The dividend outlook of the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) had a mixed outcome for July 2026. Dividends expected to be paid in the now current quarter of 2026-Q3 are slightly lower than what had been anticipated in our June 2026 snapshot, but the farther future showed continued strength as expected dividends increased.

Here is our tally of how the expected future changed in the month from 15 June to 14 July 2026:

• 2026-Q2: Finalized at $20.72 per share (unchanged).
• 2026-Q3: Decrease of $0.09 to $21.13 per share
• 2026-Q4: Increase of $0.05 to $21.45 per share
• 2027-Q1: Increase of $0.18 to $22.75 per share
• 2027-Q2: Increase of $0.19 to $21.75 per share

The following chart shows how expectations for the S&P 500's quarterly dividends per share changed in the month from 15 June 2026 to 14 July 2026.

The initial estimate of dividends expected to be paid out to S&P 500 investors for the distant future quarter of 2027-Q3 is $21.92 per share.

More About Dividend Futures

Dividend futures represent the quantified expectations investors have for the future income they will realize from owning shares of stocks, which in turn, affects how investors set current day stock prices. How changes in the outlook for dividends at specific points of time in the future contribute to changes in current day stock prices as represented by the value of the S&P 500 index is described by this math.

Dividend futures for the index indicate the market capitalization-weighted amount of dividends per share for all these dividend-paying stocks that are expected to be paid out over the period covered by each quarter's dividend futures contracts. These contracts 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. For example, as determined by dividend futures contracts, the now "current" quarter of 2026-Q3 began on Saturday, 20 June 2026 and will officially end on Friday, 18 September 2026. Since the expectations for this quarter's dividend payouts can change all the way up to that final date, it counts as a future quarter all the way up to its end.

Because dividend futures are tied to options contracts that run on this schedule, that makes these figures different from the quarterly dividends per share figures that are 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.

June 2026 saw strong, across-the-board improvement in the outlook for the quarterly dividends of the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) over our snapshot of where they stood just a month earlier.

Impressively, the current quarter of 2026-Q2 saw the biggest month-over-month gain. Here is how the outlook for it and all the other quarters for which we have S&P 500 future dividends data changed since our 15 May 2026 snapshot:

• 2026-Q2: Increase of $0.90 to $20.72 per share
• 2026-Q3: Increase of $0.28 to $21.22 per share
• 2026-Q4: Increase of $0.57 to $21.40 per share
• 2027-Q1: Increase of $0.36 to $22.57 per share
• 2027-Q2: Increase of $0.37 to $21.56 per share

The following chart shows how expectations for the S&P 500's quarterly dividends per share changed in the month from 15 May 2026 to 15 June 2026.

Dividend futures data represent the quantified expectations investors have for the future income they will realize from owning shares of stocks, which in turn, affects how investors set current day stock prices. How changes in the outlook for dividends at specific points of time in the future contribute to changes in current day stock prices as represented by the value of the S&P 500 index is described by this math.

The S&P 500 index is a market capitalization-weighted index composed of the 502 stocks for the largest U.S.-based publicly traded companies in the U.S. stock market according to their market capitalization that meet S&P Global's criteria for inclusion in the index. There are more than 500 stocks in the index because it also includes multiple classes of shares issued by Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOGL and GOOG), Fox (Nasdaq: FOX and FOXA), and Newscorp (Nasdaq: NWS and NWSA).

As of 15 June 2026, 409 of these stocks pay dividends, covering about 81.5% of all the stocks in the index. Dividend futures for the index indicate the market capitalization-weighted amount of dividends per share for all these dividend-paying stocks that are expected to be paid out over the period covered by each quarter's dividend futures contracts. These contracts 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. For example, as determined by dividend futures contracts, the now "current" quarter of 2026-Q2 began on Saturday, 21 March 2026 and will officially end on this Friday, 19 June 2026. Since the expectations for this quarter's dividend payouts can change all the way up to that final date, it counts as a future quarter all the way up to its end.

