What Have Portfolios Actually Returned?
Every return input on this site is a guess about the future. This page doesn't predict that future — it shows what different US stock/bond mixes actually returned, year by year, from 1928 through 2025 (98 years), computed directly from the same underlying dataset used elsewhere on this site. Nothing on this page is a third-party estimate.
What the return input means
Every "expected return" field on this site is a nominal annual rate — the kind you'd see quoted for a fund, before subtracting inflation. Each calculator deflates it by your inflation input and works entirely in today's dollars from there, so a target or balance it shows you is real purchasing power, not a bigger future number that buys the same as a smaller one today. See the methodology page for the exact real-return formula every engine on this site follows.
Full-period returns by portfolio mix, 1928-2025
Stock/bond mix, geometric mean annual return (the honest way to average returns over time), and the single best and worst calendar year that mix experienced. "Real" is after inflation; that's the figure that maps onto a calculator's return input once you've accounted for your own inflation assumption separately.
| Mix (stock/bond) | Archetype | Nominal | Real | Worst year | Best year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100/0 | All-equity (a 'VT and chill' shape) | 10.02% | 6.78% | -43.84% | 52.56% |
| 80/20 | Growth-tilted | 9.27% | 6.05% | -35.58% | 42.71% |
| 60/40 | The classic balanced portfolio | 8.34% | 5.15% | -27.33% | 32.85% |
| 40/60 | Conservative-tilted | 7.24% | 4.08% | -19.07% | 28.97% |
| 30/70 | Conservative/risk-parity-ish equity weight | 6.63% | 3.48% | -17.89% | 29.10% |
| 0/100 | All-bond | 4.53% | 1.45% | -17.83% | 32.81% |
A note on "All Weather"-style portfolios: our dataset only covers US stocks and 10-year Treasuries. It has no commodities or gold sleeve, so we can't compute a figure for that kind of mix — approximating it with a stock/bond blend and labeling it All Weather would misrepresent what it actually holds, so we don't.
The same portfolio, 30 years, a different start date
Hold the classic 60/40 mix for a full 30 years and the full-period average says you should expect around 5.15% real per year. But no one lives the average — everyone lives one specific 30-year window. Rolling every possible 30-year window through our 98 years of data (69 windows in all), the same 60/40 portfolio annualized real return ranged from 2.93% (starting 1955) to 7.51% (starting 1982), with a median of 5.42%.
That 4.58-point spread, from nothing but which year you happened to start in, is wider than the gap between most of the portfolio archetypes in the table above. Which 30 years you live through matters more than which reasonable mix you pick.
Why our slider goes above 15%
Most FIRE calculators cap the return input somewhere around 15%. Ours doesn't. That's deliberate: part of this site's audience runs active or systematic strategies — not a passive index fund — and models return targets that reflect that strategy's own assumptions, not a market average.
To be plain about it: no broad passive portfolio in this 98-year record sustained anything close to 20% over a long window. The highest full-period figure above is 10.02% nominal, for 100% equities. A return input well above that is modeling a specific strategy's assumption rather than a market average — which is a legitimate thing to model, and the reason the slider allows it.
Limits
- US markets only — no international, small-cap, or REIT sleeves.
- No commodities or gold, so no figure for a commodity-inclusive mix (see above).
- No fees or taxes are deducted from any figure on this page.
- Past returns describe what happened; they are not a forecast of what will happen next.
See how these figures are derived on the methodology page, or go back to the calculators.