)
• Bear Markets Explained: Causes, History, and Investment Opportunities (Investopedia)
• What We've Learned From 150 Years of Stock Market Crashes (Morningstar)
• Prediction: A Bear Market Is Coming. Here's What History Says Investors Should Do Based on 100 Years of Data (The Motley Fool)
• Bull and Bear Markets Over Time (Vanguard)
• History Suggests That US Stocks Have Further to Fall (market commentary, June 2022)

Original article: Bear Market Statistics: Historical Data Every Investor Should Know (CoinCentral)