Because dividend futures are tied to options contracts that run on this schedule, that makes these figures different from the quarterly dividends per share figures that are 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.

The outlook for the quarterly dividends of the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) has substantially improved in the month since our previous snapshot.

Here is our summary of how the outlook for the S&P 500's quarterly dividends per share changed since our 15 April 2026 snapshot:

• 2026-Q2: Increase of $0.04 to $19.81 per share
• 2026-Q3: Increase of $0.46 to $20.94 per share
• 2026-Q4: Increase of $0.47 to $20.85 per share
• 2027-Q1: Increase of $0.40 to $22.14 per share
• 2027-Q2: Increase of $1.13 to $21.19 per share

The following chart shows how expectations for the S&P 500's quarterly dividends per share changed in the month from 15 April 2026 to 15 May 2026.

The large change in the forecast value for the most distant future quarter of 2027-Q2 is typical of the kind of volatility we see in dividend futures after the data for a new quarter first becomes available. Based on just the increases seen for all the other future quarters however, May 2026 saw one of the strongest month-over-month improvements in the S&P 500's dividend outlook in years.

Ready to find out more about dividend futures data? If this is your first exposure to the S&P 500's quarterly dividend futures, be sure to read the following section that explains what this data is communicating about the future for the index' dividends.

More About Dividend Futures Data

For this series, we take 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. For example, as determined by dividend futures contracts, the now "current" quarter of 2026-Q2 began on Saturday, 21 March 2026 and will end on Friday, 19 June 2026. Since the expectations for this quarter's dividend payouts can change all the way up to that final date, it qualifies as a future quarter.

Because dividend futures are tied to options contracts that run on this schedule, that makes these figures different from the quarterly dividends per share figures that are 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.

Dividend futures data is important for more than just what they project will be a future quarter's dividend payout. They represent the quantified expectations investors have for the future income they will realize from holding their investments, which in turn, affects how investors set current day stock prices. How changes in the outlook for dividends at specific points of time in the future contribute to changes in current day stock prices is described by this math.

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.

Measured by the number of companies announcing they would be lowering their dividend payouts from their previous level, March 2026 was a good month for the dividend paying companies of the U.S. stock market. But then, after the concentrated carnage that swept through the ranks of publicly traded Business Development Companies in February 2026, there aren't many BDCs left in the financial services arena with imminent dividend cuts in their future.

That's not to say there won't be more such firms that will need to face up to the risk of their loans to software firms now facing pressure from AI technologies going bad, but the month of March saw considerably fewer of them.

Overall, the number of dividend decreasing companies in our sampling for the month dropped from a revised total of 27 the month before to just 6 in March 2026. The following chart presents the tally of dividend decreases recorded for each industrial sector within the U.S. stock market.

The oil and gas sector saw the most decreases with four firms announcing decreased dividends in March 2026. Three of which are represented by royalty trusts that pay variable dividends, which directly results from the business conditions for this portion of the industry in the preceding month. While March 2026 saw oil and gas prices surge in response to the Iran war's disruption of the global trade in oil, February had seen falling prices, which reduced the revenue and earnings of many of these firms, which in turn resulted in their reduced distributions to their shareholders for this month.

Even so, the number of these firms falls well below the threshold of ten we use as a rule of thumb for determining whether the industry is facing contractionary conditions.

The financial services sector added two more dividend decreasing firms to the total, both of which pay fixed dividends that required action by their boards of directors to declare.

Here are the sampled dividend decreases for March 2026:

• Monroe Capital (Mortgage) (NASDAQ: MRCC)
• FS Credit Opportunities (NYSE: FSCO)
• Cross Timbers Royalty Trust (NYSE: CRT)
• Permian Basin Royalty Trust (NYSE: PBT)
• PermRock Royalty Trust (NYSE: PRT)
• FutureFuel (NYSE: FF)

Monroe Capital has a strange situation in that after the company slashed its dividend payout in March, it delivered an outsize dividend payment in April 2026 after its acquisition by Horizon Technology Finance (NASDAQ: HRZN).

