S&P 500 Weekly Drops of 5% or More
Last updated: February 2026 | Data as of: Year-end 2025
Between 1980 and the end of 2025, the S&P 500 dropped 5% or more in a single calendar week approximately 40 times. That works out to about once every 60 weeks, or roughly once every 14 months. For most advisors, the more useful number is this: after a weekly decline of that magnitude, the following week produced a gain 62% of the time. The market’s most violent drops have historically been followed by recoveries more often than by further collapse, a pattern that holds across four decades of data spanning Black Monday, the dot-com bust, the Global Financial Crisis, COVID-19, the 2022 rate-shock bear market, and the 2025 tariff sell-off.
That pattern is not a trading signal. It is a conversation tool. When a client calls on a Friday afternoon after watching the S&P 500 lose 6% in five days, the question they need answered is not “will it bounce back next week?” The question they are actually asking is “has something broken, or is this normal?” This article provides the data to answer that question honestly.
How Rare Are Weekly Drops of 5% or More?
The S&P 500 has traded for approximately 2,400 calendar weeks from the start of 1980 through the end of 2025. Weekly declines of 5% or more have occurred in roughly 1.7% of those weeks. To frame that differently: in 98.3% of all calendar weeks across this 46-year span, the index either held steady, gained ground, or declined by less than 5%.
These episodes are rare, but they are not evenly distributed. They cluster around crisis events with a pattern that is worth understanding.
Table 1: S&P 500 Weekly Declines of 5% or More by Crisis Period (1980 to 2025)
| Crisis Period | Approximate Weekly Declines of 5%+ | Largest Weekly Drop | Trigger |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early 1980s Recession (1980–1982) | 2 | Approx. −6% | Volcker rate shock, double-dip recession |
| Black Monday (October 1987) | 2 | Approx. −12% (week of 10/16/87) | Portfolio insurance cascade, program trading |
| Gulf War / Recession (1990) | 1 | Approx. −5% | Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, recession fears |
| Russian Crisis / LTCM (1998) | 1 | Approx. −5.5% | Russian debt default, LTCM collapse |
| Dot-com Bust (2001–2002) | 4 | Approx. −7.5% (week of 9/21/01) | Tech bubble collapse, 9/11 attacks |
| Global Financial Crisis (2008) | 6 | Approx. −18.2% (week of 10/3/08) | Housing bust, Lehman Brothers, bank runs |
| Flash Crash Period (2010–2011) | 2 | Approx. −7% | Flash crash, European debt crisis, U.S. downgrade |
| COVID-19 Pandemic (March 2020) | 4 | Approx. −16% (week of 3/13/20) | Global pandemic lockdowns, liquidity crisis |
| 2022 Bear Market | 1 | Approx. −5.8% (week of 6/17/22) | Federal Reserve tightening, inflation shock |
| Liberation Day Crash (2025) | 2 | Approx. −9.1% (week of 4/4/25) | Tariff escalation, trade war fears |
Several patterns emerge from this data. First, 5%+ weekly declines almost never arrive as isolated events. They come in clusters of two, four, or six, concentrated in periods of systemic stress. The 2008 financial crisis produced six such weeks. COVID-19 produced four in a single month. A client experiencing one 5%+ decline should be prepared for the possibility that another is nearby.
Second, the largest single-week declines are associated with financial system stress rather than economic slowdowns alone. The two most severe weekly drops in this data set, the roughly 18% decline during the week of October 3, 2008 and the roughly 16% decline during the week of March 13, 2020, both occurred when markets questioned the stability of the financial system itself. Economic recessions without financial contagion (such as the early 1990s downturn) have produced fewer and milder 5%+ weeks.
Third, the frequency has not increased over time despite faster information flow, algorithmic trading, and social media amplification. The 1980s and 2000s each contributed a comparable number of 5%+ decline weeks. What has changed is speed: the March 2020 sell-off compressed into three weeks what the 2008 crisis spread across six months.
What Happens After the Drop?
The legacy version of this article, which covered data through August 2015, found that after a weekly decline of 5% or more, the following week experienced a loss only 38% of the time. Extending the data through 2025 produces a similar finding. The subsequent week has historically delivered a positive return approximately 60% to 65% of the time.
The four-week forward returns tell a richer story.
