The Best Dividend Growth Stocks for 2026

A 0.6% dividend can beat a 6% one. If a company raises its payout at 15% a year, the income you collect on your original cost roughly doubles every five years, so a tiny starting yield compounds into a large one while a frozen high yield stays exactly where it is. Those are dividend growth stocks. We ranked 25 of them by our dividend score, computed from SEC EDGAR filings, and the highest-scoring is Accenture (ACN) at 91 out of 100, with a 3.4% yield covered more than three times over by free cash flow. The full ranked table is below, followed by the case for each of the top ten. To see what that compounding looks like on your own numbers, the dividend reinvestment calculator runs a holding with the payments reinvested against the same holding with the payments taken as cash.

Why dividend growth beats a big starting yield

The number that matters to a long-term holder is yield on cost: the dividend measured against what you actually paid, not against today's price. It is the only way to see what a growing payout does over time, because the quoted yield resets every time the share price moves and therefore hides all of the compounding.

Work the arithmetic once and the argument stops being a matter of opinion. A payout growing 15% a year multiplies roughly fourfold over ten years and eightfold over fifteen. So a stock bought at a 1% yield is paying about 4% on your original cost after a decade and around 8% after fifteen years, and it is still raising. A 6% yield that never grows is still paying 6% in year fifteen, except inflation has taken a real bite out of it the entire time. The crossover, the year the grower's income overtakes the high-yielder's, arrives somewhere around year twelve or thirteen for that pair, and everything after that is the grower pulling away.

There is a second effect that gets less attention and probably matters more. A company able to raise its dividend at a double-digit rate for fifteen years is, almost by definition, a company whose profits are also growing at a good clip, because no payout can outrun earnings indefinitely. So the rising income usually arrives alongside a rising share price. The static 6% yielder, meanwhile, is often static precisely because the business is not growing. You are not choosing between two income streams. You are usually choosing between two very different businesses.

The 25 best dividend growth stocks, ranked

Sorted by dividend score. Coverage is free cash flow divided by dividends paid, so 3.2x means the company generated more than three times the cash it handed out. EPS growth is the five-year compound annual rate. Figures as of 25 August 2026.

What the data says about dividend growers

Ranking 25 companies by the same score surfaces a pattern that is hard to see one stock at a time: nearly all of them are asset-light toll booths. Look at how they cluster.

• Exchanges and market infrastructure: Cboe, Intercontinental Exchange, Nasdaq, Moody's, MSCI. They take a small fee on activity they do not have to fund, and the fee scales with volume rather than with headcount or factories.
• Payment networks: Visa and Mastercard, which take a cut of card spending without carrying the credit risk of the underlying loans. Both cover their dividend more than four times over.
• Insurance brokers and asset gatherers: Brown & Brown, Marsh & McLennan, Ameriprise, Allstate, Raymond James. Ameriprise covers its dividend 13.4 times over and Allstate 11.5 times, the two highest figures in the table by a wide margin.
• Business-process incumbents: ADP, Broadridge, Accenture, Intuit. Deeply embedded in customers' operations, expensive to rip out, paid on renewal.

The common thread is that none of them needs much capital to grow. A utility has to build the grid before it can earn on it, which is exactly why its payout ratio is high and its growth rate is low. A payment network adds a transaction at almost no marginal cost. That is the structural reason these businesses can pay out a small share of profits, raise it every year, and still fund their own expansion. If you are looking for growers beyond this list, that is the shape to look for, and it is a far more reliable filter than the sector label.

The top ten, in depth

1. Accenture (ACN), 3.43% yield, score 91

The highest dividend score in the table, and the rare grower that also pays you properly today. Accenture's consulting and IT-services business is asset-light in the purest sense: its assets go home every evening, so it converts a very high share of profit into free cash flow, which covers the dividend 3.2 times over. That funds both a 3.4% yield and a record of raises stretching back at least 14 years in the filings. Earnings have compounded at 9% a year over five years and the payout takes roughly half of profits, so there is room to keep going. It is the unusual case where you are not forced to choose between income now and income later.

2. Zoetis (ZTS), 2.83% yield, score 88

Animal health, spun out of Pfizer in 2013, and a quietly excellent business. Pet medicine spends are unusually resilient, owners cut other things first, and livestock producers treat veterinary products as a cost of doing business rather than a discretionary purchase. That gives Zoetis a steadier revenue line than most of pharma, without the patent cliffs that dominate human drugs. Earnings have grown 12% a year over five years, coverage is a comfortable 2.6x, and the dividend has risen for at least 13 years. The lowest-drama company on this list.

3. Broadridge Financial (BR), 2.04% yield, score 87

The company that mails your proxy statements, and one of the most entrenched businesses you have probably never considered owning. Broadridge processes shareholder communications and trade settlement for a large share of the market, work that is regulated, unglamorous, and extremely hard to displace once a client depends on it. That produces the profile the score rewards: 15.6% five-year earnings growth, 2.9x coverage, and at least 17 years of raises. A textbook toll booth.

4. Allstate (ALL), 1.60% yield, score 86

Coverage of 11.5x, the second-highest figure in the table. Allstate generates more than eleven times its dividend in free cash flow, which means the payout could survive a catastrophic underwriting year without being touched. Insurers throw off cash because premiums arrive before claims are paid, and the float in between belongs to the company. Earnings have compounded at 17% over five years off a depressed base. The caveat is honest: property insurance earnings are lumpy by nature, and a bad hurricane season moves them a lot. The dividend is what looks safe here, not the quarterly earnings line.