The overall number of dividend decreases announced in March 2026 is well below the total of 50 that signifies recessionary conditions are present in the U.S. economy as a whole.

Image credit: Dividends definition. State Savings and Loan Association advertisement on Page 9 of Beatrice, Nebraska's Beatrice Daily Express, 12 December 1921. Chronicling America. [Online Database]. 12 December 1921. Public domain image.

How has the expected future changed for the quarterly dividends of the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) in the month since our previous snapshot?

As of 15 April 2026, the outlook for the S&P 500's quarterly dividends through the end of 2026 and the first quarter of 2027 has improved considerably over the past month. Here is our summary of how the outlook for the S&P 500's quarterly dividends per share changed since our 13 March 2026 snapshot:

• 2026-Q2: Increase of $0.21 to $19.77 per share
• 2026-Q3: Increase of $0.25 to $20.48 per share
• 2026-Q4: Increase of $0.27 to $20.38 per share
• 2027-Q1: Increase of $0.55 to $21.74 per share

Not all the dividend futures data was rosy. On the day the dividend futures contract for 2026-Q1 ended on Friday, 20 March 2026, the expected dividend payout for 2026-Q1 plunged by $0.26 per share to a final value of $21.20 per share for the now-ended quarter.

The following chart shows how expectations for the S&P 500's quarterly dividends per share changed in the month from 13 March 2026 to 15 April 2026.

We're going to a rolling 13 quarter presentation for this chart, which for this edition, covers 2024-Q2 through 2027-Q1, and gives us a first look at the dividend expectations for 2027-Q2. The first projection of that most distant future quarter of this outlook is $20.06 per share, which is $0.29 higher than the $19.77 per share expected for the current quarter of 2026-Q2.

If this is your first exposure to the S&P 500's quarterly dividend futures, be sure to read the following section that explains what this data is communicating about the future for the index' dividends.

More About Dividend Futures Data

For this series, we take 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. For example, as determined by dividend futures contracts, the now "current" quarter of 2026-Q2 began on Saturday, 21 March 2026 and will end on Friday, 19 June 2026. Since the expectations for this quarter's dividend payouts can change all the way up to that final date, it qualifies as a future quarter.

Because dividend futures are tied to options contracts that run on this schedule, that makes these figures different from the quarterly dividends per share figures that are 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.

Dividend futures data is important for more than just what they project will be a future quarter's dividend payout. They represent the quantified expectations investors have for the future income they will realize from holding their investments, which affects how investors set current day stock prices. How changes in the outlook for dividends at specific points of time in the future contribute to changes in current day stock prices is described by this math.

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.

We've had to shelve our popular "Dividends by the Numbers" series after the January 2026 edition. The series tracked the U.S. stock market's dividend metadata, which provided a simple, near real-time method of measuring the relative health of the U.S. economy.

Our analytical series was enabled by S&P Dow Jones Indices' Howard Silverblatt, who made the number and kinds of dividend actions announced for ordinary stocks traded in the U.S. stock market available each month. At this writing, it's possible S&P Dow Jones Indices will continue providing the stock market's dividend statistics on a quarterly basis, which had been the firm's practice, but they haven't yet indicated if they will.

We do however have other sources of dividend metadata to tap, which has at least two disadvantages. The biggest disadvantage is we have to generate a methodology for identifying dividend changes that may not align with the practices that S&P Dow Jones Indices, or its predecessor firms, Standard & Poor and, if we go back to the beginning, Standard Statistics, followed in compiling the data.

Another disadvantage is the scope of the alternate sources we're utilizing, which we've encountered as we simply sought to compile a list of what publicly-traded companies in the U.S. stock market declared they would decrease their dividends in February 2026. None of the sources we used to generate the list we're presenting offered a complete listing of the common stocks that decreased their dividends.

Because there isn't a single source that provides all dividend decrease data for the U.S. stock market for February 2026, we have to proceed with the assumption that the data we have represents a sample of the total.

