This paper studies the asymptotic growth and decay properties of solutions of the stochastic pantograph equation with multiplicative noise. We give sufficient conditions on the parameters for solutions to grow at a polynomial rate in p-th mean and in the almost sure sense. Under stronger conditions the solutions decay to zero with a polynomial rate in p-th mean and in the almost sure sense. When polynomial bounds cannot be achieved, we show for a different set of parameters that exponential growth bounds of solutions in p-th mean and an almost sure sense can be obtained. Analogous results are established for pantograph equations with several delays, and for general finite dimensional equations.