Stats › Listings, IPOs and corporate actions › Dividends and buybacks
S&P 500 dividends and buybacks
When a company has more cash than it needs, it has two ordinary ways of handing some back to the people who own it. It can pay a dividend, which puts money in your account and a tax bill on your desk. Or it can buy its own shares back off the market, which retires them and quietly makes every remaining share a slightly bigger slice of the same business. Both are cash returned to shareholders. Only one of them shows up in the yield figure everyone quotes.
That's the reason this page exists. The S&P 500's dividend yield is sitting at 1.08%, the lowest reading in a series that goes back to 1871, and if you stopped there you'd conclude that American companies have basically stopped paying their owners anything. They haven't. Over the twelve months to September 2025 they returned $1.685 trillion between the two channels. The yield fell partly because prices climbed, and partly because the plumbing changed decades ago and the standard measure never caught up.
So on this page you'll find the quarterly totals for both channels, who the biggest buyers actually are, and a detail I think is more interesting than the record itself: the share of index companies doing any buyback at all has been falling while the total goes up. Everything comes from three sources, listed with their publication dates at the bottom. I'd rather you checked them than trusted me.
S&P 500 companies spent a record $1.020 trillion on buybacks in the twelve months to September 2025, the first time the figure has crossed a trillion, and paid a further record $664.9 billion in dividends. Combined shareholder return hit $1.685 trillion. Yet the index dividend yield sits at 1.08%, the lowest in a series going back to 1871, because the money increasingly goes out as buybacks rather than dividends and because prices have risen faster than payouts.
Members only
The rest of this page is for members
Below this point there are 8 sections, 1 chart, 2 tables and 3 named sources, roughly 1200 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
You can keep browsing every statistic in the library for free. The intro and the summary are always open.