We've opted to focus on dividend decreases because that data can provide a raw indication of which companies and industries may be experiencing some kind of distress. That distress may be significant in the case of firms that normally pay fixed dividends, which requires action on the part of their boards of directors to change their dividend payouts. Or, in the case of firms that pay variable dividends, like oil and gas royalty trusts, the number of dividend decreases that are announced can simply be an indication of whether oil prices were down in the preceding month. For variable dividend payers in the oil & gas sector, we consider any number above ten in a single month as indicating the industry is experiencing potentially contractionary headwinds.

Having now set these basic guidelines for evaluating the data, the following chart visualizes what we found for our February 2026 sampling of 26 dividend decreases:

Here's the list of sampled dividend decreases for February 2026:

• BCB Bancorp (NASDAQ: BCBP)
• CVR Partners (NYSE: UAN)
• Permianville Royalty Trust (NYSE: PVL)
• Golub Capital BDC (NASDAQ: GBDC)
• Natural Health Trends (NASDAQ: NHTC)
• Chesapeake Granite Wash Trust (NYSE: CHKR)
• LyondellBasell Industries (NYSE: LYB)
• AngloGold Ashanti (NYSE: AU)
• Sabine Royalty Trust (NYSE: SBR)
• Manhattan Bridge Capital (REIT-Mortgage) (NASDAQ: LOAN)
• Insteel Industries (NASDAQ: IIIN)
• Rayonier (REIT-Materials) (NYSE: RYN)
• TPG Specialty Lending (NYSE: TSLX)
• OFS Credit (NASDAQ: OCCI)
• Franklin BSP Realty Trust (REIT-Mortgage) (NYSE: FBRT)
• Permian Basin Royalty Trust (NYSE: PBT)
• Gerdau S.A. (NYSE: GGB)
• PermRock Royalty Trust (NYSE: PRT)
• MidCap Financial Investment (NASDAQ: MFIC)
• Vitesse Energy (NYSE: VTS)
• Morgan Stanley Direct Lending (NYSE: MSDL)
• Eagle Point Credit (NYSE: ECC)
• Nuveen Churchill Direct Lending (NYSE: NCDL)
• TXO Energy Partners (NYSE: TXO)
• Mesa Royalty Trust (NYSE: MTR)
• Horizon Tech Finance (NYSE: HRZN)
• BlackRock TCP (NASDAQ: TCPC)

Starting with the oil & gas industry, we count eight royalty trusts that pay variable distributions announcing decreased dividend payments to their shareholders, which falls below the threshold of ten we've established for indicating anything other than month-to-month noise for the sector. This makes sense because oil prices had been falling in January 2026. It's won't be until March 2026 that the U.S. military action against Iran that has prompted an increase in oil prices will reverse that trend, which bodes well for these firms in April. At this writing, the expectations are this spike will be comparatively short lived, which is why the stock prices of major oil firms haven't boomed in response.

The most notable dividend decreases announced in February 2026 are the eight reductions among firms in the financial service sector. These are primarily made up of Business Development Companies, or BDCs, which provide loans to medium-to-small businesses. These firms have been hit by a combination of falling interest rates, which puts pressure on their profitability margins, and the disruption of businesses to which they lend from artificial intelligence technologies. In recent months, the outlook of firms in the Software as a Service (SAAS) sub-sector of the information technology sector have been absolutely hammered by the increasing capabilities of AI.

Closing out the list, four firms in the Materials industry (steel foundries, gold miners, and timber) announced dividend decreases. There two each in the chemical and real estate sectors, and one each in the banking and consumer goods industrial categories.

On the whole, with less than 10 firms in oil and gas sector and fewer than 50 overall, the total number of dividend decreases in our February 2026 sample falls below the threshold that signals recessionary conditions are present within the U.S. economy.

Image credit: Dividends definition. State Savings and Loan Association advertisement on Page 9 of Beatrice, Nebraska's Beatrice Daily Express, 12 December 1921. Chronicling America. [Online Database]. 12 December 1921. Public domain image.

