Blog · 29 Oct 2026 · By BitcoinSaving
DCA vs lump sum: which actually won?
The honest answer is that it depends on the year you started, and the gap is big in both directions. So we ran the same test for every January start since 2016: $5,200 put in all at once, against the same $5,200 spread as $100 a week for a year. Both piles were valued two years after the start, on the daily price history our calculator uses (Coinbase daily prices, via btcdollarcostaverage.com).
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| Start | Lump sum after 2 years | DCA after 2 years | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 2016 | $160,896 | $132,154 | Lump sum by 22% |
| Jan 2017 | $20,037 | $10,095 | Lump sum by 98% |
| Jan 2018 | $2,768 | $5,422 | DCA by 96% |
| Jan 2019 | $39,975 | $24,522 | Lump sum by 63% |
| Jan 2020 | $34,597 | $24,990 | Lump sum by 38% |
| Jan 2021 | $2,937 | $1,913 | Lump sum by 54% |
| Jan 2022 | $4,817 | $9,159 | DCA by 90% |
| Jan 2023 | $29,545 | $17,853 | Lump sum by 65% |
| Jan 2024 | $10,435 | $7,355 | Lump sum by 42% |
Each plan invested exactly $5,200. Recomputed by BitcoinSaving on 29 Oct 2026.
Read the table the other way round
Lump sum won seven of the nine starts, which is what you would expect: an asset that mostly rises rewards getting in early. But look at when DCA won. January 2018 opened a year in which Bitcoin fell about 70 percent; the weekly buyer spent that year purchasing the fall, while the lump sum sat underwater for most of the two years. January 2022 was the same shape. And the single worst day to start in the whole dataset, 10 November 2021, near the all-time high, makes the point sharpest: the $5,200 lump sum was worth $2,990 two years later and about $6,553 today, while the weekly plan from the same day was worth $6,591 at two years and about $14,446 today. DCA is not a return maximizer. It is insurance against your own start date.
The January 2021 row deserves a footnote, because it looks like it breaks the pattern: DCA lost that one too, and lost more. The lump sum bought on 1 January at about $29,000, before the run. The weekly plan kept buying all the way up to $69,000 and back down, and the two-year mark landed at the bottom of the bear market. Spreading buys helps when the price falls after you start. When it rockets first and crashes later, the spread buyer chased it up.
What this does not say
Two years is a short window, fees and taxes are ignored, and past windows are not promises. What the table does show is the actual trade: lump sum has the higher ceiling and the deeper regret, DCA has the flatter distribution of outcomes. Most people are not choosing between two spreadsheets. They are choosing between a plan they will panic out of and a plan small and automatic enough to still be running in year three. The full side-by-side tool is on our lump sum vs DCA page; this article is its long version.
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