Dividend stock screener

What each column means

Yield (forward est.) is the forward estimate: the most recent regular payment multiplied by the number of payments a year, divided by the latest stored price. It is used only when the cadence is known and the last payment is recent enough for the stream to look live.

Yield (trailing 12m) is the trailing figure: the cash actually paid over the last 365 days divided by that same price. Where the forward estimate cannot be established the forward column falls back to this number, which is why the two are sometimes identical. Neither is comparable to a bond's yield to maturity or a Treasury bill's discount rate without adjusting for what those measure. Full definitions are on dividend yield.

Forward div / share / yr is the same forward estimate expressed in dollars per share per year rather than as a percentage of the price. It is an annualised figure derived from one payment, not a total of payments received.

Payout (GAAP EPS) is the dividend as a percentage of GAAP earnings per share. Below roughly 60% the payment is comfortably covered by profit; above 100% it is being funded from cash, borrowing or asset sales. This ratio is close to meaningless for REITs and BDCs, whose accounting earnings sit far below the cash they actually generate — a REIT with a 180% payout ratio may be covering its distribution comfortably out of funds from operations. Blank means we hold no ratio for that ticker, which is the normal state for funds. See payout ratio.

Rising yrs (our history) is the number of consecutive completed calendar years, counted backwards from the most recent one, in which the total payments we store were higher than the year before. The window is our own payment history, which begins wherever our data provider's history begins — often the early 1970s. A figure printed as 55+ † is a floor rather than a total: that run reaches the first year of payments we hold, so the count ran out of data rather than out of increases and the company's actual record is longer. Because it is our count and not an index provider's, it will not match one — see dividend aristocrats for how the index versions differ — and because it is our history and not the company's, the issuer's investor-relations page is the authority on the record itself. Filtering on a minimum here filters on what we can see.

Score blends yield, payout safety, rising years and how much payment history we hold into a 0–100 number for sorting a large set quickly. It deliberately stops rewarding yield above roughly 6%, because past that level a higher yield has more often signalled a coming cut than a better deal. The yield component uses the forward estimate.

Sources for every column

Where each number on this page comes from. Price, market capitalisation and the security's name, sector and industry: Financial Modeling Prep, quote and company-screener endpoints, stored daily by pipeline/quotes.py and weekly by pipeline/universe.py. Individual dividend payments — amount, ex-date, record date, pay date and whether the payment was regular or special: Financial Modeling Prep, dividends endpoint, stored by pipeline/dividends_fmp.py. Payout ratio: Financial Modeling Prep, ratios-ttm endpoint, stored by pipeline/fundamentals.py and measured against GAAP earnings per share. Everything else — the forward yield estimate, the trailing twelve-month yield, the payment cadence, the count of rising years and the first year of history it could be counted from, the five-year growth rate, the next ex-date and the research score — is computed on this server by pipeline/compute.py from those stored payments and prices. No vendor's own yield field is printed anywhere in this section, which is why every figure here can be traced back to a list of individual payments on the security's own page.