S&P 500 & VOO Growth: Latest Performance

"S&P 500 growth" and "VOO performance" are some of the most searched investing questions there are — and also some of the fastest-changing, since the market moves every trading day. Rather than print a specific growth figure that would be wrong within hours, this article gives you a live number where possible, explains what "growth" actually means across different timeframes, and points you to where to check the current figures yourself.

VOO's price and performance right now

Because VOO is built to track the S&P 500 closely, its live price and day's move below are a reasonable real-time proxy for how the index itself is doing right now — this card pulls a fresh quote on every page load rather than showing a number frozen at publish time.

For the S&P 500 index value itself (rather than VOO's fund price), check S&P Dow Jones Indices or a financial data provider directly — the index level and VOO's price move together but aren't numerically identical.

Why "S&P 500 growth" isn't one fixed number

"How much has the S&P 500 grown?" doesn't have a single answer, because the result depends entirely on which two dates you're comparing. The same index can show a gain over one timeframe and a loss over another, depending on where you start and end the measurement:

• Today's change — the move since the previous trading day's close.
• Year-to-date (YTD) — the move since the first trading day of the current calendar year.
• 1-year, 5-year, 10-year — the move over each respective trailing period, recalculated every day as the window shifts forward.
• All-time — the move from a fixed historical starting point to today.

Any specific number for any of these changes daily, so treat any figure you read (including in an older version of this article) as a snapshot, not a permanent fact.

Price return vs. total return

There's a second, less obvious source of confusion: the headline S&P 500 index level reflects price movement only. It doesn't include the dividends paid by the roughly 500 companies in the index. "Total return" figures add those dividends back in, assuming they're reinvested, and are consistently higher than price-only figures over any meaningful period.

This matters directly for VOO, since VOO passes dividend income through to shareholders. An investor who reinvests VOO's dividends experiences something closer to the index's total return than to its price-only return. Our VOO dividend calculator lets you model the effect of reinvested dividends separately from price growth.

Checking YTD, 1-year, 5-year, and 10-year performance

For the current, exact figures — YTD return, trailing 1-year, 5-year, 10-year, or since-inception return — go directly to a source built to keep them updated:

• Vanguard's official VOO fund page, for VOO-specific performance figures.
• S&P Dow Jones Indices, for the S&P 500 index itself.
• Your brokerage account, which typically shows your own personal return, including your specific purchase dates and any dividends reinvested.

We intentionally don't reproduce those figures here, since a number that's accurate today is guaranteed to be stale eventually, and an outdated performance figure can be actively misleading.

The long-run historical average

One number that changes more slowly is the S&P 500's long-run historical average return. Widely cited long-term studies commonly put the nominal average somewhere around 10% a year before inflation across many decades of data, or roughly 7% a year after adjusting for inflation. A few important caveats:

• That average blends very strong years and very weak (including negative) years — it isn't a smooth, guaranteed path.
• Shorter periods, including the most recent 5 or 10 years, can look meaningfully different from the multi-decade average in either direction.
• A long-run historical average is a reference point, not a prediction — nothing guarantees the S&P 500 or VOO will return anything close to that figure going forward.

How closely VOO tracks the index

VOO aims to replicate the S&P 500's performance as closely as possible, and in practice it tracks the index very closely. Small, normal differences can still appear, mainly from VOO's expense ratio and minor day-to-day tracking differences inherent to running any index fund. For most long-term investors, this gap is small compared to the effect of the market's own overall moves — see our full VOO guide for more on expense ratios and fund structure.

Modeling your own growth assumptions

Since nobody, including this article, can tell you what the S&P 500 or VOO will actually return going forward, our calculators work differently on purpose: you choose an assumed annual return — perhaps informed by the long-run average above, perhaps more conservative or more optimistic — and the tool shows you the mathematical result of that assumption over your own time horizon and contribution pattern.

Try the VOO calculator or S&P 500 calculator with a few different return assumptions to see how sensitive your own plan is to the rate you choose.