After January 2025's good start, February 2025's dividends were mildly disappointing, as Wall Street's bear took away some of the dividend increases investors had hoped to catch.
Leaving that picture behind, dividends did take a mildly bearish turn in February 2025. Investors looking for an increase in the number of companies increasing their dividends in February 2025 got them, but they got fewer than what they did a year earlier.
On the other hand, the number of firms announcing they would pay an extra, or special, dividend to their shareholders increased over the number that did in February 2024, but not by enough to offset the net reduction in the number of favorable dividend changes reported during the month.
Meanwhile, the number of dividend decreases ticked up by two year-over-year, making February 2025's unfavorable dividend changes more unfavorable.
Tallying all the month's positive and negative dividend changes from February 2024's values puts it squarely in the negative column. February 2025's magic dividend number, the single number that simply describes how good the month was for the dividend paying companies of the U.S. stock market, is -11.
All the month's favorable and unfavorable year-over-year changes in dividends are listed and totaled in the following table, which also provides the month-over-month numbers and changes.
| Dividend Changes in February 2025 | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb-2025 | Jan-2025 | MoM | Feb-2024 | YoY | |
| Total Declarations | 4,185 | 3,720 | 465 ▲ | 5,386 | -1,201 ▼ |
| Favorable | 387 | 230 | 157 ▲ | 396 | -9 ▼ |
| - Increases | 286 | 178 | 108 ▲ | 305 | -19 ▼ |
| - Special/Extra | 99 | 52 | 47 ▲ | 90 | 9 ▲ |
| - Resumed | 2 | 0 | 2 ▲ | 1 | 1 ▲ |
| Unfavorable | 23 | 18 | 5 ▲ | 21 | 2 ▲ |
| - Decreases | 23 | 18 | 5 ▲ | 21 | 2 ▲ |
| - Omitted/Passed | 0 | 0 | 0 ◀▶ | 0 | 0 ◀▶ |
The following chart visualizes the monthly counts of dividend increases and decreases from January 2004 through February 2025. It shows the trend for dividend paying companies that's been moving downward since 2023 remains in place:
We anticipate the now two-year-old downward trend will continue to assert itself next month. But we'll be happy to be wrong if that's not the case.
References
Standard and Poor. S&P Market Attributes Web File. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 3 March 2025.
Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bear catching a salmon in a stream that has the words 'DIVIDEND INCREASES' written on it. Downstream, several investors look disappointed".
Labels: dividends
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