VOO ETF: Fees, Holdings, Drawdowns and How It Compares With SPY

Michael Whitman · Trading since 2017, full-time since 2020 · YouTube creator, 137K subscribers · Published 2026-11-07

VOO is the ticker of the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF. People search for it as “VOO stock” because it trades like one, but each share is a slice of about 500 companies, and what those companies weigh inside the fund has shifted a lot in a few years.

Quote pages give today’s price, the fee and today’s top ten. This page goes further back: every quarterly holdings report Vanguard has filed with the SEC since 2019, the fund’s record against SPY and IVV since 2010, and every fall of 15% or more on the way.

VOO at a glance: Vanguard’s S&P 500 ETF

VOO closed 5.61% below its record on November 6, 2026, after a 4.37% drop on November 5. Its price was up 7.79% for 2026 at that point.

How it works: one fund, several doors

VOO is not a separate fund. Vanguard’s April 28, 2026 summary prospectus calls it “an exchange-traded share class of Vanguard 500 Index Fund.” The same pool of stocks also sits behind Vanguard’s mutual fund shares, which is why the fund’s net assets, $1.67 trillion at June 30, 2026, are larger than VOO’s own.

The fund copies the index rather than picking stocks. It “attempts to replicate the Target Index” by holding each S&P 500 stock “in approximately the same proportion as its weighting.” The S&P 500 is chosen by a committee and weighted by company size, so the fund ends up holding the biggest companies in the biggest amounts.

Vanguard patented the share-class design. Patent US6879964 was filed March 7, 2001 by The Vanguard Group and granted April 12, 2005. It covers a fund that issues “a class of conventional shares and a class of exchange-traded shares in the same fund.” Google Patents lists its adjusted expiration as May 16, 2023, and Vanguard’s 2014 annual report lists it first among six US patent numbers printed beside its ETF Shares.

The price history has a split in it. Vanguard did a one-for-two reverse split, so VOO traded on a split-adjusted basis from October 24, 2013; old prices on chart sites are doubled to match today’s shares.

The 0.03% fee, and VOO against SPY and IVV

The fee is 0.03%: 0.02% management and 0.01% other expenses. On $10,000 that is $3 a year, taken inside the fund. SPY’s gross expense ratio was 0.0945% on State Street’s page on November 7, 2026, or $9.45 on $10,000, and iShares listed IVV at 0.03%.

All three hold the same index, so the record is close. From VOO’s first close on September 9, 2010 to November 6, 2026, with every dividend reinvested on its ex-date, $10,000 grew to:

VOO finished ahead of SPY in 13 of the 15 full calendar years from 2011 to 2025 and behind in 2020 (by 0.08 points) and 2022 (by 0.01). The closest year was 2011, when VOO’s lead was 0.006 points. The median yearly gap was 0.07 points, about the size of the fee difference.

SPY is a unit investment trust, as State Street’s page states. A tracking error gap this size is about what the fee difference predicts.

QQQ is in the table for scale, not as a twin. It holds the Nasdaq-100 and moved more: its yearly volatility over the same span was 20.7% against VOO’s 17.0%, with a 0.928 correlation of daily returns.

The original data: concentration in 28 Vanguard filings

Concentration, read from 28 SEC filings. Every quarter Vanguard files Form NPORT-P listing each holding of Vanguard 500 Index Fund with its share of net assets. We read all 28 public filings, from September 30, 2019 to June 30, 2026, added share classes of the same company together (Alphabet’s two), and summed the ten largest companies.

The ten largest went from under a quarter of the fund to about two fifths in six years. In September 2019 the list still held Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble and Exxon Mobil. On June 30, 2026 it was NVIDIA 7.51%, Apple 6.59%, Alphabet 5.84%, Microsoft 4.30%, Amazon 3.62%, Broadcom 2.77%, Micron 2.02%, Meta 1.92%, Tesla 1.84% and Eli Lilly 1.47%.

The full table is in the quarterly CSV.

A fund of 503 companies can still lean hard on a few. That is the trade-off of weighting by size, and concentration risk explains it in general. The point specific to VOO is that the lean is measurable, it changes, and the quote pages show only today’s number.

VOO’s falls of 15% or more since 2010, and its dividend record

Every fall of 15% or more since 2010. Measured on the value with dividends reinvested, from a prior high to the lowest close before that high was regained:

Depth and length did not go together. The 2020 fall was the deepest at 34.01% and was won back in under six months. The 2022 fall was shallower at 24.53% but took 23 months, the longest wait on this list. The spring 2025 fall, at 18.69%, was regained 11 weeks after its April 8 low.

