Despite wars, recessions, and crises, the U.S. stock market has remained one of the most reliable engines of wealth creation and human progress. A single dollar invested in U.S. equities around 1870, with dividends reinvested, would have grown to roughly $30,000 to $35,000 in today’s dollars.
In nominal terms, long-run total returns have averaged about 9.2–9.3% annually. After accounting for inflation, U.S. equity investors have grown their purchasing power by roughly 7% per year for more than a century and a half. That equates to a real, inflation-adjusted return of approximately 6.5–7% per year over 150 years.
Those historic returns are confirmed across multiple academic and practical sources. Jeremy Siegel’s Stocks for the Long Run estimates real equity returns of around 6.5–7% across two centuries. The Credit Suisse/UBS Global Investment Returns Yearbook shows a similar pattern since 1900, and Robert Shiller’s historical dataset, which tracks monthly prices, dividends, and inflation since 1871, remains the benchmark for long-term total return calculations. Complementary analysis from Aswath Damodaran (1928 to present) reaches the same conclusion: nominal equity returns near 9–10%, translating to 6–7% real after inflation.
This long-term record does not mean returns are steady or predictable. Investors rarely see results close to the historical average in any single year, as they experience booms and busts, bull and bear markets, and long stretches of underperformance often followed by sharp recoveries.