What If You Had Invested in VOO 10 Years Ago?

VOO: all at once or every month?

Take $12,000: all of it on day one, or $1,000 a month for a year. Across every starting month since 2010 (183 of them), the lump sum was ahead after 12 months in 155 (85%). That is lopsided: for VOO, waiting to invest has usually cost money. The best case for monthly investing was a start in December 2021, when it finished the year 15% ahead.

Worst drop

VOO's worst fall in this history was -23.9%, milder than the worst falls of most stock funds, from December 2021 to September 2022. Getting back to the old high took until December 2023: 15 months from the bottom and 2.0 years from the peak. $1,000 invested at that peak shrank to about $761 at the low.

VOO dividends

VOO paid $7.43 per share over the last 12 months, quarterly. At $673.97 that is 1.10%, a small yield; nearly all of the return has come from the price. From 2020 to 2025 the yearly payout grew +5.9% a year, steadily. The yearly total fell in 2020. Amounts are adjusted for splits.

Yield = each year’s dividends divided by the price at the end of the year.

VOO dividend history: last 12 payments

Stock splits

• October 2013: 0.5-for-1

About VOO

Fund details as of 2025. Check the issuer for the current expense ratio and holdings.

VOO owns the 500 companies in the S&P 500, weighted by size, so the biggest names such as Apple, Microsoft and NVIDIA make up a large share of it. It is one of the cheapest ways to own the U.S. stock market's largest companies.

VOO, SPY and IVV all track the same index, so their returns are almost identical. The differences are cost and structure: VOO and IVV charge less than SPY, while SPY trades in the largest volume, which matters mostly to traders.

What you actually own

The S&P 500 is not simply the 500 biggest U.S. companies. A committee picks them, and a company has to be profitable over the most recent year and the latest quarter to be added. That rule kept Tesla out until December 2020, long after it was large enough. Because the fund is weighted by market value, the ten largest companies make up more than a third of VOO, and technology is its biggest sector by far. When people say 'the market was up', they mostly mean those giants were up.

Who it suits

VOO is the kind of fund Warren Buffett had in mind when he wrote in 2013 that the money he leaves for his wife should go 90% into a low-cost S&P 500 index fund. It is a common core holding for people who do not want to pick stocks. In Korea, too, VOO is one of the U.S. ETFs my readers ask about most, usually alongside QQQ and SCHD, so the comparisons on this page are the ones I get asked to run.

Dividends

VOO pays its dividend every quarter, usually at the end of March, June, September and December. The yield is modest because the biggest holdings pay little or nothing, but the payout has grown over time. Reinvested, those dividends add roughly a percentage point or more a year to the return, which is why the total-return numbers here are higher than VOO's price change alone.

Questions about VOO

How much would $10,000 invested in VOO 15 years ago be worth today?

About $76,558 with dividends reinvested, invested at the November 2011 close: 665.6% in total, or 14.5% a year.

When does VOO pay dividends?

In the last 12 months the payments went out in March, June, September and December, $7.43 per share in total.

Did VOO beat QQQ?

No. Over the last 10 years it trailed by 4.8 percentage points a year: +14.6% a year for VOO against +19.4% for QQQ, dividends reinvested. Its worst fall was milder than QQQ's over the same history (-23.9% against -32.6%).