Dividend paying stocks turned in a mixed performance during April 2025. The good news is that the number of stocks announcing unfavorable dividend actions dropped to its lowest level since June 2024. The bad news is the long-running trend of fewer companies announcing favorable dividend changes continued, pulling the month into the net negative column.
In the end, the single number that best summarizes the month is -20. This figure represents the net amount by which a reduced number of companies announcing favorable actions like dividend increases or paying extra (or special) dividend payments to their shareholders offset the reduction in the number of firms that either cut or suspended their dividends when compared against their levels in April 2024.
All the month's favorable and unfavorable dividend actions are tallied in the following table, which shows how much they changed both since April 2024 (year-over-year) and since March 2025 (month-over-month).
| Dividend Changes in April 2025 | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr-2025 | Mar-2025 | MoM | Apr-2024 | YoY | |
| Total Declarations | 3,632 | 3,585 | 47 ▲ | 5,367 | -1,735 ▼ |
| Favorable | 159 | 141 | 18 ▲ | 181 | -22 ▼ |
| - Increases | 107 | 93 | 14 ▲ | 124 | -17 ▼ |
| - Special/Extra | 52 | 47 | 5 ▲ | 57 | -5 ▼ |
| - Resumed | 0 | 1 | -1 ▼ | 0 | 0 ◀▶ |
| Unfavorable | 4 | 16 | -12 ▼ | 6 | -2 ▼ |
| - Decreases | 4 | 16 | -12 ▼ | 6 | -2 ▼ |
| - Omitted/Passed | 0 | 0 | 0 ◀▶ | 0 | 0 ◀▶ |
The following chart visualizes the monthly counts of dividend increases and decreases from January 2004 through April 2025.
April 2025 is the third consecutive month in which the U.S. stock market's dividend metadata has been net negative. That's the longest negative streak for U.S. dividend paying firms since a 16-month long period during which the market's dividend metadata was net negative in 15 months, which ran from June 2022 through September 2023. That period coincidentally falls within the 2022-2024 earnings recession for the S&P 500.
References
Standard and Poor. S&P Market Attributes Web File. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Image credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bear playing a casino game called 'Net Negative' and losing". We tweaked the text on the "Net Negative" sign to make it "Fabulous" and to take it out of Nevada.