Image credit: SyedaAfreen1810443, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Dividends for the U.S. stock market ended 2024 on a positive note. Measured against their year-over-year comparables, the number of favorable dividend changes in December 2024 outweighed the number of unfavorable changes, giving us a net change of +5.

The dividend situation becomes more complex when we get deeper under the hood for the index. The number of firms announcing they would pay an extra or special dividend to their shareholding owners decreased by seven from their December 2023 total. That unfavorable change however was exactly offset by a year-over-year increase of seven firms announcing they were increasing their dividend payouts.

Meanwhile, the number of firms announcing they would decrease their dividends in December 2024 increased by two above their level in December a year ago, which would tip the balance to the unfavorable side of the scale. The only factor that shifted toward a net positive outcome for dividend changes were the seven firms that announced they were resuming paying dividends after having previously suspending or passing on paying them.

It's an unusual way to back into a net positive result, but we'll take it! The following table presents Standard and Poor's dividend metadata for December 2024. It summarizes how the month's dividend data compares in both Month-over-Month (MoM) and Year-Over-Year (YoY) terms with previously reported data:

Let's next visualize just the data for U.S. stock market's dividend increases and decreases, showing how they fit in the trends for this dividend metadata over the past 21 years.

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In the next chart, we've grouped the previous 15 months worth of dividend increase and decrease data into quarters, covering the last five quarters from 2023-Q4 through 2024-Q4.

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Viewed from this perspective, we find the fourth quarter of 2024 is overall slightly more negative than the fourth quarter of 2023. The number of dividend increases by quarter however increased for the second time since bottoming in 2024-Q2, which is a potential cause for concern going into 2025.

To end on a positive note, we also find the overall number of monthly dividend decreases remains below the threshold that is consistent with recessionary conditions being present in the U.S. economy.

References

Standard and Poor. S&P Market Attributes Web File. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 3 January 2025.

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