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Global dividend payments
Companies that generate more cash than they need send some of it to their shareholders. Add that up across the listed world and you get one number for how much money moved from businesses to their owners in a year. In 2024 it was $1.75 trillion, a record, and it was up on the year on both of the measures this index publishes. US companies paid $651.6 billion of that.
This page breaks the figure into the parts that actually tell you something. There are two growth rates rather than one, and the difference between them matters. There's the share of companies that raised or held their payout, which describes the health of the whole set far better than the total does. There's the sector split, which is lopsided, and a breadth figure: 17 of the 49 countries covered hit record dividend levels, including the US, Canada, France, Japan and China. And there's the thing I found most interesting in the whole dataset. Meta, Alphabet and Alibaba started paying dividends, and those three companies alone accounted for roughly a fifth of the world's dividend growth that year.
The data is Janus Henderson's Global Dividend Index, for full year 2024. There's a 2025 forecast on the page as well, clearly marked as a forecast, and I'd ask you not to quote it as an outcome. The index is published quarterly, so the full year 2025 numbers will supersede these once they're accessible. Press releases are linked at the bottom if you want the originals.
Global dividends reached a record $1.75 trillion in 2024, with headline growth of 5.2% and underlying growth of 6.6%. US companies paid $651.6 billion of that. 88% of companies either raised their dividend or held it steady, with a median increase of 6.7%. The single most interesting item: Meta, Alphabet and Alibaba began paying dividends and together distributed $15.1 billion, accounting for roughly one fifth of all global dividend growth that year.
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