What the price did around each halving

A halving-window return is the change in price between the halving date and a fixed number of months afterwards. The start price is the closing price on the halving date itself; the end price is the closing price on the date that falls the stated number of months later. The return is the percentage change between those two closes. Nothing is annualised, nothing is interpolated, and no window is measured from a different anchor than any other.

The definition matters because the same phrase is used loosely in market commentary. A "twelve-month post-halving return" can mean the return from the halving date, from the start of the halving month, or from the day the subsidy change was first anticipated. Those three conventions produce three different numbers from the same price series. This page uses the halving date, and states it here so the figures below can be checked against the underlying record.

The completed windows show a wide range of outcomes, and the range is the finding. Some halvings were followed by large gains over twelve months; others were followed by losses over the same horizon. A reader looking for a reliable post-halving pattern will not find one in this table, because the table reports what happened rather than what the pattern requires. The supply change is real and knowable in advance; the price response is neither.

There is also a sample-size problem that no amount of careful measurement can fix. Bitcoin has had four halvings. Four observations cannot distinguish a genuine relationship between the subsidy change and the price from a coincidence, particularly when the market around each halving was materially different from the one before it. The 2012 halving occurred in a market with no regulated venues; the 2024 halving occurred with spot exchange-traded funds already trading. Treating those as four draws from the same process is a strong assumption.

The most useful way to read the table is as a set of reference points rather than a rule. If a reader wants to know what a particular halving was followed by, the answer is here, with the window stated and the truncation flagged. If a reader wants to know what the next halving will be followed by, the honest answer is that the record does not say. The halving history page covers the schedule itself, and the halving-window returns page presents the same windows with their annualised figures.