Methodology

The universe

Three sources build the list of securities the site covers, and nothing appears on a page unless it came from one of them.

• A screener pass. United States-listed common shares that pay a dividend and carry a market capitalisation above $250 million, taken from Financial Modeling Prep's company screener with funds and exchange-traded products excluded. Only listings on the NYSE, Nasdaq, NYSE American and Cboe BZX are kept; symbols containing a dot or a dash are dropped, because those are second-line listings and share classes rather than the primary security.
• Curated catalogs. Named sets maintained by hand where a screener cannot see the category: dividend ETFs, bond ETFs, covered-call ETFs, business development companies, closed-end funds, master limited partnerships, royalty trusts, mortgage REITs, net-lease REITs, utilities, and United States-listed shares of non-US companies for the international income section.
• Listed preferred series. Every symbol on the exchange master that matches the shape of a preferred series ticker is a candidate, and a candidate is only stored if a live batch quote comes back with a price above fifty cents. That test exists because the exchange master carries every series ever issued, including ones that were redeemed years ago.

Two things are then classified out of the common-stock universe rather than left in it. Preferred series are stored as their own kind, and so is exchange-traded debt — the $25 notes and debentures, often called baby bonds, that list and trade like shares but rank as borrowings of the issuer. Both are identified from the security name and neither can appear on a dividend-stock screen, in a sector yield median, or beside common equity in a table.

A security that stops returning a quote is deactivated rather than deleted, so its history stays intact and it stops appearing in tables. Inclusion is not endorsement: the screen describes what the security is, not what it is worth.

Corporate actions and the share basis

Every payment we store is kept twice: as it was paid, and restated on the current share basis after any splits since. Every derived figure — yield, annual dividend, trailing twelve months, growth streak, CAGR — uses the restated figure, because the price it is divided by is always today's.

This matters more than it sounds. KLA split ten-for-one in June 2026. Its earlier payments were $1.90 and $2.30 a share on the old share count; the price afterwards is a tenth of what it was. Pairing the old payment with the new price reports a yield ten times too high, and for a period this site did exactly that. Splits are now applied before anything is computed.

Securities that have stopped trading

A market-data feed keeps answering for a security long after it stops trading: it returns the last trade that ever happened. A redeemed preferred, a company acquired two years ago, a terminated trust — all still quote a price, and annualising a payment against that price manufactures a yield on something that no longer exists.

Every security therefore carries a lifecycle state derived from the exchange timestamp on its most recent quote. Anything that has not traded for more than about two months is treated as no longer trading and leaves every live table, ranking, median and count. Its page stays up, marked, so the payment history remains readable and inbound links still work — but it is never presented as investable.

This is inference from trading activity, not a corporate-actions feed. A security halted for a long period would be treated the same way as one that was redeemed.

Prices

Prices come from one batch quote per security per refresh. They are delayed, they are not trading quotes, and they are used for exactly one purpose: expressing a payment as a percentage of a price. Market capitalisation, trading volume and the fifty-two-week range arrive in the same call and are shown as context, not as a valuation. Average daily volume is not carried by that endpoint, so it is left blank rather than estimated.

Because a yield is a fraction with the price on the bottom, a stale or wrong price produces a wrong yield. That is the single most common way a figure on a site like this goes bad, which is why the observation date is printed next to the number.

The annual dividend: forward or trailing

Two ways exist to state what a security pays in a year and they disagree constantly. We publish which one is in use for each security rather than blending them.

Forward estimate (preferred)

The most recent regular payment multiplied by the number of payments a year, used only when the payment cadence is known and the last payment is recent enough that the stream still looks alive. The recency test is scaled to the cadence: a monthly payer must have paid within roughly a month and a half, a quarterly payer within roughly five months.

Trailing twelve months (fallback)

The sum of every payment with an ex-dividend date in the last 365 days. Used when the cadence is irregular or unknown, or when the last payment is too old to extrapolate from.

When the forward estimate and the trailing twelve months differ by more than 25 per cent, the security carries a note saying so. That gap is usually a payment that was just raised or cut, or a one-off distribution sitting inside the trailing window — either way it is a signal to look at the payment history on the security's own page rather than trust a single annual figure.

A forward estimate is an arithmetic extrapolation of the last payment, not a forecast and not a promise. Any board can cut, suspend or skip a distribution at any time.

