A dividend that grows is a raise you never had to ask for. Enter today’s dividend per share, your purchase price, and an annual growth rate to see what the payout — and your yield on cost — looks like years from now.
Answer first: this tool compounds a dividend forward. If a company pays $2.00 per share today and raises the payout 7% a year, the dividend itself snowballs: about $2.81 in five years, $3.93 in ten, and $7.74 in twenty. Because you locked in your purchase price on day one, every raise pushes your yield on cost higher — the same shares that yielded 4% at purchase can be paying you 8%, 12%, or more on your original money a decade later, without you buying a single extra share.
Future dividend = today’s dividend × (1 + growth rate)years
Example: $2.00 growing at 7% for 10 years → $2.00 × 1.0710 ≈ $3.93 per share. On a $50 purchase price, that is a 7.9% yield on cost versus 4% at the start.
Dividend investors constantly face a fork in the road. One stock yields 6% but barely raises its payout; another yields 2.5% but grows the dividend 10% a year. Run both through this calculator and the crossover becomes concrete: the fast grower’s payout catches the high yielder’s in roughly nine years, and after that it pulls away for good. Which one is “better” depends entirely on your time horizon — income needed this year favors the high yielder, income needed in fifteen years usually favors the grower.
| Result | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Future dividend / share | The projected annual payout after compounding every yearly raise |
| Yield on cost | Future dividend divided by the price you paid — your personal yield |
| Starting yield | Today’s dividend divided by your purchase price, for comparison |
| Total income collected | Every dividend paid across the projection, summed (per share or for your share count) |
A useful sanity check is the company’s own track record: its 5- and 10-year dividend growth history, and whether the payout ratio leaves room for more raises. Long streaks of high single-digit growth are common among mature consumer and industrial companies; sustained 15%+ growth usually belongs to younger payers starting from a tiny base and rarely lasts decades. If you type 20% growth for 30 years, the math will happily oblige — reality usually will not.
Reality check: this projection assumes the dividend is raised at a constant rate forever and never cut. Real companies pause and cut dividends in recessions — the 2008–09 crisis saw dozens of household names slash payouts. Treat the output as a scenario, not a promise. Educational tool only — not financial advice.
This calculator ignores reinvestment on purpose, so you can isolate the growth effect. To stack dividend growth and reinvested shares on top of each other, use the DRIP calculator; to work out how much capital you need for a target income today, try the dividend income calculator. New to the topic? Start with what are dividends and dividend yield.
Last updated July 2, 2026 · Written by Mustafa Bilgic. Educational only — not financial advice.
Multiply the current dividend per share by (1 + annual growth rate) raised to the number of years. A $2.00 dividend growing 7% a year becomes about $3.93 in 10 years.
Yield on cost is the current annual dividend divided by the price you originally paid for the shares. Because your cost is fixed, every dividend raise increases your yield on cost.
It depends on your horizon. A high starting yield pays more now; a fast-growing dividend usually overtakes it within a decade and keeps pulling away. Short horizons favor yield, long horizons favor growth.
Many mature dividend payers have raised payouts in the mid single digits to high single digits per year over long periods. Double-digit growth sustained for decades is rare, so test conservative rates too.
No. It deliberately isolates dividend growth on the shares you already own. For reinvestment compounding, use the dividend reinvestment (DRIP) calculator, which buys new shares with each payout.