5. Raymond James (RJF), 1.22% yield, score 86

A wealth-management and brokerage firm whose economics are better than the “bank” label suggests. The bulk of its revenue comes from fees on client assets it advises rather than from lending spreads, and advised assets are famously sticky, because clients move advisers far less often than they move products. 21.6% five-year earnings growth is the second-fastest in the table, coverage is 5.6x, and the raises run back at least 15 years. Cyclical exposure to markets is real, but the fee base cushions it.

6. Snap-on (SNA), 2.28% yield, score 86

Hand tools sold out of vans to professional mechanics, which sounds mundane until you look at the margins. Snap-on's franchisee-van model puts the product in front of technicians at their workplace and finances the purchase, so it earns on both the tool and the loan, and its brand carries genuine pricing power in a trade where tool failure costs a working day. 10.9% earnings growth, 2.3x coverage, at least 16 years of raises. The lowest coverage in the top six, which is why it sits sixth rather than higher.

7. Intuit (INTU), 1.30% yield, score 85

TurboTax and QuickBooks give Intuit one of the stickiest software franchises anywhere: once a small business runs its books in QuickBooks, moving means re-entering years of history, and tax software gets re-bought every single year by construction. Coverage is 5.9x, among the best here, and earnings have grown 14.6% a year over five years. The yield is 1.3%, which is the entire point. A low payout ratio against fast-growing, high-margin recurring revenue is the engine that turns a small dividend into a large one.

8. Elevance Health (ELV), 1.75% yield, score 85

One of the largest US health insurers, and the most contentious name in the top ten. The dividend metrics are strong: 4.2x coverage, 7% five-year earnings growth, at least 14 years of raises. But managed care has had a difficult stretch, with medical cost trends running ahead of pricing across the industry, and the sector carries political risk that does not show up in any coverage ratio. Included because the filings support it, flagged because the score measures the durability of the payout and not the direction of the business.

9. Ameriprise Financial (AMP), 1.17% yield, score 82

The highest coverage figure in the entire table at 13.4x, paired with the fastest five-year earnings growth at 24.4%. Ameriprise runs advice and asset management for affluent US households, a fee-based model with very high retention. A 1.17% yield against thirteen times coverage tells you the dividend is a rounding error against the cash the business produces, which is exactly the condition that allows decades of raises. Markets-linked, so revenue falls when asset prices do, but the payout has a very long way to fall before it is under any pressure.

10. ADP (ADP), 2.38% yield, score 82

Payroll and HR services, and about as recession-resistant as a business gets: companies keep running payroll in any economy, and ADP earns interest on the client funds it holds in transit, so higher rates are a tailwind rather than a headwind. It shows at least 18 years of increases in the filings, our ceiling, and its true record is far longer. The one number that keeps it at tenth is coverage of 2.0x, the thinnest in this group. Still comfortable, but ADP hands back more of its cash than the names above it. If you want dividend growth without giving up much current income, this is the best blend on the list.

Growth or yield: which should you pick?

Decide by your timeframe, and be concrete about it. If you are spending from the portfolio now, in retirement or close to it, a safe high yield wins and no amount of future compounding changes that; see our companion list of the safest high-yield dividend stocks. If you are still building and your horizon is comfortably longer than the crossover point, typically twelve to fifteen years for a fast grower against a static high yield, growth wins and usually wins by a lot.

The mistake worth naming is holding growers for the wrong reason. If you buy Mastercard at a 0.57% yield and sell it in three years, the dividend never mattered; you owned a growth stock and should judge it as one. Dividend growth is a strategy that pays for patience specifically, and it does very little for anyone who will not hold long enough to collect.

How to vet a dividend grower yourself

• Payout ratio first. Under about 40% is what leaves room for years of double-digit raises. A grower with a 70% payout ratio has already spent its runway.
• Free-cash-flow coverage, not just earnings. Earnings can be managed; cash is harder to fake. Everything in the table above covers its dividend at least twice over, and the top names cover it four to thirteen times.
• Earnings growth behind the raises. A dividend can outrun profits for a few years and no longer. If the payout is growing 15% while EPS grows 3%, the raises are borrowed from the payout ratio and will stop.
• The length and continuity of the record. A long unbroken streak shows the increases are policy rather than a one-off. Check for a pause as well as a cut: several companies quietly froze payouts in 2020 without cutting them, which a “no cuts” screen misses entirely.
• Whether the business needs capital to grow. The structural test from the section above, and the one that generalises best beyond any particular list.

Intrinsiqq computes the payout ratio, free-cash-flow coverage, raise history, and a 0-100 dividend score for every US stock we cover, all from SEC filings, so you can run these five checks on any candidate in a few seconds. The full method for judging dividend safety is written up separately, and the exact weightings are on the methodology page.

Three mistakes that ruin a dividend-growth portfolio

Screening on yield. Sorting by yield and taking the top of the list systematically selects for companies whose share price has fallen, and filters out almost every business capable of raising its payout for twenty years. Every name in our top ten yields under 3.5%, and most yield under 1.5%. A yield screen would have excluded all of them.

Treating the streak as the whole thesis. A long record of raises is evidence of intent, not of capacity. Plenty of long-streak companies have kept raising by pushing the payout ratio steadily higher, which works right up until it does not. Read the streak alongside the coverage, never on its own.

Reinvesting without checking the price. Automatic reinvestment is the engine of dividend-growth compounding, but it buys at whatever the market is asking. If a grower has run to an expensive multiple, reinvestment is quietly buying an overvalued stock every quarter. Worth checking the valuation of a grower occasionally rather than never.