Wealthy PotRSP vs VOO: The Same 500 Stocks, Weighted Two Different Ways
RSP and VOO own the same roughly 500 American companies. The difference is how much of each one you get. VOO weights every holding by market value, so its ten largest positions came to 37.8% of the fund. RSP gives every company the same weight, about 0.2% each, and resets that at every quarterly rebalance, so its ten largest came to about 3.2%. That single design choice drives everything else: RSP charges 0.20% a year against VOO's 0.03%, turns over 27% of its portfolio a year against VOO's 2%, and has beaten or trailed the S&P 500 depending entirely on which stretch of years you measure.
Table of Contents
The Short Answer
- Same companies, different doses. Both funds hold the S&P 500 constituents. S&P Dow Jones Indices builds the equal weight index from the identical list.
- Concentration is the whole story. Top ten constituents: 37.8% of the S&P 500 against 3.2% of its equal weight version, both as of 31 August 2026.
- One stock is 8.1% of VOO's index. No holding in RSP is allowed to start a quarter above about 0.2%.
- RSP costs 0.20% a year, VOO 0.03%. Equal weight has to trade to stay equal, so it is a more expensive thing to run.
- Turnover: 27% for RSP, 2% for VOO in each fund's most recent fiscal year, from their prospectuses.
- Technology is 37.9% of VOO and 14.7% of RSP. Equal weighting is a live sector bet whether or not you wanted one.
- Neither one wins every period. Over the ten years to 31 August 2026 VOO returned 15.34% a year and RSP 12.00%. Over 2026 to that same date, RSP returned 15.44% and VOO 13.11%.
RSP vs VOO Side by Side
| Feature | RSP | VOO |
|---|---|---|
| Full name | Invesco S&P 500® Equal Weight ETF | Vanguard S&P 500 ETF |
| Index tracked | S&P 500 Equal Weight Index | S&P 500 Index |
| Weighting | Equal weighted | Float-adjusted market cap weighted |
| Rebalance | Quarterly, in March, June, September and December | Quarterly, in March, June, September and December |
| Expense ratio | 0.20% | 0.03% |
| Portfolio turnover, latest fiscal year | 27% (year ended 30 Apr 2026) | 2% (year ended 31 Dec 2025) |
| Inception | 24 April 2003 | 7 September 2010 |
| Fund size | $96.55B (25 Sep 2026) | $1.8 trillion total fund, $1.0 trillion in the ETF share class (31 Aug 2026) |
| Holdings | 505 securities (25 Sep 2026) | 505 stocks (31 Aug 2026) |
| Replication | Full replication | Holds each stock at approximately its index weight |
| Listed on | NYSE Arca | NYSE Arca |
Holding counts sit slightly above 500 in both funds because a handful of companies have more than one class of shares in the index, and because index membership changes between measurement dates. S&P Dow Jones Indices listed 503 constituents in both the S&P 500 and its equal weight version on 31 August 2026.
The Concentration Gap
This is the number to take away from the page. Both funds are built from the same list of companies, and S&P Dow Jones Indices publishes the concentration of each version on the same day.
| As of 31 August 2026 | S&P 500 (VOO) | S&P 500 Equal Weight (RSP) |
|---|---|---|
| Number of constituents | 503 | 503 |
| Weight of the top 10 | 37.8% | 3.2% |
| Weight of the largest single constituent | 8.1% | 0.6% |
| Largest constituent market cap | $5.35 trillion | $5.35 trillion |
| Median constituent market cap | $44.7 billion | $44.7 billion |
Put plainly: buy VOO and roughly thirty-eight cents of every dollar goes to ten companies. Buy RSP and about three cents does. S&P Dow Jones Indices describes its own construction in one sentence: the equal weight index "includes the same constituents as the capitalization weighted S&P 500, but each company in the S&P 500 EWI is allocated a fixed weight, or 0.2% of the index total at each quarterly rebalance."
We checked that against what each fund actually held. Vanguard's own Form N-PORT filing for 30 June 2026 shows NVIDIA at 7.51% of net assets and Apple at 6.59%, with the ten largest positions summing to 36.40%. Counting Alphabet's two share classes as one company, the ten largest companies came to 37.87%. Invesco's N-PORT filing for 30 April 2026 shows RSP's ten largest equity positions summing to 3.16%, the biggest of them 0.38%. On Invesco's live holdings page on 25 September 2026, days after a quarterly rebalance had reset the portfolio, the largest position was 0.30%.
