Dividend aristocrats

What makes a dividend aristocrat

The name is informal: a company that has raised its dividend per share every year for at least 25 years in a row. Fifty years earns the nickname “dividend king”. S&P Dow Jones Indices runs an index called the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats with rules of its own, such as size and trading volume; this article does not use its list. It counts what the companies themselves say.

Many companies state their run in their SEC filings, in sentences like this one from Genuine Parts (February 27, 2026): This marks the 70th consecutive year of increasing the dividend. We searched the filings of every S&P 500 company from the last 5 years and kept each one's latest statement: 120 companies state a run, 52 of 25 years or more.

S&P 500 companies, years of increases in a row by their own count in SEC filings (searched November 12, 2026). Runs that ended after the statement are not counted.

Who has raised the longest

Each bar is one company's run of dividend increases, by its own count, ending on the date of the filing that says so. The longest, 70 years, is shared by Dover, Genuine Parts, Parker Hannifin and Procter & Gamble. The 52 runs of 25 years or more reach back as far as about 1957.

37 of these runs are older than the first website (1991), and 14 began before anyone had walked on the Moon (1969). They kept going through the inflation of the 1970s (shaded: years when US consumer prices rose more than 6%), the crash of 1987, 2008 and 2020.

How rare that is

Here is the whole S&P 500, one dot per company. 131 pay no dividend. 273 pay one but have not raised it every year. 43 raised it in every fiscal year of their XBRL filings (since 2008 for most) without stating a run of 25 years. 26 state 25 to 49 years, and 26 state 50 or more.

So about 10% of the index are aristocrats by their own count. In red: companies that said so in the last 5 years but cut afterwards (1). The true number can only be higher: a company that never writes its run into an 8-K, a 10-K or a proxy statement is not counted here.

Every company, every year since 2008

One row per S&P 500 company that paid a dividend in these years, one column per fiscal year, colored by what its dividend per share did against the year before. The rows at the top raised it every single year; red is a cut. In fiscal 2009, 33 of the 197 payers with figures for both years cut or stopped their dividend (17%); in fiscal 2020, 31 of 330 (9%). In the median year from 2008 to 2025 the share was 4%.

Cuts by the filed figures among the companies that state a run of 25 years or more: none in fiscal 2009; none in fiscal 2020. A pale cell is a dip: lower than the year before but back the next year, or still above the year before that, which is how a special dividend or a dividend declared in another fiscal year shows. Every company's run in these filings, sortable, is on Longest runs of dividend increases.

Do aristocrats cut dividends?

Sometimes, and then the run is over. Companies that stated a run of 25 years or more in the last 5 years and have filed a lower dividend per share since: 3M (65 years as of March 22, 2023; cut in fiscal 2024).

The check against the filings: for 43 of the 53 long runs, every fiscal year we can see inside the run shows a higher dividend than the year before. 6 have a year that is flat or lower in the filed figures but no lasting drop (fiscal years and payment dates do not always line up), and 2 show a lasting drop inside the run they state; the table above marks them. One more is not a cut by its own count: Nucor's total dividend per share fell in fiscal 2008 and 2009 when its supplemental dividend, paid on top of the base one, shrank and then ended, while its base dividend kept rising every year.

By industry, the cuts of fiscal 2009 came most often from Financials (12), Real Estate (7) and Consumer Discretionary (4); those of fiscal 2020 from Consumer Discretionary (11), Real Estate (6) and Energy (5).

The S&P 500's dividend since 1871

From January 1871 to June 2026 the dividend paid on the index grew ×314, 3.8% a year; the price grew ×1,678, 4.9% a year. After inflation that is ×11.7 and ×62.6.

The dividend is steadier than the price. Of the 154 calendar years from 1872 to 2025, the dividend fell in 30 and the price (December average) in 52. The dividend's worst year was 1932, at −39.0%. The dividend for 2009 came in −21.1% against 2008, and for 2020 +0.1% against 2019.

In crashes the price fell; the dividend bent

Since 1871 the price has fallen 20% or more from a record 13 times (monthly averages, prices as quoted). In the median fall the price lost 37.7% and the dividend, at its deepest, 9.1%. The dividend fell less than the price in 12 of the 13 falls, and in 3 it did not fall at all.

The deepest fall ran from September 1929 to June 1932: the price lost 84.8%, while the dividend lost 55.1% from December 1930 to December 1933. In the crash that began in 2007 the price lost 50.8% and the dividend 24.1%.