The outlook for the S&P 500's dividends dimmed since previous snapshot of their future. For all five quarters in our forecast window, all showed decreases though of varying amounts.

Here is our summary of how the outlook for the S&P 500's quarterly dividends per share has changed in the past month for the current quarter of 2026-Q1, the remaining three quarters of 2026, and the first quarter of 2027:

• 2026-Q1: Decrease of $0.25, falling to $21.46 per share
• 2026-Q2: Decrease of $0.08, dipping to $19.62 per share
• 2026-Q3: Decrease of $0.05, ticking down to $20.28 per share
• 2026-Q4: Decrease of $0.30, dropping to $20.12 per share
• 2027-Q1: Decrease of $0.40, declining to $21.20 per share

The following chart shows how expectations for the S&P 500's quarterly dividends per share changed in the month from 13 February 2026 to 13 March 2026.

In the next edition of this series, we'll show 2026-Q1 as finalized and will add 2027-Q2 to the outlook. If the outlook for dividends continues to dim, we'll have to drag out our old thesaurus to find new expressions to describe the negative changes since we blew through all the ones we keep on ready standby for this edition.

More About Dividend Futures Data

For this series, we take 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. For example, as determined by dividend futures contracts, the now "current" quarter of 2026-Q1 began on Saturday, 20 December 2025 and will end later this week, on Friday, 20 March 2026. The upcoming quarter of 2026-Q2 will become the current quarter on Saturday, 21 March 2026 and end on Friday, 19 June 2026.

Because dividend futures are tied to options contracts that run on this schedule, that makes these figures different from the quarterly dividends per share figures that are 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.

How changes in the outlook for dividends at specific points of time in the future contribute to changes in current day stock prices is described by this math.

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.

There are 503 stocks that make up the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) at the beginning of 2026. How many of them pay dividends to their shareholding owners?

To answer this question, we've tapped Standard and Poor's historic data, which covers the period from 1980 through 2025 so we can see how that number has evolved over this time. We should note that the number of firms in the S&P 500 has changed over this time. There were 500 stocks in the index from 1980 through 2013, which increased to 502 in 2014, 504 in 2015 and topped out at 505 from 2015 through 2021 as a few firms (like Google, now called Alphabet) split up their shares into different classes (GOOG and GOOGL) that were large enough to qualify to be included in the index. There have been 503 companies in the S&P 500 since 2022.

We'll also provide some background information that helps explain that evolution. But first, the following chart visualizes how the number of the S&P 500's dividend paying stocks has changed during the last 45 years.

In the period before 1986 and also from 1997 to 2003, tax rates on dividends were set to be much higher than they were for capital gains. This inequality prompted many firms to stop paying dividends during these periods, which you can see in the number of dividend payers dropping from 469 to 426 from 1980 to 1986, and then drop from 427 to 351 in the period between 1996 and 2003. However, once dividend and capital gains taxes were equalized, the number of S&P 500 companies that paid dividends either rose or stabilized outside ordinary business cycle downturns.

Of course, "recession" is another name for a business cycle downturn and the chart shows two major recessions in which the number of dividend paying firms in the S&P 500 notably fell.

The first of these is the 2008-2009 "Great Recession", a harsh event for the U.S. stock market, with 7% of dividend payers acting to either suspend or outright stop paying dividends until their businesses recovered. In all, the number of dividend paying companies dropped from 390 to 363 during the Great Recession.

2020's Coronavirus Pandemic Recession was even worse, harming 9% of dividend payers, as the number of dividend payers drop from 423 to 385. Since then, the number of dividends payers has recovered to reach 409 of the firms that make up the S&P 500 index today, which is still below the 423 that did in 2019.

References

Dai, Zhonglan and Shackelford, Douglas A. and Zhang, Harold Huibing, Capital Gains Taxes and Stock Return Volatility. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=972349 or DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.972349. 11 August 2010.

