Stats › Listings, IPOs and corporate actions › Dividend Aristocrats

The Dividend Aristocrats

Listings/Aristocrats · S&P DJI index · May 2026 · 1 source · data as of 31 Jul 2026

A Dividend Aristocrat is a company in the S&P 500 that has raised its dividend every single year for at least twenty five years. Sixty nine companies currently clear that bar. The appeal is obvious. Twenty five unbroken years of increases, through 2008 and through 2020, says something real about how reliably a business produces cash. Where it gets interesting is the returns. This is a proper index with published rules and published performance, not a list somebody keeps on a blog, and the numbers are free to download. Over ten years the Aristocrats returned 5.63% a year while the S&P 500 they are drawn from returned 14.15%. A strategy widely marketed on quality has lagged its own parent index by more than eight points a year for a decade.

I put this page together because that gap has a straightforward explanation almost nobody includes when they are selling the idea, and because the strategy does have a genuine case for it, just not the case it usually gets sold on. So you get the eligibility rules, how the Aristocrats differ from the Dividend Kings, why the ten year record came out the way it did, and what the approach is actually good at.

Nearly all of it comes off a single S&P Dow Jones Indices factsheet dated 29 May 2026. It is linked at the bottom and it runs to a couple of pages. Read that rather than me.