Nifty 50 year-by-year returns since 2008

Every calendar year

The table shows the Nifty 50's return for each calendar year from 2008, and the largest fall from a high inside that year. The price return is the index alone. The dividend column is our estimate of the total return, built from NSE's published dividend yield.

Three things the table shows

Up years far outnumber down years. The index rose in 15 of the 18 full years, 2008 to 2025. The median year returned about 12.7% with dividends.

Almost every year has a scare. In 14 of the 18 years the index fell more than 10% from a high at some point, and in 11 of those it still ended the year higher. 2020 is the extreme case: a 38.4% fall by March and a 14.90% gain by December. A fall of 10% inside a year is the normal cost of owning equities, not a signal that something has broken.

Returns arrive in lumps. Five years (2009, 2012, 2014, 2017 and 2021) delivered gains of more than 24% each, and they account for much of the long-run return. An investor who sat out a few of them to avoid a fall would have missed most of the reward. The same point is made, with daily data, in our post on the best and worst Nifty days.

Average vs compounded return

From the close of 2007 to the close of 2025, the index compounded at 8.38% a year on price, about 9.79% with dividends. The simple average of the eighteen yearly returns with dividends is about 13%.

The gap is not a rounding error. A 50% fall followed by a 50% rise leaves you 25% down, yet averages to zero. Big swings pull the compounded return below the average, so a projection built on "the Nifty averages 13%" overstates what an investor actually earned. The CAGR calculator gives the compounded figure from any start and end values; absolute return, CAGR and XIRR explains the three measures.

The 2008 starting point matters too. That year began close to the January 2008 peak, so 2008–2025 is a stretch that starts with the worst year. Measured over the ten years to September 2026 instead, the index returned about 11.5% a year with dividends; our post on Nifty 50 returns over 1, 3, 5, 10 and 15 years gives every period.

What 2026 looks like in this company

To 30 September, 2026 is the third-worst year in the table. The index peaked at 26,328.55 on 2 January and fell 15.2% to its low on 30 March. Only 2008 and 2011 ended a year with larger losses, and both were followed by strong years, but two cases are not a rule and the table cannot tell you what the last quarter of 2026 or 2027 will bring.

What it does suggest is how to read a bad year: the eighteen years in this table include a global financial crisis, a European debt crisis and a pandemic, and the index ended the stretch several times higher. For how investors who kept their SIPs through those falls came out, see should you stop your SIP in a market crash, and for the psychology, the psychology of a market crash.

Notes on the data

• Each year runs from the last close of the previous year to the last close of the year. 2026 runs to 30 September.
• The "largest fall within the year" is the deepest fall from the highest close earlier in the same calendar year, so it does not count a decline that started the year before.
• Dividend-adjusted figures are our estimates, not NSE's total return index.

Sources. Index closes, P/E and dividend yield from NSE Indices; calculations by WealthTicker.

This article is for education, not investment advice. Past returns do not predict future ones.