How different are the most popular ETFs? We measured 35 pairs

Fund names suggest more variety than fund holdings deliver. We took 35 pairs of the most popular US-listed equity ETFs, read every position from each fund's own SEC filing, and measured how much of one fund is also inside the other.

Three results stood out:

• SPY, VOO and IVV are, by holdings, one portfolio. Any two of them share 99.6% or more of their weight.
• VTI, the total market fund, is 88% S&P 500. It reports about 3,150 positions, and the 499 it shares with VOO carry 88.1% of its weight.
• The two most popular dividend funds are among the least alike. SCHD and VYM share 21.4%, even though VYM holds almost every stock SCHD does.

The full table is below, and every pair links to its own page with the stock-by-stock breakdown.

How the overlap is measured

For every company both funds hold, take the smaller of the two weights. Add those up. That sum is the overlap: the part of one fund that is also in the other, position by position. Two funds tracking the same index land near 100%. A fund made of different companies lands near 0%.

The holdings are every equity position each fund reported in its most recent public Form N-PORT filing with the SEC, not the top 10 a fact sheet shows. The filings are dated between 31 May and 31 July 2026. When the two funds in a pair filed in different months, prices moved in between, so the weights are a little further apart than they would be on the same day. One company held under two share classes (Alphabet's Class A and Class C) counts as one company, and so does a company the two filings spell differently.

The 35 pairs

Same index, three tickers

SPY, VOO and IVV all track the S&P 500, and their 30 June 2026 filings say so: between 99.6% and 99.8% of their weight is shared, and any two of them have the same 500 stocks in common. The remaining fraction of a percent is small differences in the weights each fund reported.

Whatever separates these three, it is not what they own. Issuer, structure, cost and trading volume are separate questions this measurement does not touch.

The total market is mostly the S&P 500

VTI reported about 3,150 stock positions. VOO reported 502. The overlap is still 88.1%, because the S&P 500 companies are most of the US market by value. Read in each direction:

• 99.6% of VOO's weight is in companies VTI also holds. VOO sits almost entirely inside VTI.
• 88.1% of VTI's weight is in companies VOO holds. The other 2,650 or so positions in VTI add up to under 12% of the fund.

The same holds for the iShares pair: IVV vs VTI overlaps by 88.1%. And two total market funds from different issuers, ITOT and VTI, overlap by 98.0%.

Growth funds: the same companies, weighted differently

QQQ overlaps VOO by 54.5%, which sounds like two different funds. But 95.4% of QQQ's weight is in companies that are also in the S&P 500. The difference is not which companies, it is how much of each: QQQ concentrates on the largest Nasdaq companies and gives them bigger weights.

Growth funds from different issuers resemble each other more than they resemble QQQ. MGK and VUG share 85.8%, SCHG and VUG 78.2%, IWF and VUG 77.9%. Against QQQ the same funds land between 55% and 60%.

QQQ vs VGT: about half

QQQ and VGT share 49.6% of their weight and 38 stocks. They are built differently: QQQ follows the 100 largest non-financial companies listed on Nasdaq, across sectors, while VGT holds technology companies on any US exchange, about 315 of them. Each holds a lot the other does not. Two technology funds, VGT and XLK, overlap by 80.0%.

Dividend funds are the least alike

This is the result that surprised us. Four of the most popular dividend ETFs, compared with SCHD:

SCHD and VYM are the clearest case. VYM holds 81 of SCHD's 99 stocks, and those 81 make up 99.1% of SCHD. By the count of names, SCHD looks like a subset of VYM. By weight, the two share 21.4%, because they size the same companies very differently. SCHD's largest positions in its May 2026 filing were Qualcomm (6.7%), Texas Instruments (5.9%) and UnitedHealth (5.1%). VYM's in July were Broadcom (7.4%), JPMorgan (3.8%) and Exxon Mobil (2.6%).

That is why the table has two columns. The count of common stocks tells you which companies appear in both. The overlap by weight tells you how much of your money is in the same place.

Two "mid-cap" funds with one stock in common

IJH and VO are both described as mid-cap funds. In their June 2026 filings they had one stock in common, and an overlap of 0.1%. They track different definitions of mid-sized. IJH follows the S&P MidCap 400, whose largest position was Twilio at 0.86%. VO follows the CRSP US Mid Cap index, which sits higher up the size range: its largest positions were Vertiv, Western Digital and Seagate. The small-cap pair IWM vs VB shows a milder version of the same thing, at 25.2%.

Growth and value split the market between them by design, so VUG and VTV share 3.7%.

International: the definition of "developed" matters

VEA and IEFA both hold developed markets outside the US, and overlap by 70.2%. The gap is mostly two countries. VEA's index includes Canada and South Korea, IEFA's does not: Samsung Electronics, SK hynix and Royal Bank of Canada are among VEA's largest positions and absent from IEFA. The broader pairs, IXUS vs VXUS at 84.8% and ACWI vs VT at 85.2%, are closer.

VT against VTI measures how American a world fund is: 98.0% of VTI is inside VT, and those US holdings are 62.2% of VT.

A note on dates: QQQ and QQQM

QQQ and QQQM track the same index, so they should read close to 100%. They read 92.0%, because their latest public filings are a month apart, QQQM's dated 31 May and QQQ's 30 June, and the index changed in between: the June list has six companies the May list does not, and the May list five the June list does not. Weights also moved with a month of prices.

This is the main limitation of every figure on this page. A filing is a snapshot. Funds report their full holdings to the SEC every quarter, and the public filings arrive about 60 days after the date they describe. The pair pages show which filing each number comes from, and they update as new filings appear.

What the overlap does and does not tell you

It tells you what two funds hold in common, measured from what the funds themselves reported. It does not say whether holding both makes sense, which one is better, or what either will return. Those depend on things this page cannot see, including why each fund is in a portfolio in the first place.

To check a pair that is not in the table, the ETF overlap tool compares any two to five of about 270 US-listed funds, with the same method. Each fund also has a holdings page with its full list, for example VOO, VTI and SCHD. For how overlap works across a global and a US fund, see ETF overlap: how much of your second fund did you already own?.

If you use these figures, a link to this page is all we ask.