TheDesperateTrader.com· How long halts really last, and how often halted stocks close higher
Exchanges publish halt notices. Almost nobody publishes what happens after one. We keep an archive of every US halt our scanner sees, with the halt code, the price at the halt and the resume time, so we can answer the two questions a trader actually asks when a stock they hold goes dark: how long will this last, and where does it reopen.
Based on 809 resolved halts across 610 symbols, 2026-07-20 to 2026-09-08. Updated continuously.
The two findings
A volatility pause is short. A news halt is not. The median volatility pause lasts 5 min. The median news-pending halt lasts 13.2 hours. If you are waiting to get back in, the halt code tells you whether that is minutes or overnight.
And news halts reopen badly. Only 21.0% of stocks halted for news closed above the price they halted at, with a median move of -17.6%. Even the 75th percentile is -2.5% - three quarters of them finished the session down. A volatility pause is closer to a coin flip at 43.9%.
Every halt code, measured
Halt code
Halts
Median length
Closed higher
Median move
Middle half
Volatility Pause (LULD)
442
5 min
43.9%
-3.2%
-22% to 14%
News Pending
163
13.2 hours
21.0%
-17.6%
-52% to -3%
Market-Wide Circuit Breaker
112
5 min
37.5%
-9.8%
-28% to 5%
Volatility Trading Pause (LULD)
74
5 min
52.8%
+1.3%
-13% to 19%
Volatility Trading Pause
16
5 min
54.5%
+1.5%
-13% to 14%
Method, and what these numbers are not
Medians, not averages. The averages here are useless: a stock halted at $1 that closes at $5 prints +400% and drags the mean for a whole code. One code averaged +135% while its median was +1.3%. Every figure above is a median or a percentile.
"Closed higher" means against the halt price - the last print before trading stopped - not against the previous close. For a volatility pause that price is often the extreme of a spike, so some of the drift back down is mechanical rather than a verdict on the stock.
This is our scanner's universe. It skews toward small and mid caps, because that is where halts happen. It is not a census of every US halt.
Same session only. The outcome is measured to that day's close. It says nothing about the next morning.
The window is short. 2026-07-20 to 2026-09-08. Codes with fewer than 15 halts are not shown at all, and the smaller rows above should be read as indicative rather than settled.
Watch halts as they happen
The archive behind this study is built from our live feed. The halt scanner shows every US stock halted right now with its code and resume time, and most-halted stocks ranks which names halt most often. If you want the mechanics rather than the data, start with what is a stock halt.
Free to cite with a link to this page. The numbers update as the archive grows, so quote the sample size and dates above alongside any figure.
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