Only 35% of US-Listed Companies Pay a Dividend. In the S&P 500 It's 81%.

Only 35.2% of US-listed companies pay a dividend: 1,628 of the 4,631 companies counted in our census of SEC filings, as of 16 October 2026. In the S&P 500 the figure is about 81%. So the number most people have in their head describes the 500 largest companies, not the stock market.

I built this census because I kept reading that "about 80% of US stocks pay a dividend", and when I checked, that figure always traced back to the S&P 500. Nobody seemed to publish the same number for every listed company, with the method shown. So I counted. The full tables, sector breakdowns and downloads live on the dividend statistics page and the profitability statistics page. This article explains what the numbers say and why they look the way they do.

About one in three US-listed companies pays a dividend

Of the 4,631 US-listed companies we could check, 1,628 pay a dividend. That is 35.2%. The other 3,003 have no dividend history, have paid nothing for three or more fiscal years, or paid nothing in their latest or previous fiscal year.

The gap with the S&P 500 is not a contradiction. The two figures count different groups. S&P Dow Jones Indices puts the share of S&P 500 members paying a dividend at 81.3% (Q4 2025). Its smaller indices pay less often: 65% for the MidCap 400 and 57% for the SmallCap 600. Among US common stocks outside the S&P 500, S&P counts just 19.4% of issues paying. S&P counts share issues rather than companies, so the figures are not a perfect match, but the picture is clear. Our census sits between those numbers because it includes every US-listed company that files with the SEC and has a recent annual report, from Apple down to biotech companies with no products on the market yet.

Each row counts a different group, so read it as context rather than a trend. It does show the pattern clearly: the bigger and older the company, the more likely it pays.

This is also not new. Eugene Fama and Kenneth French documented it 25 years ago in a paper called Disappearing Dividends. In 1978, 66.5% of NYSE, AMEX and Nasdaq firms paid a dividend. By 1999 it was 20.8%. Part of the drop came from new listings tilting the market toward small, young, less profitable companies. But Fama and French found that companies of every kind had also become less likely to pay, and that this mattered at least as much. Their sample and definitions differ from ours, but the direction matches what we see today.

Some of the biggest names pay nothing

Not paying is not a sign of weakness. Several of the largest US companies pay no dividend at all: Amazon, Tesla, Netflix, Adobe, Uber and Palantir among them. They reinvest their cash in the business or buy back shares instead. AutoZone and O'Reilly Automotive are the classic case of the second: both are very profitable, and both return cash only through buybacks.

Others stopped. Intel suspended its dividend in 2024, and Boeing has not paid a dividend on its common shares since 2020. Going the other way, Meta and Alphabet both started paying in 2024, so the count moves in both directions every year.

Utilities, real estate and banks pay; healthcare and tech mostly do not

The sector spread is enormous, and it explains most of the headline number. Here is every sector, with the three figures side by side.

*Free cash flow excludes banks and insurers, so the financials figure covers only the other financial companies, such as asset managers and exchanges. The energy profitability figure is withheld this edition because too few energy companies passed our filing check.

Utilities, REITs and banks pay because their business model suits it. A regulated utility earns steady cash and has limited room to grow, so it hands most of it back. REITs must distribute most of their taxable income to keep their tax status. Banks and insurers are mostly mature businesses with steady earnings.

Healthcare is the opposite. It is the largest sector in the census, with 831 companies, and many of them are drug developers and biotech companies still spending on research before they have products to sell. Only 24.9% are profitable and only 32.2% generate free cash flow, so a dividend is simply not on the table. That one sector pulls the market-wide dividend share down more than any other. Technology is similar, with 14.9% paying, even though the largest tech companies, such as Apple, Microsoft and NVIDIA, all pay one.

Just over half of US-listed companies are profitable

53.3% of US-listed companies reported positive net income over the last twelve months: 2,348 of 4,408. Put the other way, 46.7% did not make a profit. That can be surprising if you mostly follow large companies.

The pattern follows the dividend table closely. Utilities (81.7%) and financials (78.8%) are the most consistently profitable. Healthcare (24.9%), materials (44.4%) and technology (46.4%) are the least. Profitability is close to a precondition for a dividend, which is why the two lists broadly line up.

57.9% generate free cash flow, and most payers can afford their dividend

Profit is an accounting figure. Free cash flow, operating cash flow minus capital expenditure, is the cash a business actually has left over. Outside banks and insurers (where free cash flow does not mean the same thing), 57.9% of US companies generate positive free cash flow: 1,969 of 3,402.

For dividend investors the more useful question is whether the payers can afford what they pay. Of the 1,022 dividend payers we could check (excluding banks, insurers and REITs), 76.5% cover their dividend with free cash flow. The median profitable payer pays out 36.0% of its earnings, and half of them sit between 21.2% and 69.4%.

Utilities are the exception worth knowing. 69.2% of them pay a dividend, but only 20.3% of those payers cover it from free cash flow. They spend heavily on networks and power plants and fund part of the dividend with debt and new shares. That is normal for the sector and backed by regulated earnings, but it means utility dividends depend on access to capital markets more than most.

Only about one payer in five has raised its dividend 10 years running

Of 1,552 US dividend payers, 345 (22.2%) have raised their dividend per share for at least ten consecutive fiscal years. 190 have done it for 15 years or more. At the other end, 543 payers did not raise their dividend in their latest fiscal year. Utilities lead again: 52.6% of utility payers have a streak of ten years or more. Because machine-readable filings start around 2009, streaks are capped at that point, so very long streaks are undercounted.

What this means if you invest in individual stocks

If you own an S&P 500 index fund, the 81% figure describes what you own. If you pick individual stocks, especially smaller ones, the census describes the market you are actually choosing from: one where most companies pay nothing, almost half are not profitable, and dividends are concentrated in a handful of sectors.

None of this makes a dividend good or bad on its own. A non-payer can be an excellent business reinvesting at high returns, and a payer can be stretching to keep a dividend it cannot afford. What the numbers do say is that a dividend tells you something real about a company: that it is mature, profitable and confident enough in its cash flow to commit to paying it. You can check that for any single company on its dividends page, which shows the payout ratio, free cash flow coverage and streak used in this census.

How the census counts

The population is every US-listed company that files with the SEC and published an annual report in the last 18 months: 4,671 companies this edition. A company is counted in a figure only when every stored number behind that figure matched its own SEC filing, which is why the counts differ slightly between statistics (40 companies were left out of the dividend figure because a number could not be verified).

A company counts as a dividend payer when its dividends page shows a current dividend. It counts as a non-payer when it has no dividend history, has paid nothing for three or more fiscal years, or paid nothing in the latest or previous fiscal year. Profitability uses trailing twelve-month net income, or the latest fiscal year where quarterly figures are incomplete. The full method is on the methodology page, and every limitation is listed on the statistics pages.

How to cite these figures

The figures, tables and charts are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. You can quote, chart and republish them with credit to Intrinsiqq and a link to the statistics page. Please include the date of the figures you use (16 October 2026).

The CSV and JSON downloads are on the dividend and profitability pages. Journalists and researchers who want company-level data can email me at hello@intrinsiqq.com or find more about me on the about page.