De Silva, Matthew. The art and science of stewarding the S&P 500. Quartz [Online Article]. 25 September 2019.

Political Calculations. What Caused the Dot Com Bubble to Begin and What Caused It to End? [Online Article]. 15 December 2010.

Silverblatt, Howard. S&P 500 Indicated Rate Change. Standard and Poor. S&P Dow Jones Indices. [Excel Spreadsheet]. 31 January 2026.

Silverblatt, Howard. S&P 500 Market Attributes Web File. S&P 500 Dividend Payers vs Non-Payers Performance. Standard and Poor. S&P Dow Jones Indices. [Excel Spreadsheet]. 31 January 2026.

The outlook for the S&P 500's dividends generally improved since previous snapshot of their future. For the five quarters in our forecast window, four showed solid gains, while one had a small decline.

Here is our summary of how the outlook for the S&P 500's quarterly dividends per share has changed in the past month for the current quarter of 2026-Q1, the remaining three quarters of 2026, and the first quarter of 2027:

• 2026-Q1: Increase of $0.21, rising to $21.71 per share
• 2026-Q2: Decrease of $0.03, dipping to $19.70 per share
• 2026-Q3: Increase of $0.24, rising to $20.33 per share
• 2026-Q4: Increase of $0.40, rising to $20.42 per share
• 2027-Q1: Increase of $0.27, rising to $21.60 per share

The following chart shows how expectations for the S&P 500's quarterly dividends per share changed in the month from 15 January 2025 to 13 February 2026.

As a general rule, the further out the forecast, the more subject to change the dividends will be before they are finalized at the end of their indicated quarter. Be sure to read the following section providing more information about dividend futures data to get a better understanding of what this information represents.

More About Dividend Futures Data

For this series, we take 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. For example, as determined by dividend futures contracts, the now "current" quarter of 2026-Q1 began on Saturday, 20 December 2025 and will end on Friday, 20 March 2026, one month from today.

Because dividend futures are tied to options contracts that run on this schedule, that makes these figures different from the quarterly dividends per share figures that are 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.

How changes in the outlook for dividends at specific points of time in the future contribute to changes in current day stock prices is described by this math.

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.

Dividend paying stocks in the U.S. stock market got off to an unexpectedly strong start in January 2026.

Tallying up the dividend-payers' metadata for the month, we find the year-over-year number of net favorable dividend actions totaled 50. With fifty more publicly traded firms announcing favorable dividend actions than unfavorable ones, January 2026 represents the best month on record since September 2023. Coincidentally, that was the last month that saw its net favorable dividend actions reach 50, as the next 15 months fell below that level, with 12 of those months recording a negative result.

Until January 2026. As we noted, this result was unexpected and largely driven by an increase in the number of firms announcing they would pay an extra, or special, dividend to their shareholding owners. The first month of 2026 had 98 such declarations, 46 more than were recorded in January 2025.

The following table presents a full summary of January 2026's dividend actions and provides a Month-over-Month (MoM) comparison with December 2025 and Year-over-Year (YoY) comparison with January 2025.

Without the extra dividends being announced, January 2026's dividend metadata is just slightly better than January 2025's data. The following chart presents the U.S. stock market's total number of dividend increases and decreases for each month from January 2004 through January 2026.

The number of dividend rises was 181, three more than counted a year earlier. The number of dividend decreases was 17, one less than counted a year earlier and well below the threshold that indicates recessionary conditions are present in the U.S. economy. Combined with the much larger increase in special dividends, January 2026 was a very strong month for the U.S. stock market's dividend-paying companies.

That's not to say it couldn't have been stronger. Companies that otherwise pay a set dividend will pay out extra dividends when their performance pulls in more cash than they anticipated, but they increase their ordinary dividends when they expect their good fortune to continue. Paying an extra dividend suggests many companies are taking a cautious wait-and-see approach with their dividends going into the new year.

References

Standard and Poor. S&P Market Attributes Web File. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 2 February 2026.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bull who is happy to be getting an extra dividend payment in January 2026".

