How long does it usually take equities to recover from a bear market [1]?
I don’t just mean how long does it take for a bear market to end. Bears can be officially over in a matter of months.
But how long does it take for us to recover our losses? To get back in the black? In real, inflation-adjusted terms.
Sadly, that’s a much longer slog…
Investing returns sidebar – All returns quoted are inflation-adjusted total returns (including dividends). Fees are not included. The bear recovery column shows you when the stock market fully restored its losses in real terms. Total duration measures the period from the start of the bear market until recovery.
World equities: bear market recovery times 1970-2025 (GBP returns)
| Bear start | Bear trough | Bear real recovery | Fall (%) | Total duration |
| Dec 1969 | Jun 1970 | Jun 1972 | -22 | 2 years, 5 months |
| Dec 1972 | Sep 1974 | Dec 1984 | -52 | 12 years |
| Sep 1976 | Apr 1980 | Mar 1983 | -39 | 6 years, 6 months |
| Aug 1987 | Nov 1987 | Jul 1989 | -30 | 1 year, 11 months |
| Dec 1989 | Sep 1990 | Aug 1993 | -39 | 3 years, 8 months |
| Aug 2000 | Jan 2003 | May 2014 | -51 | 13 years, 9 months |
| Oct 2007 | Feb 2009 | Feb 2013 | -36 | 5 years, 3 months |
Data from MSCI [2]. November 2025. Note: MSCI World monthly returns begin in 1970. The December 1969 bear market actually began before that – see the UK and US bear market recovery tables below.
To summarise:
- Average bear market loss: -38%
- Average bear market recovery time: 6 years, 6 months
- Shortest bear: 1 year, 11 months
- Longest bear: 13 years, 9 months
The real-return figures I’m sharing here are much worse than the nominal ones you’ll see from sources that ignore inflation.
Unfortunately though, the cost of living is real as we’ve seen only too recently.
Inflation-adjusted returns are the ones that put food on the table. So let’s not obscure reality with nominal figures.
That aside, I’m always shocked by the potential depth and severity of really big bear markets.
If you weren’t invested during the Global Financial Crisis [3] (GFC) then you haven’t even experienced an average bear market shock yet.
God knows how awful many of us would feel if the market were to fall by 50%.
So far that’s happened twice in my lifetime. But happily not my investing lifetime.
Smarter than the average bear
Many people seem to believe that they can always ride out a bear because the market will bounce back in a few years.
As the table shows, that could prove a serious miscalculation if you’re gliding towards retirement [4] with a portfolio stuffed full of equities like a jumbo jet carrying too much fuel.
Remember the recovery periods above only get you back where you started.
It’s also worth pondering on that fact that, as I say, since the GFC we’ve enjoyed an exceptionally benign bear-free patch.
Long may that continue, eh?
(Gulp! Should you suddenly feel a desire to dig deeper, I recently refurbished our article on defensive asset allocation [5].)
UK equities: bear market recovery times 1900-2025 (GBP returns)
Okay, we can’t access World equities data before 1970. So for a longer term picture, let’s turn to the UK and US record of bear attacks:
| Bear start | Bear trough | Bear real recovery | Fall (%) | Total duration |
| Jun 1914 | Dec 1920 | Feb 1923 | -52 | 8 years, 8 months |
| Jan 1929 | Jun 1932 | Feb 1934 | -37 | 5 years, 1 month |
| Jan 1937 | Jul 1940 | Mar 1945 | -40 | 8 years, 2 months |
| Jun 1951 | Jun 1952 | Nov 1953 | -28 | 2 years, 5 months |
| Jun 1957 | Feb 1958 | Aug 1958 | -21 | 1 year, 2 months |
| Apr 1961 | Jun 1962 | Aug 1963 | -25 | 2 years, 3 months |
| Jan 1969 | May 1970 | Jan 1972 | -35 | 3 years |
| Apr 1972 | Dec 1974 | Jan 1984 | -75 | 11 years, 9 months |
| Jan 1976 | Oct 1976 | Aug 1977 | -32 | 1 year, 7 months |
| Sep 1987 | Nov 1987 | Apr 1992 | -34 | 4 years, 7 months |
| Aug 2000 | Jan 2003 | Feb 2006 | -45 | 5 years, 6 months |
| Oct 2007 | Feb 2009 | Mar 2013 | -43 | 5 years, 5 months |
| Dec 2019 | Mar 2020 | Aug 2021 | -25 | 1 year, 8 months |
Data from Before the cult of equity: the British stock market, 1829–1929, (Campbell G, Grossman R, Turner JD, (2021), European Review of Economic History. 25. 10.1093/ereh/heab003.), A Century of UK Economic Trends, and FTSE Russell. November 2025.
Some highlights:
- Average bear market loss: -38%
- Average bear market recovery time: 4 years, 9 months
- Shortest bear: 1 year, 2 months
- Longest bear: 11 years, 9 months
Surprisingly, inking in the period wracked by World Wars and the Great Depression does not make the UK’s bear market recovery stats look any worse than the World index.
