DCA
End value $137,691
Total return +127.6%
Annualized (XIRR) +15.7%
Max drawdown 33%
Using it as a VOO return calculator
Choose any start and end month from September 2010 on. The DCA card shows what steady buying (monthly, biweekly or weekly) would be worth at the end month, the Lump Sum card shows the same total put in on the first day, and the chart tracks both over time. Enter an initial investment to start from a balance you already hold.
VOO at a glance
- Full name: Vanguard S&P 500 ETF
- Inception date: September 7, 2010 (our daily price data begins September 9, 2010)
- Benchmark: S&P 500 Index
- Expense ratio: 0.03% a year
- Dividends: paid quarterly, and reinvested in every backtest on this page
Fund details from Vanguard's VOO profile, checked October 14, 2026.
Because every result here is built from VOO's own trading history, the backtests describe the fund itself, fees and tracking included, rather than the index on paper. VOO and SPY hold the same stocks, differing mainly in fund structure and cost; to test years before VOO existed, use our DCA calculator for the S&P 500, which runs on SPY data from 1993.
How $500 a month in VOO has grown
DCAKit's engine recalculates the three backtests below on every site build, from the same VOO price file the calculator loads: $500 on the first trading day of each month, no starting lump, dividends reinvested. Type matching start and end months into the form at the top of the page and the figures will agree.
Every month since launch
Begin in October 2010, VOO's first full month of trading, and keep buying: by Oct 16, 2026 that adds up to 193 purchases totaling $96,500, now worth $353,593. That is a +266.4% total return, or +14.7% a year measured as an internal rate of return (XIRR) on every contribution. Had the whole $96,500 gone in at the start, it would be worth $860,167 (+791.4%), the gap you would expect from a fund that has spent most of its life climbing.
The plan's worst drop from a previous high was 34%, compared with 34% for VOO itself: once a balance is large, a fresh $500 barely cushions a fall. Stopping the same plan earlier shows how unevenly the growth arrived:
- After 5 years (Sep 30, 2015): $30,000 invested, worth $39,471 (+31.6%)
- After 10 years (Sep 30, 2020): $60,000 invested, worth $118,215 (+97.0%)
- After 15 years (Sep 30, 2025): $90,000 invested, worth $299,021 (+232.2%)
Profit went from $58,215 at the ten-year mark to $209,021 five years later. Compounding does its heaviest lifting late in a long plan, which is why quitting early costs more than it looks.
Starting just before the 2020 crash
This plan's first $500 went in on the first trading day of February 2020, a couple of weeks before VOO's pre-pandemic high. Within weeks the fund was down 34%. After 12 monthly purchases, in January 2021, $6,000 had grown to $7,053 (+17.6%), barely ahead of putting the full amount in on day one, which ended at $6,977 (+16.3%). What monthly buying changed was the experience: a worst decline of 29% rather than 34%. When a crash reverses within months, averaging has little time to build an edge.
Starting at the January 2022 high
2022 brought the opposite kind of decline: no single crash, just a slide that lasted most of the year and took VOO as much as 25% below its January peak. Monthly buying from that January through December 2023 turned $12,000 into $13,894 (+15.8%), while the same sum invested at the top had recovered to only $12,326 (+2.7%). The monthly buyer never fell more than 13% below a previous high, against 25% for the all-at-once buyer, and the shares picked up at 2022's depressed prices are what carried the plan ahead.
Read together, these runs sum up VOO's record for regular investors: over the long climb since launch a lump sum came out ahead, after the quickly reversed 2020 crash the two strategies ended almost level, and through the long, grinding decline of 2022 monthly buying came out ahead.
VOO calculator FAQ
Why does this VOO calculator start in 2010?
VOO did not exist any earlier. Vanguard lists September 7, 2010 as the fund's inception date, and the first daily price in our data is from September 9, 2010, so September 2010 is the earliest start month the calculator accepts. That still spans the 2011 debt-ceiling selloff, the pandemic crash of 2020 and the long slide of 2022 — just not the dot-com bust or the 2008 financial crisis, which happened before the fund launched.
Is VOO the same as Vanguard's VFIAX?
They are two doors into one portfolio. VOO is the exchange-traded share class of Vanguard's 500 Index Fund and VFIAX is the same fund's Admiral Shares, so the holdings are identical. What differs is cost and mechanics: VOO's expense ratio is 0.03% versus 0.04% for VFIAX, and VFIAX requires a $3,000 minimum to open and is priced once a day after the market closes, while VOO trades all day like a stock and can be bought one share — or, at many brokers, a fraction of a share — at a time. Long-run results are nearly identical, so the choice mostly comes down to where your account is and how you like to buy.
Are VOO's fees included in these results?
Yes. Vanguard takes VOO's 0.03% expense ratio out of the fund's assets bit by bit instead of billing you, so the cost is already inside the daily prices this calculator uses, and every backtest on this page is net of it. In dollar terms, 0.03% is $3 a year for each $10,000 invested — about $106 a year on the $353,593 that the since-launch plan above is worth today.
Keep exploring
VOO is one of eight tickers you can test on DCAKit. Our DCA calculator home page switches between all of them and documents the methodology in its FAQ; the QQQ calculator covers the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 and its 3× leveraged cousin TQQQ; and Vanguard's total-market fund is one click away as a VTI backtest.