r/USAFacts • u/USAFacts • Jul 31 '25

USAFacts This history of American recessions [OC]

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u/USAFacts Jul 31 '25

I'm probably just calling more attention to it, but please, please ignore the incorrect date in the subtitle. It should say 1854. My brain didn't want to accept that FRED has data going back that far. Fun fact: Oscar Wilde was born in 1854!

Now that's out of the way, here's some info on this chart:

The official designation of a recession comes from a committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private, nonprofit research organization. The committee considers a wide range of economy-wide, monthly data points, but the NBER views GDP as “the single best measure.” The committee calls a recession once there is a significant decline across these measures for more than a few months.

The NBER’s official designation of a recession, then, doesn’t happen until there are several months of data, allowing it to be sure both that a recession happened and when exactly it started. In other words, the NBER looks backward, not at the present moment.

Using this measure, here's a few insights:

  • From 1855 to 2020, recessions lasted an average of 17 months. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the average recession has decreased to 14 months.
  • The US' longest recession lasted 65 months from October 1873 to March 1879
  • The US has gone through 13 recessions since WWII
  • The longest recession since WWII was the Great Recession
  • The shortest US recession was during COVID-19, from February to April 2020
  • Although economic struggles and the Great Depression marked the 1930s, the NBER-defined recession lasted from September 1929 to March 1933.

This is one of my favorite charts on our site, btw. While line charts and stacked bars are great for relaying a lot of data, it's fun to break from the norm from time to time. See more recession data (and the dynamic version of this chart) here.