Why the equal weight figure moves between about 2.5% and 3.2%: weights are reset toward 0.2% four times a year, then drift for three months as winners grow and losers shrink. Measure right after a rebalance and the top ten look smallest. Measure at the end of a quarter and they look largest. Neither is wrong, and both are far from 37.8%.
Vanguard is not hiding this. Its VOO prospectus warns that the fund "may become nondiversified, as defined under the Investment Company Act of 1940, solely as a result of tracking an index." The concentration is not a decision Vanguard made. It is what the market did, faithfully copied.
The Sector Tilt You Did Not Choose
Concentration at the company level becomes a tilt at the sector level. Because the biggest companies in the United States are currently technology companies, market cap weighting pours money into that sector, and equal weighting quietly pulls it out.
| Sector | VOO | RSP | RSP minus VOO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Information technology | 37.90% | 14.70% | -23.2 pp |
| Financials | 12.30% | 15.94% | +3.6 pp |
| Communication services | 9.50% | 3.93% | -5.6 pp |
| Health care | 9.30% | 13.12% | +3.8 pp |
| Consumer discretionary | 9.10% | 9.18% | +0.1 pp |
| Industrials | 8.30% | 16.03% | +7.7 pp |
| Consumer staples | 4.50% | 6.53% | +2.0 pp |
| Energy | 3.50% | 4.36% | +0.9 pp |
| Utilities | 2.00% | 5.59% | +3.6 pp |
| Materials | 1.80% | 5.12% | +3.3 pp |
| Real estate | 1.80% | 5.49% | +3.7 pp |
RSP's largest sector is industrials at 16.03%, roughly double VOO's 8.30%, and its smallest is communication services at 3.93%, less than half VOO's 9.50%. Equal weight does not have an opinion about technology. It simply owns as many dollars of the smallest technology company in the index as it owns of the largest one, and the index contains more industrial and financial companies than it does giant technology ones.
That is worth sitting with before you buy either fund. If you already hold a technology-heavy fund such as the Nasdaq-100, VOO stacks more of the same names on top of it, which is the point we make in QQQ vs VOO. RSP does the opposite.
Cost, Turnover and Tax
Equal weight is not free, and the reason is mechanical. A market cap weighted fund barely has to trade: when a stock rises, its weight rises by itself and the fund is still correctly weighted. An equal weight fund has to sell what went up and buy what went down, four times a year, to get every position back to the same size. That trading costs money.
| RSP | VOO | |
|---|---|---|
| Management fee | 0.20% | 0.02% |
| Other expenses | None | 0.01% |
| Total annual fund operating expenses | 0.20% | 0.03% |
| Cost on $10,000 after 1 year | $20 | $3 |
| Cost on $10,000 after 10 years | $255 | $39 |
| Portfolio turnover, latest fiscal year | 27% | 2% |
| Turnover, five most recent fiscal years | 27%, 24%, 21%, 21%, 18% | 2% in each of the five years |
RSP costs about 6.7 times what VOO costs, and on the issuers' own illustration the ten-year gap on $10,000 is $216. That is the visible cost. The turnover line is the invisible one: RSP replaced 27% of its portfolio in its last fiscal year against VOO's 2%, more than ten times as much trading. Those trading costs are not inside the expense ratio. Invesco's prospectus says so directly, warning that transaction costs "are not reflected in Total Annual Fund Operating Expenses or in the example" and "may affect the Fund's performance."
On tax, both funds are ETFs and both use in-kind creation and redemption, which is why capital gains distributions are rare for either. RSP's five most recent fiscal years, as printed in its August 2026 prospectus, show distributions to shareholders from net investment income only, with no realized capital gains distributed. Higher turnover raises the risk of taxable distributions in principle; in RSP's case it has not produced one in those five years. For the mechanics behind that, see ETF vs index fund.
Performance Depends on the Window
Here is the honest part, and the part most comparisons get wrong by choosing a flattering start date. We are using each issuer's own standardized returns, over identical periods, on the same date.
| Annualised, to 31 Aug 2026 | RSP | VOO | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 year to date | 15.44% | 13.11% | RSP |
| 1 year | 18.25% | 20.34% | VOO |
| 3 years | 15.43% | 21.01% | VOO |
| 5 years | 8.80% | 12.75% | VOO |
| 10 years | 12.00% | 15.34% | VOO |
Say it plainly: over the last decade, cap weighting won, and it was not close. VOO returned 15.34% a year against RSP's 12.00%, a gap of 3.3 percentage points a year compounded over ten years. The reason is exactly the concentration described above. A handful of very large companies did most of the work, VOO owned them in size, and RSP deliberately capped its exposure to each of them at about 0.2%.
