DCA
End value $138,649
Total return +129.2%
Annualized (XIRR) +15.8%
Max drawdown 32%
Why this calculator defaults to SPY
Several ETFs track the S&P 500 — the index of roughly 500 large-cap US companies that covers about 80% of the American stock market — but only one of them has been trading since January 22, 1993: SPY, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust, the first ETF ever listed in the US. That extra history is exactly what a backtesting tool needs. With SPY you can test a plan through the dot-com bust, the global financial crisis, the COVID crash and the 2022 bear; VOO, Vanguard's popular alternative, only exists from September 2010 and has therefore never seen a decade-defining crisis.
Structurally, SPY is a unit investment trust with a 0.0945% expense ratio: it must hold dividends in cash between its quarterly distributions and cannot lend securities. VOO is a conventional open-end fund charging 0.03%. Those differences shave a few hundredths of a percent per year in VOO's favor — real, but tiny next to the decision this page is actually about, which is when and how the money goes in. Our verdict in short: backtest with SPY, accumulate with VOO (see the FAQ below), and don't lose sleep over the gap.
Three decades of S&P 500 DCA, already computed
These runs come straight from the backtest engine at build time — $500 into SPY on the first of each month, dividends reinvested, no starting lump. Set the same window above to verify any of them.
Buying the October 2007 top, held ten years
Starting a plan at the exact pre-crisis peak sounds catastrophic. It wasn't: $60,500 drip-fed over 121 months grew to $120,520 (+99.2%) by October 2017, with a worst portfolio drawdown of 28% thanks to the cash still flowing in through 2008–2009. The lump sum actually ended slightly ahead at $124,296 (+105.4%) — but it had to sit through the index's full 55% collapse to get there. Same destination, radically different journey.
Two bear markets in one window: 2000 → 2013
Thirteen years spanning both the dot-com bust and the financial crisis. Here the averaging advantage shows up in the totals, not just the ride: $78,500 invested monthly became $114,119 (+45.4%), while the identical sum invested in January 2000 reached only $102,399 (+30.4%). Every purchase made inside the 2002 and 2009 troughs bought the index on sale, and those cheap shares did the heavy lifting.
A friendly decade: 2015 → 2025
Balance demands the other side. Over this mostly-rising decade, monthly investing turned $60,500 into $132,661 (+119.3%) — a fine outcome that nonetheless trailed the lump sum's $211,149 (+249.0%) by a wide margin. When the S&P 500 grinds upward with only brief interruptions, cash waiting for its scheduled buy date is cash missing the rally.
S&P 500 DCA FAQ
Should I DCA into SPY or VOO?
For money going in from today onward, VOO is the economically better choice: it tracks the same S&P 500 index but charges 0.03% a year against SPY’s 0.0945%, and Vanguard’s fund structure reinvests dividends internally between distributions. SPY’s advantages — enormous trading volume and the deepest options market in the world — matter to traders, not to someone buying $500 a month. The gap is small either way: roughly six hundredths of a percent per year. This page runs on SPY purely because its price record is the longest; select VOO in the ticker list to backtest it directly from its 2010 launch.
Is DCA into the S&P 500 better than a lump sum?
Measured purely by ending value, usually not: across most ten-year stretches of SPY’s history since 1993, investing everything up front finishes ahead, sometimes dramatically. The exceptions cluster around the awful starting points — January 2000 and October 2007 — where averaging in either won outright or came close while suffering roughly half the drawdown. If your alternative to DCA is not a lump sum but waiting in cash for a better entry, DCA wins that comparison almost by default.
How far back can this S&P 500 backtest go?
To January 1993, when SPY became the first exchange-traded fund listed in the United States. That is over three decades of daily, dividend-adjusted prices covering the dot-com collapse, the 2008 financial crisis, the 2020 COVID crash and the 2022 bear market — enough history to test a dollar-cost-averaging plan against every kind of market the modern S&P 500 has produced.
More backtests
The main DCA calculator handles all eight supported tickers — VOO, VTI, SCHD, Bitcoin and more — and its FAQ documents the full methodology. Chasing growth instead of the broad market? There's a dedicated QQQ DCA calculator with Nasdaq-100 and TQQQ scenarios.