Stats › Valuation › Dividend yield

S&P 500 dividend yield

Valuation/dividend yield · 1871 to 2026 · 2 sources · data as of 30 Jul 2026

The dividend yield is a simple thing: the cash a company pays out over a year, divided by what its shares cost. Do it for the whole S&P 500 and you get a number that people have used as a rough valuation check for over a century. Today it reads 1.08%, which is the lowest it has ever been in a series that starts in 1871.

Put like that it sounds alarming, and it gets used that way. The truth is more interesting. Some of the fall is real, prices have risen faster than payouts. But a big chunk of it is measurement. Since 1982 companies have returned most of their cash by buying back their own shares instead of paying dividends, and buybacks don't show up in the dividend yield at all. In the twelve months to September 2025, S&P 500 companies paid $664.9 billion in dividends and spent $1.020 trillion on repurchases.

So this page is the yield itself, where it sits against 155 years of history, and the correction you need to apply before comparing today's reading to anything before 1982. It also covers the 1932 record high, which is the best illustration I know of why a big yield is not automatically good news. The historical series and the buyback figures come from two different sources with two different cut off dates, both listed underneath. Worth clicking through, especially if you want to see how the pre 1982 data was assembled.