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The worst day in stock market history wasn't 1929. Here are the 10 biggest S&P 500 drops on record

Black Monday's 20.47% drop in 1987 still tops the list, and 2020 is the last year to make it. See the 10 worst S&P 500 days on record

Maxim Hopman / Unsplash

Eight of the 10 worst days in S&P 500 history came in just four years: 1929, 1987, 2008 and 2020. No day since March 2020 has made the top 20, and the worst day of 2025, April 4, fell 5.97%, less than a third of the 20.47% drop in 1987.

Wikipedia's ranking of the largest daily S&P 500 changes, which draws on S&P Dow Jones Indices data, ranks every trading day since 1923 by its close-to-close percentage loss, and the 10 below top it, though figures before the index's formal 1957 launch are reconstructed.

Black Monday remains the worst day in the S&P 500's history. The index fell 20.47%, or 57.86 points, to 224.84, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 22.6%, or 508 points. Some calculations using the Dow's older methods put December 12, 1914, when the New York Stock Exchange reopened after a four-month closure at the start of World War I, at a 24.39% loss, but 1987 is the record in most accounts.

Markets had already been falling worldwide, and the S&P 500 lost 9% in the week before. About 604 million shares traded, almost twice Friday's volume. The crash is usually attributed to a mix of overvalued stocks, program trading and investor panic. The Federal Reserve supplied liquidity to meet unprecedented demand for credit, the index gained 9.10% on October 21, and the exchange introduced trading curbs in 1988. The S&P 500 did not regain its pre-crash high until July 26, 1989.

Viktorija Demjanenko / Unsplash

The S&P 500 index of the day fell 12.34%, or 3.20 points, to 22.74, and the Dow dropped nearly 13%, a........

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