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.
| Dividend Changes in December 2025 | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec-2025 | Nov-2025 | MoM | Dec-2024 | YoY | |
| Total Declarations | 5,207 | 4,948 | 259 ▲ | 5,374 | -167 ▼ |
| Favorable | 244 | 193 | 51 ▲ | 246 | -2 ▼ |
| - Increases | 117 | 134 | -17 ▼ | 128 | -11 ▼ |
| - Special/Extra | 126 | 59 | 67 ▲ | 111 | 15 ▲ |
| - Resumed | 1 | 0 | 1 ▲ | 7 | -6 ▼ |
| Unfavorable | 21 | 10 | 11 ▲ | 10 | 11 ▲ |
| - Decreases | 21 | 10 | 11 ▲ | 10 | 11 ▲ |
| - Omitted/Passed | 0 | 0 | 0 ◀▶ | 0 | 0 ◀▶ |
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'".
Labels: dividends, stock market
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