September 2025 was a disappointing month for dividend investors in the U.S. stock market. For the eighth month in a row, the net outcome of favorable and unfavorable changes among dividend paying stocks was negative.

That's what we find after adding up all the favorable year-over-year dividend actions like dividend increases, extra dividends and resumptions during September 2025 and then subtracting all the unfavorable actions, like announced dividend decreases. The result of that math is a single number that summarizes all the dividend changes during the month, which for September 2025, produced a value of -46.

This outcome resulted from two factors. First, there was a year-over-year increase in obviously unfavorable dividend changes with September 2025 having 17 dividend decreases announced during the month, an increase of eight over September 2024's total of 9 firms announcing reduced dividend payments.

The second factor is less obvious but had a bigger impact. The number of firms announcing favorable dividend increases dropped from a total of 136 in September 2024 to just 98 in September 2025. That reduction of 38 dividend increases pulled the number of net dividend changes well into negative territory as bearish factors in the market figuratively intercepted a substantial number of potential dividend hikes.

September 2025's favorable and unfavorable dividend actions are tallied in the following table, which reveals how much they changed since September 2024 (year-over-year) and since August 2025 (month-over-month).

The following chart tracks the monthly counts of dividend increases and decreases from January 2004 through September 2025:
 

The good news is the number of dividend decreases remains well below the threshold that indicates outright recessionary conditions are present within the U.S. economy. The bad news is the number of dividend increases has dropped to a level that indicates many publicly-traded companies in the U.S. are facing substantial headwinds. Whether that might turn into recessionary conditions is a reason to keep paying close attention to these near-real time economic indicators.

The next chart visualizes how the dividend increases and decreases reported during 2025-Q3 compare with each of the preceding four quarters:
 

This chart underscores the curious state of the U.S. stock market's dividends, in which dividend increases have fallen off considerably since the first quarter of 2025, while the number of dividend decreases has been relatively steady, falling within a comparatively narrow range.

Will that pattern continue in the next month and quarter? Stay tuned!

References

Standard and Poor. S&P Market Attributes Web File. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 1 October 2025.

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