Dividends roughly tripled per share. With prices adjusted for the 2013 split, VOO paid $2.372 a share in 2011, $4.737 in 2018 and $7.068 in 2025. Yahoo’s record is missing one 2014 payout; Vanguard’s 2014 annual report gives $3.490 for that year, so the missing December payout was $1.026 and we added it on December 18, 2014, the ex-date third-party histories list (a few days either way moves the end value by under $25).

With that fill, the record matches Vanguard’s. Our per-share totals match the ETF Shares dividends in Vanguard’s annual reports for every year from 2010 to 2025, to within a tenth of a cent.

Two checks against Vanguard’s own figures. Our 2025 return of 17.82% matches the prospectus return based on market price for 2025 exactly, and our 2014 return of 13.55% sits beside the 13.63% that Vanguard’s 2014 annual report shows at net asset value. The daily series is in the total-return CSV.

A worked example: $10,000 in VOO from the end of 2021

Take $10,000 bought at the December 31, 2021 close of $436.57, about 22.9 shares, with dividends reinvested.

1. By October 12, 2022 it was worth $7,593.23, a loss of $2,406.77 on paper, with the dividends already folded in.
2. It was back above $10,000 on December 11, 2023, almost two years after the purchase.
3. On November 6, 2026 it was worth $16,547.23.

The fee over that span was about $3 a year per $10,000, too small to see in the result. The 2022 fall was not small. Someone who sold in October 2022 locked in the $2,406.77; someone who held got the rest of the path. For a plain one-, five- and ten-year look at $1,000 in an S&P 500 fund, see if you invested $1,000 in the S&P 500.

VOO’s four payouts a year and the tax bill

VOO pays four times a year. The four payouts with ex-dates in the 12 months to November 6, 2026 came to $7.428 a share, 1.10% of the closing price. The yield is what the companies pay out, less the fee, not a fixed rate, and it falls when prices rise faster than dividends.

In a taxable account the payouts are taxed in the year they are paid, reinvested or not, and selling shares at a gain is taxed separately. Dividend tax covers the qualified and ordinary rates.

When it fails: ten companies, large caps only, short time frames

When the largest companies fall together. With 37.87% of the fund in ten companies and 19.94% in just three, a bad stretch for a few large technology names now moves VOO more than it did in 2019. On November 5, 2026 VOO lost 4.37% in a single session.

When “the market” is taken to mean everything. VOO holds large US companies only. No small companies, no bonds, nothing outside the United States. VOO vs VTI measures how much of the total market it misses.

When the time frame is short. The 2022 fall took 23 months to recover with dividends counted, and the 2020 fall took almost six months. A fund that tracks the index cannot avoid the index’s falls; the prospectus warns its price “may fluctuate, potentially within a wide range.”

When the fee is treated as the whole story. At 0.03% VOO is cheap, but the 0.07-point yearly edge over SPY is small next to a 24.53% fall. The choice between S&P 500 funds matters far less than the decision to own the index at all.

Questions people ask

Is VOO a stock?

No. It is an ETF that trades on NYSE Arca like a stock, and each share is a slice of Vanguard 500 Index Fund, which held 503 companies on June 30, 2026.

What is the difference between VOO and SPY?

Both track the S&P 500. VOO is a share class of a Vanguard fund and charges 0.03%; SPY is a unit investment trust charging 0.0945%. From September 9, 2010 to November 6, 2026 VOO turned $10,000 into $89,236 and SPY into $88,329, dividends reinvested.

How much does VOO pay in dividends?

$7.428 a share over the 12 months to November 6, 2026, in four payouts, or 1.10% of that day’s $675.99 close.

Has VOO ever lost money over a year?

Yes. Its calendar-year total return was -18.19% in 2022 and -4.50% in 2018, and from peak to low it fell 34.01% in early 2020.

Related

The index behind the fund, and its long record, is on the S&P 500 page. How a fee like 0.03% compounds against pricier funds is worked out in expense ratio, and index funds sets out how to choose one. For the overlap with Vanguard’s total-market ETF, read VOO vs VTI, and for how a fall is measured, drawdown. The Nasdaq-100 fund it is often weighed against has its own page, QQQ ETF.

This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.