The prospectuses tell the same story for the calendar decade to the end of 2025, and they are useful because each fund quotes both indexes.
| Annualised, periods ended 31 Dec 2025 | 1 year | 5 years | 10 years |
|---|---|---|---|
| RSP, return before taxes | 11.25% | 10.25% | 11.46% |
| VOO, return before taxes, based on NAV | 17.84% | 14.38% | 14.78% |
| S&P 500 Equal Weight Index, no fees | 11.43% | 10.48% | 11.71% |
| S&P 500 Index, no fees | 17.88% | 14.42% | 14.82% |
Now the counterweight, from the same Invesco page. Measured since RSP launched on 24 April 2003, through 31 August 2026:
- S&P 500 Equal Weight Index: 11.81% a year.
- S&P 500 Index: 11.65% a year.
- RSP, the fund itself: 11.39% a year.
Read those three lines carefully, because they are the most interesting numbers on this page. Over twenty-three years, equal weighting the S&P 500 beat the S&P 500, by 0.16 percentage points a year. And the investor did not get that win: after the fund's 0.20% fee and the cost of all that rebalancing, RSP returned 11.39%, which is less than the plain S&P 500 managed. The strategy was right and the implementation charged more than the edge was worth.
That gap of 0.42 percentage points a year between RSP and its own index is wider than the 0.20% expense ratio. Invesco's prospectus points to the likely reason without quantifying it, noting the fund "incurs costs in buying and selling securities, especially when rebalancing the Fund's securities holdings to reflect changes in the Underlying Index." We have not seen an attribution that splits that gap into fee and trading cost, so we are not going to invent one.
The 2026 year-to-date row in the first table is the live reminder that this can turn. Through 31 August 2026 RSP was ahead of VOO by 2.3 percentage points. One eight-month stretch proves nothing about the next decade, which is the point: whichever fund you pick, you are making a bet on whether the biggest companies keep leading.
This is educational information, not personalized investment advice. Past performance does not guarantee future results, and all investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal. Verify current figures with the fund issuer and consider speaking with a licensed financial professional before investing.
Which One Fits You
- Choose VOO if you want the benchmark itself at the lowest cost available, and you accept that its concentration rises and falls with whatever the market is doing. It is the default core holding for a reason, and at 0.03% almost nothing competes on price.
- Choose RSP if the 37.8% top-ten weight is the thing keeping you up, and you are willing to pay 0.20% a year plus the cost of quarterly rebalancing to hold the same companies in even doses. Understand that you are also buying a live tilt toward industrials, financials, utilities and real estate.
- Do not hold both as your only two funds. They contain the same companies. Owning both mostly moves your effective weighting somewhere between the two, which you could do more cheaply by holding VOO and a separate mid-cap or small-cap fund.
- If what you actually want is more companies, not the same companies in different sizes, a total market fund is the cleaner step. That comparison is in VTI vs VOO, and a wider large-cap index is covered in SCHX vs VOO.
- In a 401(k), equal weight is rarely offered while an S&P 500 fund almost always is. That constraint usually settles the question on its own.
One practical warning for taxable accounts: RSP and VOO track different indexes, which many investors treat as enough separation for a tax-loss harvest. The IRS has never defined "substantially identical" for funds, and these two hold the same underlying companies, which makes the pair less comfortable than most. Get tax advice before using them that way.
Sources & Methodology
Every figure on this page was read from the primary source named below on 27 September 2026. No secondary summary, fund-rating site or comparison blog was used for any number.
- Invesco Exchange-Traded Fund Trust prospectus, dated 28 August 2026, filed with the SEC: RSP's 0.20% expense ratio, the $20 / $64 / $113 / $255 cost example, the 27% portfolio turnover, the 24 April 2003 inception date, the five years of Financial Highlights, and the returns to 31 December 2025.
- Invesco RSP fund page: fund size of $96.55B and holdings detail as of 25 September 2026, sector allocation and standardized returns as of 31 August 2026.
- Vanguard Index Funds prospectus, dated 28 April 2026, filed with the SEC: VOO's 0.03% expense ratio, the $3 / $10 / $17 / $39 cost example, the 2% portfolio turnover, the 7 September 2010 inception date, and the returns to 31 December 2025.
