The COVID recession: dates, timeline and how it compares with 2008

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The COVID recession lasted two months, from a business-cycle peak in February 2020 to a trough in April 2020, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). That makes it the shortest US recession on record, and one of the sharpest: unemployment jumped from 3.5% in February 2020 to 14.8% in April 2020.

Who decided the dates of the COVID recession?

In the United States, recessions are dated by the NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee, a committee of economists. It defines a recession as "a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months." The definition does not mention two quarters of falling GDP. The committee looks at monthly measures such as payroll employment, household employment, real personal income less transfers and real consumer spending, as well as quarterly real GDP and real gross domestic income. Our page on what a recession is explains the criteria in more detail.

On July 19, 2021, the committee announced that a trough in monthly economic activity occurred in April 2020 and that the previous peak was in February 2020. By the NBER's convention, a recession starts in the month after the peak and ends in the month of the trough, so the recession lasted two months. The previous shortest recession, in the first half of 1980, lasted six months.

The committee explained why such a brief decline still counted. It weighs depth, duration and diffusion (how widely the downturn spreads), and it pointed to the very large fall in employment and production and its broad reach across the whole economy.

What happened to jobs and output?

The labor market showed the shock most clearly. The unemployment rate, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, rose from 4.4% in March 2020 to 14.8% in April 2020, the highest since the series began in 1948. It was 13.2% in May, 6.7% by December 2020 and 3.9% by December 2021. It reached 3.4% in April 2023.

Output fell almost as fast. In current Bureau of Economic Analysis data, real GDP in the second quarter of 2020 was 7.9% below the first quarter, a fall of 28.0% at an annualized rate (the way US quarterly growth is usually reported). From the fourth quarter of 2019 to the second quarter of 2020, real GDP fell 9.1%. The third quarter of 2020 brought a rebound at a 34.9% annualized rate, and real GDP was back above its late-2019 level in the first quarter of 2021.

COVID recession timeline

The end of a recession does not mean the economy is back to normal. The NBER notes that economic activity is typically below normal in the early stages of an expansion. In 2020 the trough came in April, while unemployment was still 11.0% in June and 10.2% in July 2020.

How does the COVID recession compare with 2007-09?

The two recessions were close to opposites. The 2007-09 recession, which followed the 2008 financial crisis, ran from a peak in December 2007 to a trough in June 2009: 18 months, longer than the 16-month recessions of 1973-75 and 1981-82 (the contraction of 1929-33 lasted 43 months). The COVID recession was far deeper in its first weeks and far shorter overall.

Two differences in cause help explain the shape. In 2007-09 the shock came from inside the financial system, and the recovery was slow. In 2020 the shock came from outside: activity was restricted to slow the spread of the virus, and fiscal and monetary support arrived within weeks. Once restrictions eased, spending came back quickly. Our page on recession vs depression covers how far deeper and longer downturns can go.

What came after the COVID recession?

The fast recovery in demand ran into limits on supply. Global supply chains came under record strain in 2021, and consumer prices rose at the fastest pace in four decades in 2022. Those effects are covered in our pages on the supply chain crisis and inflation after COVID. The unemployment rate was 4.2% in September 2026, the latest month in the BLS data.

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