Table 2: Forward Returns After Weekly Declines of 5%+ (1980 to 2025)
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Approximate instances of 5%+ weekly decline | ~40 |
| Following week positive | ~62% of instances |
| Following week: median return | Approximately +1% to +2% |
| Following week: worst return | Approx. −18.2% (10/10/2008, the week after 10/3/2008) |
| 4-week cumulative: positive | ~58% of instances |
| 4-week cumulative: worst | Approx. −19.5% (four weeks after 10/9/1987) |
| 12-week cumulative: positive | ~65% to 70% of instances |
| 12-month forward: positive | ~75% of instances |
The worst-case forward returns are concentrated in a handful of extreme scenarios. The week of October 3, 2008 (roughly −18.2%) was followed by the week of October 10, 2008 (another roughly −18.2%). That kind of consecutive devastation has occurred exactly once in the data set. The worst four-week forward return following a 5%+ weekly decline, approximately −19.5%, followed the October 1987 crash. In both cases, the 12-month forward returns from those troughs were strongly positive.
The critical insight: the moments that feel worst for clients are the moments that have historically preceded the strongest recoveries. This is not a comfortable thing to say during a crisis. It is, however, supported by every observation in 46 years of data.
The COVID Test Case: Four Weeks That Terrified Everyone
March 2020 provides the most instructive recent example of how 5%+ weekly declines behave in real time. The S&P 500 peaked at 3,386 on February 19, 2020. Over the next five weeks, it fell 34% to a closing low of 2,237 on March 23. At least three of those weeks registered declines exceeding 5%, with the weeks of March 13 and March 20 each exceeding 10%.
The speed was historic. It took the 2008 crisis roughly 17 months to reach its trough. COVID-19 took five weeks. Circuit breakers halted trading multiple times. The VIX, which started 2020 near 12, spiked above 80. Financial media coverage was unrelenting.
An advisor who could point to the data in Table 1 during those weeks would have had a factual foundation for the hardest conversation in the profession: “This is severe, but it fits a pattern we have seen before, and the pattern has a second half that involves recovery.”
That second half arrived quickly. By August 2020, the S&P 500 had fully recovered. By December 2020, it was 16% above its pre-COVID peak. The four-year total return from the March 23, 2020 low exceeded 150%, or roughly 25.7% annualized, including the 2022 bear market along the way.
The March 2020 episode also illustrates why market timing fails during these episodes. The best single days in S&P 500 history cluster around the worst single days. Research has consistently shown that roughly 78% of the market’s best individual trading days have occurred during bear markets or in the first two months of a new bull market. The investor who exited on March 16 to “wait for things to settle down” missed the March 24 rebound (up 9.4% in a single day) and the subsequent rally that erased the entire decline within months.
The 2022 Bear Market and the 2025 Liberation Day Crash
The 2022 sell-off and the April 2025 tariff crash both added to the data set, but in different ways.
The 2022 bear market was unusual for its duration and grinding nature rather than for extreme weekly drops. The S&P 500 fell 25.4% from its January 2022 peak to its October 2022 trough over nine months. But the decline arrived in increments. Only one week in 2022 met the 5%+ threshold (the week of June 17, which included the formal entry into bear market territory). Most of the damage came in 3% to 4% weekly declines that accumulated over months. This matters because clients experience slow bears differently than fast crashes. The slow bleed can be psychologically harder to endure than a sharp, frightening drop followed by an obvious recovery. There is no single week to point to and say “that was the bottom.”
The April 2025 “Liberation Day” crash was the opposite pattern: fast, concentrated, and followed by a clear recovery point. After President Trump announced sweeping tariffs on April 2, the S&P 500 lost approximately 9% during the week of April 4, its worst weekly performance since March 2020. Two days alone, April 3 and April 4, saw a combined 10.5% decline, the fifth largest two-day drop since 1950. The index fell into correction territory, sitting more than 17% below its February peak.
Then came the reversal. On April 9, after announcement of a 90-day tariff pause, the S&P 500 surged 9.5% in a single session, its biggest daily gain since 2008. By early May, the index had recovered to its pre-Liberation Day level. By June 27, it reached a new all-time high. The full round trip from crash to recovery took roughly three months.
The 2025 episode reinforced the core finding of this data set: the weeks that feel like the end of the world have not, in 46 years, actually been the end of the world. They have been the moments when long-term returns were forged for investors who stayed.
Where This Data Breaks Down
A responsible treatment of this data requires acknowledging its limits.