- Vanguard VOO fund page: net assets, sector exposures and month-end returns as of 31 August 2026.
- S&P Dow Jones Indices, S&P 500 and S&P 500 Equal Weight Index: constituent counts, weighting method, quarterly rebalance schedule, and the top-ten and largest-constituent weights, all stamped as of 31 August 2026.
- SEC Form N-PORT for each fund, used to check the concentration figures against what the funds actually held: Vanguard 500 Index Fund as of 30 June 2026 and Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF as of 30 April 2026. The top-ten sums quoted from those filings are our own addition of the issuers' reported position weights.
Two limits worth stating. First, the two N-PORT dates cannot be aligned, because VOO's fiscal year ends in December and RSP's ends in April; wherever this page needs one date for both funds it uses the issuers' or S&P's 31 August 2026 figures. Second, Vanguard's own "holding details" module returned "this information is temporarily unavailable" on every attempt on 27 September 2026, so VOO's top-ten weight here comes from S&P Dow Jones Indices and from Vanguard's SEC filing rather than from that module.
This article is general information about two investment products and is not investment, tax or legal advice. Fund figures change daily and the figures above are dated; confirm current data with the issuer before you invest. All investing carries the risk of loss.
FAQ: RSP vs VOO
Is RSP better than VOO?
Neither is better in the abstract. VOO costs 0.03% and gives you the market's own weighting, with 37.8% of the index in ten companies. RSP costs 0.20% and holds those same companies in near-equal doses, about 0.2% each. Over the ten years to 31 August 2026 VOO returned 15.34% a year and RSP 12.00%. Over 2026 to that date the order reversed. Your answer depends on whether you want to reduce the concentration and are willing to pay for it.
Do RSP and VOO hold the same stocks?
Yes. S&P Dow Jones Indices builds the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index from the identical constituents as the S&P 500. Both indexes held 503 constituents on 31 August 2026. Only the weights differ.
Why is RSP more expensive than VOO?
Because keeping every position the same size takes trading. RSP rebalances quarterly and replaced 27% of its portfolio in its last fiscal year, while VOO replaced 2%. A market cap weighted fund stays correctly weighted on its own as prices move, so it barely has to trade. That difference shows up in the 0.20% versus 0.03% expense ratios and in transaction costs that sit outside the expense ratio entirely.
How concentrated is VOO really?
On 31 August 2026 the S&P 500's ten largest constituents were 37.8% of the index and the single largest was 8.1%. Vanguard's own Form N-PORT for 30 June 2026 shows NVIDIA at 7.51% and Apple at 6.59% of the fund, with the ten largest positions summing to 36.40%.
Does equal weight beat the S&P 500 over the long run?
The index has, narrowly. From RSP's launch on 24 April 2003 to 31 August 2026 the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index returned 11.81% a year against the S&P 500's 11.65%. The fund did not keep that edge: RSP itself returned 11.39% a year over the same stretch, because fees and rebalancing costs were larger than the 0.16 percentage point advantage. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
Is RSP more diversified than VOO?
By weight, considerably. Its top ten were 3.2% of the index against VOO's 37.8% on the same date. By company count they are the same, at roughly 500 large American businesses. RSP is not more diversified by sector in every direction: it holds 16.03% industrials against VOO's 8.30%, and 3.93% communication services against VOO's 9.50%.
Is RSP a small-cap or mid-cap fund?
No. Every holding is an S&P 500 company, and S&P Dow Jones Indices put the smallest constituent's market value at about $5.9 billion on 31 August 2026. Equal weighting does tilt the money further down the size ladder: on that date Invesco reported an average market cap of $141.14 billion for RSP while Vanguard reported a median market cap of $436.0 billion for VOO. Those are two different statistics and are not directly comparable, but the direction is unmistakable.
Can I hold both RSP and VOO?
You can, but the two contain the same companies, so holding both just lands your weighting somewhere between market cap and equal. If you want a middle ground you can get it more cheaply by holding VOO and adding a separate mid-cap or small-cap fund, which also brings in companies neither of these owns.
How often does RSP rebalance?
Quarterly, in March, June, September and December, matching its index. Each rebalance resets every company toward 0.2% of the index. Between rebalances the weights drift, which is why RSP's top-ten weight measured just after a rebalance is nearer 2.5% and measured at a quarter end is nearer 3.2%.
Cite This Page
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"RSP vs VOO: The Same 500 Stocks, Weighted Two Different Ways." Wealthy Pot, 2026. https://wealthypot.com/rsp-vs-voo/
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