That said, my eye is always caught by the UK’s -75% 1972-1974 crash [6].
Reflecting on that period also reminds me we’ve endured periods of social discontent that makes today’s disharmony look like a primary school nativity play.
Bear country
In some ways, these tables underplay the potential threats to our portfolios.
For one, our tables don’t include the near-bear markets: losses of 15% or more that pockmark the inter-bear periods.
Sub-bear shocks can still be enough to shake someone whose portfolio has galloped ahead in the good times. A few years of worth of wonderful gains can quickly move us from a place where we had little to lose to suddenly having a lot on the line.
In that situation, we may have imperceptibely become less risk tolerant [7] than we thought.
Secondly, sometimes only a few months separates one bear market recovery from the next mauling.
For example there is only a three month respite between the January 1972 recovery and the April 1972 market mutilation. So I personally view that period as one long 15-year bear market rampage. (Perhaps it would be with fees included.)
Similarly, Y2K’s Dotcom Bust and the GFC really amount to a lost decade for UK investors.
Finally, the last of my ‘glass half empty’ / ‘the glass is smashed all over the floor’ points is that the UK stock market has performed pretty well historically.
Yet it’s plausible to imagine a nastier, parallel universe where all equities were ripped up by a Bearzilla disaster on the scale of the Japanese stock market crash [8].
Incidentally, the December 1989 to September 1990 bear market (in the World equities table) is largely caused by the bursting of the Japanese asset bubble.
US equities: bear market recovery times 1900-2025 (USD returns)
For completion’s sake, here’s the bear market recovery record of the world’s most successful stock market:
| Bear start | Bear trough | Bear real recovery | Fall (%) | Total duration |
| Jun 1901 | Oct 1903 | Dec 1904 | -25 | 3 years, 6 months |
| Jan 1906 | Nov 1907 | Jan 1909 | -35 | 3 years |
| Jun 1911 | Dec 1914 | Oct 1915 | -20 | 4 years, 4 months |
| Nov 1916 | Dec 1920 | Aug 1924 | -47 | 7 years, 9 months |
| Sep 1929 | Jun 1932 | Nov 1936 | -77 | 7 years, 2 months |
| Feb 1937 | Apr 1942 | Apr 1945 | -48 | 8 years, 2 months |
| Oct 1939 | Apr 1942 | Jun 1944 | -38 | 4 years, 7 months |
| April 1946 | Feb 1948 | Oct 1950 | -35 | 4 years, 6 months |
| Dec 1961 | Jun 1962 | May 1963 | -22 | 1 year, 5 months |
| Dec 1968 | Jun 1970 | Nov 1972 | -32 | 3 years, 10 months |
| Jan 1973 | Sep 1974 | Jan 1985 | -49 | 12 years |
| Nov 1980 | Jul 1982 | Dec 1982 | -23 | 2 years, 1 months |
| Aug 1987 | Dec 1987 | Aug 1989 | -27 | 2 years |
| Aug 2000 | Feb 2003 | May 2013 | -45 | 12 years, 9 months |
| Oct 2007 | Mar 2009 | Mar 2013 | -50 | 5 years, 5 months |
| Nov 2021 | Oct 2022 | Mar 2024 | -25 | 2 years, 4 months |
Data from Robert Shiller [9]. October 2025.
- Average bear market loss: -37%
- Average bear market recovery time: 5 years, 4 months
- Shortest bear: 1 year, 5 months
- Longest bear: 12 years, 9 months
Again, you could choose to label the benighted sequence from the Great Depression to World War 2 as one giant bear lasting from September 1929 until April 1945.
Which would have meant over 15 years until you broke even. And then you got a whole 12 months off before the 35% plunge commencing April 1946.
What a time to be alive.
Essentially then, US stocks have suffered three lost decades in 125 years.
Yes, the US – the land of the permabulls!
This might seem like scaremongering. But if an investing lifetime lasts 50 to 60 years (accumulation and decumulation [10] phases combined) then many of us are likely to live through the sharp end of at least one such stagnant period.
Investing in the real world
So far we’ve considered raw market data. But in reality, the bear market recovery time we experience will be further drawn out by investment costs [11].
And on a brighter note, we can improve our results by pound-cost averaging [12] through the downturn, and by diversifying into defensive assets [5] – such as government bonds – ahead of time.
The chart below shows how a larger allocation to high-quality government bonds sped up the recovery from the coronavirus crash versus a pure equities portfolio:
[13]Source: JP Morgan [14]: Guide to the Markets. 31 May 2022. Page 63.
The All-Weather portfolio [15] is another asset allocation approach that can dramatically reduce the severity of a bear market.
Yes, you’ll probably pay for this cushioning in the form of lower long-term returns. (Though that’s never a certainty).
But experiencing shallower swoons makes it easier to stay the course. And it’s far harder to come back from a bear market if you panic sell after a deep plunge, lock in your losses [16], and then miss the rebound.
So take the right steps to protect your portfolio [17] ahead of time. It’s usually too late once a bear market runs wild.
Take it steady,
The Accumulator