Dividend stocks whose earnings grew almost every year

The dividend payers whose earnings per share rose in at least four of the last five years, ranked by yield plus earnings growth, with how to build a basket and work out its return.

A dividend is paid out of profit. A company whose profit per share keeps rising can keep raising its dividend without stretching; one whose profit is flat can only raise it by paying out a bigger share of what it earns, and that runs out. So we looked for the dividend payers whose earnings per share rose in at least four of their last five financial years, using the figures each company filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

64 companies qualify today. 21 of them grew earnings in every one of the five years. Below is the full list, what the columns mean, what faster earnings growth has actually meant for dividends in the past, and how people put stocks like these to work.

The list

Each company also passes our dividend screen: at least five years of raises in a row, no cut in five years, and a dividend that is covered. Property trusts (REITs) are left out, because they pay from a different measure of profit and their earnings per share says little. Select a column heading to sort.

Data as of 2026-09-28. A dash means the figure is not meaningful for that company — free cash flow, for example, says little about a bank. The list is refreshed about once a month.

How to read the columns

• Yield is what each dollar invested pays you in a year: the yearly dividend divided by today's share price. A 2% yield on $10,000 is about $200 a year.
• EPS growth is how fast earnings per share — the company's profit divided by its shares — has grown each year on average. We take the lower of the 3-year and 5-year rates. Five years back from 2025 starts at the 2020 COVID slump, so a five-year rate can be mostly a rebound (one retailer reads +134% a year on it); the lower figure is the steadier one.
• Yield + growth is a rough guide to the yearly return a holder has had if the share price kept pace with earnings. More on that below.
• Payout is the share of profit paid out as dividends. Lower leaves more room.
• Cash cover is free cash flow — the cash left after running and investing in the business — divided by the dividends paid. Above 1× means the dividend is paid from cash the business actually made.
• Years up counts the years out of the last five in which earnings per share rose.

What earnings growth has meant for dividends

We tested this without hindsight. At four dates from 2013 to 2019, we rebuilt what every company had filed by then, split companies that passed our dividend screen into thirds by earnings growth, and looked at what their dividends did afterwards.

• Faster earnings growth went with faster dividend raises. The fastest-growing third went on to raise dividends by 8.5% a year, against 5.4% for the slowest third. That held at all four dates.
• It did not reliably mean a safer dividend. 15.2% of the fastest growers later cut, against 20.4% of the slowest — too close to call.
• For safety, payout and cash cover mattered more. Among the same companies, the third paying out the least of their profit cut 10.4% of the time; the third paying out the most cut 30.7%. Weak cash cover: 26.2%; strong: 12.8%.

Conservative is not the same as safe

Dividend stocks have a reputation as the careful end of the market, and some of it is earned. A company that pays a growing dividend has to produce real cash every year to do it, which is hard to fake. It is usually a mature business. And the holder gets paid whatever the share price does.

But the numbers from our own testing are a useful corrective:

• They still fall. A basket of every company passing our dividend screen fell 36–38% at its worst, in early 2020. SCHD, a dividend ETF, fell 33%.
• Dividends get cut. Even among companies that passed the screen, 18–28% cut their dividend at some point in the years that followed. A dividend is not a bond coupon; the board can reduce it at any time.
• Low-yield growers behave like growth stocks. A company yielding 1% whose earnings grew 30% a year is priced on that growth, and its share price will move like it.

Building a basket

A single stock can cut its dividend or stumble; a basket spreads that. Some principles people commonly use, and what our own testing says about them:

1. Hold enough of them. If roughly one in five screened companies cuts at some point, five holdings will very likely include a cut. Twenty to thirty spreads it thinly enough that one cut costs little income.
2. Weight them equally. The same amount in each is simple, and stops one favourite dominating.
3. Cap each sector. Of the 64 names above, 16 are financial services and 14 are industrials. Taking the top twenty by rank alone would lean heavily on a couple of industries. Three or four per sector keeps one bad year for one industry from hitting the whole basket.
4. Mix yield and growth on purpose. A few higher-yielding names pay you now; the fast growers pay little today but have raised their dividends faster. Sort the table by Yield, then by EPS growth, and pick from both ends.
5. Check payout and cover before buying. Our screen flags a payout above 80% or cash cover below 1.5× as worth a closer look; those measures separated later cuts in our testing.
6. Trade rarely. Review once a year. Every trade has a cost, and our retired trading bot lost almost a third of its profit to trading costs.
7. Compare it with an ETF. A basket of every company our screen picked matched SCHD's return over seven to fourteen years, with deeper falls. If a hand-built basket cannot beat a cheap fund, the fund is the sensible default — building your own is for control over what you own and what income it pays, not for extra return.

How to work out the return

Total return counts both halves of what a dividend stock gives you: the change in the share price, and the dividends paid along the way.

Over several years, the comparable figure is the yearly rate that would turn the start value into the end value: (end ÷ start) to the power of (1 ÷ years), minus 1. $10,000 growing to $20,000 in ten years is (2)^0.1 − 1 = 7.2% a year.

The yield-plus-growth shortcut. If a company pays out the same share of its profit every year, its dividend grows as fast as its earnings, and if investors keep valuing it at the same multiple of earnings, the share price does too. Your yearly return is then roughly the yield plus the earnings growth — the Yield + growth column. It fails when either assumption breaks: when investors decide to pay less for each dollar of earnings, or when growth slows, as very fast growth usually does.

Yield on cost is the dividend you receive today divided by what you originally paid. Buy at a 1.5% yield and see the dividend raised 10% a year, and after ten years you are receiving about 3.9% a year on your original money, even though the yield quoted for new buyers may be unchanged.

How experienced investors use dividend growers

• Income without selling. In retirement, living on dividends means not having to sell shares after a fall to raise cash — selling low is what does lasting damage to a portfolio.
• Reinvesting while working. Before the income is needed, dividends are reinvested to buy more shares, which pay more dividends. Every return figure in our research includes reinvested dividends; over a decade they make up a large part of the total.
• Buying the growth, not the yield. A very high yield can mean the market expects a cut. Many dividend investors would rather own a 2% yield rising 10% a year than a 6% yield standing still — the first overtakes the second on original cost in about twelve years.
• A core fund plus a few names. A common setup is a low-cost dividend ETF as the core, with a handful of individual companies the investor understands and follows.
• Holding them in the right account. For UK investors, an ISA or SIPP keeps dividends free of UK tax. US companies' dividends also have US tax withheld at source: 15% with a W-8BEN form filed through your platform, 30% without; pension accounts are usually exempt. Check how your platform handles it.

Method and limits

• Earnings are diluted earnings per share from each company's annual 10-K filing, via SEC EDGAR, adjusted for share splits. Payout and cash cover come from our dividend screen's fundamentals; the yield is moved to the latest share price.
• Only US filers appear: companies that report to the SEC on the US standard. Some well-known foreign dividend payers are missing for that reason.
• The past is not a forecast. Growth of 20% a year or more rarely lasts, and the list describes the last five financial years, not the next five.
• The earnings-growth test ran at mid-2013, 2015, 2017 and 2019 on 658 company-dates that passed the dividend screen; the dates overlap, so they are not independent experiments. Every figure on this page is produced by a script in our codebase, last run on 2026-09-28.