The outlook for the S&P 500's dividends through 2026 has not changed much since our previous snapshot of their future. But what change there has been is best described as "mixed".

Here is our summary of how the outlook for the S&P 500's dividends has changed in the past month for the final quarter of 2025 and the upcoming four quarters of 2026:

• 2025-Q4: Decrease of $0.05, finalizing at $19.86 per share
• 2026-Q1: Increase of $0.04, rising to $21.50 per share
• 2026-Q2: Decrease of $0.01, ticking down to $19.73 per share
• 2026-Q3: Increase of $0.08, rising to $20.09 per share
• 2026-Q4: Increase of $0.23, rising to $20.02 per share

Standard and Poor reports the cash dividends for the calendar quarter of 2026-Q4 is $20.26 per share. The difference between this value and the finalized dividend futures' value is attributable to the term mismatch between S&P's data and dividend futures contracts, which run on a slightly different schedule than the calendar quarters to which they apply (see the "More About Dividend Futures Data" section for more background).

The following chart shows how expectations for the S&P 500's quarterly dividends per share changed in the month from 15 December 2025 to 15 January 2026.

We're providing a bonus glimpse of the S&P 500's expected dividends for the distant future quarter of 2027-Q1, for which dividend futures currently anticipate a $21.33 per share cash payout. Since the end of that quarter is more than a year away, you can expect the expectations to change a lot for this quarter in the months ahead.

More About Dividend Futures Data

How changes in the outlook for dividends at specific points of time in the future contribute to changes in stock prices is described by this math.

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. For example, as determined by dividend futures contracts, the now "current" quarter of 2026-Q1 began on Saturday, 20 December 2025 and will end on Friday, 20 March 2026.

Because dividend futures are tied to options contracts that run on this schedule, that makes these figures different from the quarterly dividends per share figures that are 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.

2025 was a lackluster year for dividend paying firms in the U.S. stock market.

That outcome can be verified with a single number. The net number of favorable dividend actions announced by dividend paying companies was negative in 2025, with 208 more firms announcing unfavorable changes like decreases or omissions in their dividend payouts than firms announcing favorable changes like increases or those that paid extra dividends to shareholders. Ten of the twelve months of 2025 registered a negative net result by this simple metric.

What made the year a lackluster one rather than an outright bad year is that most of the decrease came in the form of fewer firms announcing dividend increases. 2025 continued a now three-year long trend on that count, avoiding the fate of becoming a bad year with the number of firms announcing unfavorable changes holding relatively stable during the year.

The following chart shows the number of dividend increases and decreases announced by dividend-paying firms in each of the last five quarters from 2024-Q4 through 2025-Q4. It reveals most of the bad news for dividend paying firms occurred in the first quarter of 2025, with a less negative performance in the remaining quarters of the year, which agrees with the general pattern we observed in each month's net favorable dividend actions.

Our next chart focuses on the number of dividend increases and decreases announced each month from January 2004 through December 2025. Here's where you can see that the falling number of dividend increases follows a pattern that has become established since the beginning of 2023 even as the number of dividend decreases remains well below a threshold that indicates recessionary conditions are present in the U.S. economy.

Finally, the following table tallies up all the favorable and unfavorable changes recorded by dividend paying firms in the U.S. stock market for the month of December 2025. It also shows the month-over-month (MoM) and year-over-year (YoY) changes for December 2025's dividend metadata.

The number of dividend decreases in December 2025 was notably higher than in the previous month of November 2025 and in December 2024, but remains well below the recessionary condition threshold. The good news, such as it is, is that the year-over-year number of favorable changes was only down by two, which suggests that three-year-long negative trend may be close to ending.

Here's hoping 2026 will become a net positive year for the U.S. stock market's dividend paying companies!

References

Standard and Poor. S&P Market Attributes Web File. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 2 January 2026.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bear looking at a chart labeled '2025 NET FAVORABLE DIVIDEND ACTIONS' and shows the value '-208'".