What each yield actually measures

Four different measurements appear on this site under the word yield, and each is labelled where it is shown:

Forward — the last regular payment multiplied by the number of payments a year. Used when the payment cadence is settled. It is an estimate of the next twelve months and assumes the payment does not change.

Trailing twelve months — the cash actually paid over the last 365 days, divided by the current price. Backward-looking and complete.

Coupon — for exchange-traded debt, the contractual rate on the $25 principal, taken from the security's own terms rather than from its payment history. A note issued mid-quarter pays a part-period stub first, and annualising that stub would understate the interest by a wide margin.

Irregular — where a one-off distribution dominates the last twelve months, or there are too few payments on record to establish a rate at all. These are shown on the security's own page with an explanation and are excluded from every ranking and median, because the figure describes an event rather than an income stream.

Cadence itself is inferred from the spacing of the payment dates rather than from the provider's frequency label, which is missing or inconsistent often enough to matter. A one-off distribution is identified by comparing each payment with its neighbours in time, and is set aside before the cadence and the forward estimate are computed.

Yield

Yield is the annual dividend divided by the price, times one hundred. Nothing more clever than that, and deliberately so: it can be checked by hand from the two numbers printed beside it.

A computed yield above 60 per cent is discarded rather than shown, because at that level the cause is almost always a stale price, a return-of-capital distribution, or a special payment being annualised. This means a handful of securities show a price and a payment history but no yield, which is the honest outcome.

Fund distribution rates are not the same thing as an underlying portfolio yield. A closed-end fund or a covered-call ETF can pay a distribution that includes return of your own capital; the distribution rate we compute from the payments will show that money going out, and says nothing about where it came from.

Growth streak, years paying and CAGR

These three come from our own stored payment history, not from a provider's label. Payments are bucketed into calendar years by ex-dividend date, and the current incomplete year is excluded from every calculation so a half-finished year cannot break a streak or flatter one.

Growth streak

The number of consecutive completed calendar years in which the largest single regular payment exceeded the largest single payment of the year before. It counts backwards from the most recent completed year and stops at the first year that was not higher. It is bounded by how far back our payment history goes: where the streak reaches the start of that history the figure is shown as a floor ("at least N years") and the company's own record will be longer — Johnson & Johnson has raised its dividend for more than sixty years, while our history begins in 1970. A company's investor relations page is the authority on its own record, not this site. The comparison uses the payment rate rather than the calendar-year total, because a company that shifts one payment across a year end pays three times in one year and five in the next without ever cutting the dividend — a total-based count would record that as a break. Amounts are split-adjusted, so a stock split does not read as a cut.

Years paying

The count of completed calendar years with at least one payment in our history for that security. It is a coverage statistic about our data, not a corporate record: history depth is limited by what the provider returns.

Dividend CAGR

Compound annual growth of the calendar-year totals: (last / first) raised to the power of one over the number of years, minus one. The three-year figure compares the most recent completed year with the year three completed years before it; the five-year figure does the same across five. Both need enough complete years to exist, so newer payers show nothing.

A growth streak counted this way is not the same as an index provider's aristocrat or king status, which uses its own rules on spin-offs, special dividends and payment timing. Ours is reproducible from the payment table on each security's page, and we prefer that to a badge we cannot show the working for. It is also bounded by how much history the provider returns: a company that has raised its dividend for longer than our records go back shows the shorter figure, never a longer one.

Payout ratio, and where it does not apply

The payout ratio is trailing-twelve-month dividends divided by trailing-twelve-month earnings, taken from the provider's ratios feed for a bounded set: everything in a curated catalog plus the largest payers by market capitalisation. It is not computed for every security on the site, and where it is missing it is shown as missing.

For four kinds of security the ratio is close to meaningless and is treated as such:

• REITs — depreciation drags reported earnings far below the cash available to distribute, so a REIT paying comfortably out of cash flow can show a payout ratio well above 100 per cent. Funds from operations is the metric the sector uses.
• BDCs — the distribution is paid out of net investment income, while reported earnings swing with unrealised marks on the loan book.
• MLPs — partnerships distribute cash and report earnings after heavy depreciation, and unitholders receive a Schedule K-1 rather than a dividend statement.
• Funds of any kind — closed-end funds, ETFs and option-income funds distribute income, realised gains and sometimes capital. An earnings-based ratio does not describe that.

Where the ratio does apply — an ordinary operating company — it is one of the few forward-looking things in the data, because a payment consuming more than the earnings behind it has to be funded from somewhere else.

