The Great Depression is usually said to have lasted about 10 years, from 1929 to around 1939, with full recovery in the U.S. only coming on the eve of World War II.

  • Most historians date its start to 1929, marked by the Wall Street Crash and the onset of a deep economic downturn.
  • Globally, the downturn and its effects continued through the 1930s, easing in many countries only in the late 1930s.
  • In the United States, some institutions describe it as lasting “more than a decade,” from 1929 until U.S. mobilization for World War II around 1941, when war production finally ended mass unemployment.

So, in everyday terms, when people ask “how long was the Great Depression,” the standard answer is roughly a decade, spanning most of the 1930s.