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.
Labels: dividends
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