The outlook for the S&P 500's dividends in future quarters changed quite a bit in the four weeks since our last snapshot was taken. The bad news is how they changed, which on net, was for the negative.
The actual quarter-by-quarter changes present something of a mixed picture for investors however. On the plus side, the outlook changed for the better for the current quarter of 2025-Q1 and the distant future quarter of 2025-Q4. But for the two quarters in between, the change was negative.
Here's a quick summary of how they changed and what the expectations are as of the close of trading on Friday, 14 March 2025.
- 2025-Q1: Increase of $0.19 to $20.34 per share
- 2025-Q2: Decrease of $0.30 to $18.85 per share
- 2025-Q3: Decrease of $0.23 to $19.15 per share
- 2025-Q4: Increase of $0.14 to $19.60 per share
The decreases for 2025-Q2 and 2025-Q3 are large enough to pull the net change in the dividend outlook for the S&P 500 to be negative when compared with the dividend outlook of four weeks earlier.
The following animated chart shows how expectations for the S&P 500's quarterly dividends per share changed from 14 February 2025 and 14 March 2025. If you're reading this article on a site that republishes our RSS news feed, you may need to click through to our site to see the animation.
How changes in the outlook for dividends at specific points of time in the future affects stock prices is described by this math. It's not a coincidence that the momentum of stock prices turned negative in the same period the outlook for dividends have.
More About Dividend Futures Data
For this series, we have been taking a snapshot of the CME Group's S&P 500 quarterly dividend futures data shortly after the second or third week of each month.
Dividend futures indicate the amount of dividends per share to be paid out over the period covered by each quarter's dividend futures contracts, which start on the day after the preceding quarter's dividend futures contracts expire and end on the third Friday of the month ending the indicated quarter. So for example, as determined by dividend futures contracts, the now "current" quarter of 2025-Q1 began on Saturday, 21 December 2024 and will end on Friday, 21 March 2025.
That makes these figures different from the quarterly dividends per share figures reported by Standard and Poor. S&P reports the amount of dividends per share paid out during regular calendar quarters after the end of each quarter. This term mismatch accounts for the differences in dividends reported by both sources, with the biggest differences between the two typically seen in the first and fourth quarters of each year.
Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "A crystal ball with the word 'SP 500' written inside it". And 'Dividends' written above it, which we added.
Labels: dividends, forecasting
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