The 40-odd instances since 1980 are not a statistically robust sample for making forward-looking probability claims. The 62% next-week recovery rate is a description of what happened, not a guarantee of what will happen. A future 5%+ weekly decline could be the beginning of a prolonged depression that defies the historical pattern. Survivorship in the data does not mean survivorship is guaranteed.
The data also says nothing about individual stocks or sectors. The S&P 500 recovered fully from March 2020, but individual holdings within the index did not all recover on the same timeline. Sector dispersion during crisis periods is wide. Energy stocks during COVID-19, office REITs during the post-pandemic period, and bank stocks during 2008 all suffered far worse than the index and took far longer to recover. A client with a concentrated position cannot draw the same comfort from index-level data that a diversified investor can.
Perhaps most importantly, the historical pattern assumes the investor stays invested. The data in Table 2 describes what happened to a dollar that remained in the index. The investor who sold during the 5%+ week and re-entered later earned a different return, and DALBAR’s research on the behavior gap documents that the difference is consistently negative. In 2024, the average equity fund investor earned 16.54% while the S&P 500 returned 25.02%, an 8.48 percentage point gap driven largely by the tendency to sell after declines and buy after recoveries.
The data does not prove that staying invested is always the right decision. It proves that for the specific set of crisis events that have occurred since 1980, the investors who sold during 5%+ decline weeks and failed to re-enter before the subsequent recovery underperformed those who held.
Turning the Data Into a Client Conversation
The real value of this data set is not analytical. It is conversational.
When the S&P 500 drops 6% in a week and a client calls asking whether they should sell, the advisor faces a high-stakes moment. The client’s emotional brain is screaming for action. The advisor’s job is not to argue against the emotion but to provide a factual framework the client can process.
Specific applications of this data in client conversations:
“In 46 years of data, the S&P 500 has experienced roughly 40 weeks like this. In about two-thirds of those instances, the following week was positive. That does not mean next week will be positive. It means that what you are experiencing right now is normal, and the historical pattern has a second half.”
“The two most violent weekly drops in the data set, October 2008 and March 2020, felt like the financial system was collapsing. Both were followed by recoveries. The 12-month forward returns from the worst weeks in the data set were positive roughly 75% of the time.”
“Here is what concerns me more than this week’s decline: the evidence on what happens when investors exit during these periods. DALBAR tracks the difference between what funds return and what investors actually earn. The gap is driven almost entirely by selling during weeks like this one and buying back after the recovery is already underway.”
This last point connects the weekly drop data to the broader behavioral coaching framework. The data in this article is a tool for that conversation, not a replacement for it. The table tells the client what the market did. The advisor tells the client what to do about it, which, in most cases, is nothing.
For clients who cannot tolerate inaction, the conversation can redirect toward process rather than prediction. “Let’s review your allocation targets and see if this decline has pushed anything far enough out of balance to trigger a rebalance. That gives us a structured reason to act without making a market timing call.” Rebalancing during a decline means buying more of what has fallen, the mechanical opposite of the panic-selling impulse, and it channels the urge to “do something” into a disciplined framework.
The Advisor’s Edge
The weekly closing prices of the S&P 500 are public. Any client can download the data and build the table in this article. What they cannot build on their own is the ability to sit across from a frightened client during a 5%+ decline week and calmly walk through four decades of evidence, connect it to the client’s specific goals and time horizon, and help them avoid the behavioral mistake that DALBAR shows costs investors more than any market decline.
That ability, the combination of data literacy, behavioral coaching, and practitioner judgment, is what the Certified Fund Specialist (CFS) designation develops across its full curriculum. The CFS program covers risk measurement, market cycle analysis, behavioral finance, and the systematic approach to client communication that turns raw data into better outcomes.
For more on how historical risk patterns inform portfolio construction, see Portfolio Diversification for Risk Reduction: What the Research Shows.
Sources and Notes: S&P 500 weekly return data compiled from S&P Dow Jones Indices and verified against Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED). Forward return calculations based on Friday-to-Friday closing prices. COVID-19 market data from S&P Global. 2025 Liberation Day crash data from Bloomberg and S&P Dow Jones Indices. DALBAR behavior gap data from the 2024 Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior (QAIB). All returns are price returns, not total returns with dividends. This article is refreshed annually or after any market event that produces a new 5%+ weekly decline.