About & Methodology

TopDivs publishes dividend data for US-listed stocks and exchange-traded funds: rankings, per-company profiles, upcoming ex-dividend dates and income calculators. It exists to answer factual questions — what a company pays, how often, whether it has ever cut — accurately and quickly.

It is not a research service and does not make recommendations. Nothing on this site tells you what to buy or sell, and no figure here should be the sole basis for an investment decision.

Securities listed on the NYSE, NASDAQ and AMEX that currently pay a dividend. Companies listed in Canada, Australia, India, the United Kingdom or elsewhere are not included, even where they also trade in the US as depositary receipts.

Common stock and exchange-traded funds are covered. Mutual funds are excluded: their distributions are largely realised capital gains rather than dividend income, and including them would put phantom yields at the top of every ranking. Exchange-traded notes and preferred series are also excluded from rankings — they pay interest or a fixed coupon rather than a dividend, and one issuer can have several series that would otherwise occupy consecutive rows.

Market and dividend data is provided by Financial Modeling Prep. Prices and company details refresh daily. Dividend payment history is refreshed when a company actually pays, rather than on a fixed loop, so a company’s record updates within a day of a new payment going ex. The ex-dividend calendar refreshes three times a day.

Every data page displays the date its figures were collected. If that date looks stale, the figures are stale — we would rather show you the age of the data than imply a freshness we cannot guarantee.

Yield is the total dividends paid per share over the trailing twelve months, divided by the latest closing price. It describes what a company has actually paid, not what it is expected to pay.

Three exclusions matter, and each exists because including them produced a visibly wrong answer:

• Special and one-off distributions are excluded. They do not recur, so counting them overstates the income a new investor can expect. One company on this list distributed a large liquidating payment against a collapsed share price, which would have appeared as a yield above 900%.
• Companies that have stopped paying are treated as non-payers. If no regular dividend has gone ex in fifteen months, the yield is zero rather than a stale figure. Without this, a company whose last payment was in 2007 still showed a headline yield.
• Payments far out of line with a company’s own norm are ignored. Distribution labels cannot always be trusted — one company paid a large one-off sum recorded as a routine quarterly dividend. A payment several times the size of that company’s typical one is treated as non-recurring regardless of how it is labelled.

We also refuse to publish a trailing twelve-month yield without twelve months of evidence behind it. A company whose entire history is two payments made days apart has no trailing year to measure, so no yield is shown rather than an invented one.

One adjustment is worth stating plainly. A rolling twelve-month window does not reliably capture twelve monthly payments. Whether it catches eleven or twelve depends on where today falls against the payment dates, and payment records sometimes have genuine gaps — one large monthly REIT has a 59-day hole between two consecutive payments, so one is simply absent from the record. Left uncorrected this understated roughly a quarter of monthly payers and most weekly payers, by around 8% and 14% respectively.

Where the window holds fewer payments than a company’s schedule implies, the figure is therefore annualised from the typical payment rather than summed from whatever fell inside the window. That makes it an indicated annual rate for those companies rather than a strict historical total. Quarterly payers are unaffected and are left exactly as recorded, because a quarter is long enough that the window edge almost never bites — it applied to 2 of 2,425 of them.

The annual figure on each company page is the typical payment that year multiplied by the number of payments, not a straight sum of the records. A sum is destroyed by a single bad entry: one duplicated payment in a company’s history was enough to make a company with a sixty-year record of increases appear to have cut its dividend. The median-based figure is unaffected by that.

Amounts are adjusted for share splits, so a split does not read as a cut. The current calendar year is excluded from history charts because it is incomplete and would always appear as a final-year decline.

The trade-off: a cut announced late in a year may not appear until the following year, because most of that year’s payments were still at the old rate. We accept reporting a real cut late over inventing one that never happened.

These are the figures we would treat with the most caution:

• Consecutive years of dividend growth is approximate. It is derived from payment history, and that history is not deep enough for some companies — several long-standing payers have records that begin in the 1980s. Use it to compare companies, not as a certified streak.
• Companies in liquidation can still overstate. A business winding down may make large distributions labelled as ordinary dividends, which our filters do not always separate from genuine income.
• Payout ratios are measured against reported earnings. For REITs this routinely exceeds 100% for accounting reasons rather than financial distress, and should not be read the way it would be for an industrial company.
• Yields on funds are derived differently. Our data provider does not publish trailing ratios for exchange-traded funds, so fund yields are computed from distribution history against the latest price.
• All figures may be delayed and are not guaranteed to be accurate or complete. Verify anything that matters against the company’s own filings.

Each ranking is a filter over the same underlying data — a yield floor, a market capitalisation floor, a sector or a payment frequency — and the exact criteria are stated in a methodology note at the foot of every list. Lists are rebuilt from current data rather than curated by hand, so a company enters or leaves a list because its numbers changed, not because someone decided it should.

The exceptions are index membership lists such as the Dividend Aristocrats, which cannot be derived from payment history reliably and must be reconciled against the index publisher. Those lists stay unpublished until that reconciliation has been done.

For informational purposes only. Not financial advice.

TopDivs is not a registered investment adviser, broker or dealer. Nothing on this site constitutes a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security, and no content here is tailored to your circumstances. Dividend payments are discretionary: they are not guaranteed and can be reduced or suspended at any time, often with little warning.

Past payment records do not predict future payments. A long history of increases tells you what a company has done, not what it will do. Always verify figures against primary sources and consider seeking advice from a qualified professional before making an investment decision.

If a figure on this site looks wrong, it may well be. Several errors described above were found by checking published pages against companies whose records are widely known, and that method has limits. Reports of incorrect data are welcome and are the fastest way for us to find the cases we have missed.