The income score

The income score is a 0 to 100 research screen that blends four measurable things. It exists to order a long table so the reader can start somewhere, and for no other purpose.

Yield — 40 per cent of the score

Rises with the yield up to 6 per cent, and then decays. A 15 per cent yield is not scored as twice as good as 7.5 per cent, because at that level the market is usually pricing a cut. The component has a floor, so an extreme yield still scores something rather than zero.

Payout safety — 25 per cent

Full credit below a 0.6 payout ratio, stepping down through 0.8 and 1.0, and falling away above 1.0. A missing ratio scores neutral rather than free credit. For REITs, BDCs, MLPs and funds the component is floored at neutral, because the ratio is the wrong lens for them.

Growth — 20 per cent

The growth streak, reaching full credit at fifteen consecutive up years.

Longevity — 15 per cent

Completed years of payment history, reaching full credit at twenty-five.

A security with no computable yield gets no score at all rather than a low one. Scores change when prices change, so the ordering of a table moves without anything about the underlying business having changed.

Rates, curves and index yields

Every rate on the site is a published series retrieved from FRED at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, stored with its observation date and its own note. We do not average, adjust or re-badge them, and the series identifier is shown so any figure can be looked up at the source.

• Deposit rates — savings, money market and CD series are FDIC national averages across insured institutions. An average is not an offer: the top rate advertised by a particular bank is routinely far above it, which is the entire point of the cash rates page.
• Treasury bill series are quoted on a discount basis, against face value over a 360-day year; the constant-maturity series are investment-basis yields on the price actually paid, over a 365-day year. The same bill therefore reads two slightly different numbers under the two conventions, which is why each one is labelled and why they are never blended — the detail is on Data Sources. The ten-year inflation-indexed series is a real yield, after inflation, and is not comparable with the nominal series beside it.
• Corporate and high-yield figures are ICE BofA index effective yields — the yield of an index of hundreds of bonds, not a bond you can buy. Spreads are option-adjusted spreads over Treasuries, in percentage points.
• Mortgage rates are the Freddie Mac survey averages, shown because they set the floor under private lending rates rather than because anyone here is borrowing.
• The commercial property series is published as a percentage change from the same quarter a year earlier — a rate of change, not a price level, not a yield and not a cap rate. It is shown for direction only, and it is quarterly, so it moves four times a year.

Full attribution for each provider is on Data Sources.

Refresh cadence

Different data changes at different speeds, so different jobs run at different intervals.

• Prices and rate series — daily.
• Dividend and distribution histories — weekly, with top-up runs for securities that have none.
• Fundamentals used for the payout ratio — weekly, ahead of the derived metrics.
• The securities universe — weekly.
• Derived metrics (annual dividend, yield, streaks, CAGR, score) — after every price or dividend refresh.

The authoritative freshness signal is not this list: it is the observation date printed beside each figure. If a page shows an old date, the data behind it is old, and we would rather show you that than quietly hide it.

Known limitations

The honest list of what this data cannot do.

• Prices are delayed and refreshed on a schedule. Nothing here is a real-time quote and nothing should be used to time a transaction.
• No options chains. The options income section explains mechanics and lets you compute an illustration from inputs you supply. It does not carry live strikes, premiums, implied volatility or open interest.
• No individual bond pricing. There is no CUSIP-level quoting on this site. Corporate, agency and municipal figures are index yields or curve-derived indications, useful for orientation and useless as an execution price. A live quote for a specific bond comes from a broker.
• No private-market marks. Real estate syndications, private credit funds, farmland, small business stakes and similar assets have no daily price. Those pages describe structure, fees, lock-ups and failure modes, and quote no valuation.
• Dividend history depth varies by security and is limited to what the provider returns. Long records may be truncated, and irregular or one-off payments are not separately flagged in the source feed, which is why the forward-versus-trailing divergence note exists.
• Coverage is United States-listed and US dollar. Non-US companies appear through their US listings, where withholding tax and reporting differ from the ordinary case.
• No ratings, no forecasts, no total-return figures. We do not publish price targets, expected returns, back-tested performance or model portfolios.
• Tax treatment is described, never calculated. Nothing on the site knows your bracket, your state, your account type or your holding period.

Corrections

Every figure here is reproducible: a yield is an annual payment over a price, a streak is a list of calendar-year totals, a rate is a named series with an observation date. That makes errors findable, and we would rather find them.

If something looks wrong, send the page address and the figure through Contact. We check the number against the source before changing anything, and the correction process is described on Editorial Policy.