These 15 Dividend Aristocrat stocks have been the best income builders

Below is a screen of the 15 Aristocrats that have raised dividends the most over the past five years. There is another list showing how well stocks listed a year ago in a similar screen have performed.

Despite the focus on dividends, the best way to think about the Aristocrats may be as a long-term growth strategy. The first and oldest group of Aristocrats tracked by S&P Dow Jones Indices is the set of 64 companies in the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats Index XX:SP50DIV. These are companies in the benchmark S&P 500 SPX that have raised regular dividends for at least 25 consecutive years. That is the only requirement — it makes no difference how high a stock’s dividend yield is.

One way to play the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats as a group is to hold shares of the ProShares S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats ETF NOBL, which was established in 2013. So here are comparisons of total returns, with dividends reinvested, for NOBL, the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats Index and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust SPY for various periods through Jan. 6:

If we had run a similar comparison during the long bull market, the Dividend Aristocrats may not have fared so well. For example, for five years through 2021, NOBL returned 103%, while SPY returned 132%. Last year’s 18% decline for SPY made quite a difference.

The best dividend compounders

If you are building a nest egg for retirement, chances are you will want to shift your focus to income generation at some point. You might select stocks with high dividend yields, but a high current payout could be a sign that investors aren’t confident a company can maintain its dividend — if the stock price has fallen, the dividend yield has gone up, at least until the payout is cut.

If you hold shares for many years, and a company raises its dividend year after year, you might build up an income stream with an attractive yield — relative to the price you paid for the shares years ago.

For example, if you bought shares of AbbVie Inc. ABBV at the close on Jan. 6, 2018, you paid $101.11 for your shares. The annual dividend at that time was $2.84 a share, so your dividend yield was 2.81%. The annual dividend is now $5.92 a share and the stock closed at $166.55 on Jan. 6, 2023. So the current yield on the stock is 3.55%, but the yield on your five-year-old shares is 5.86%. Meanwhile, the stock has risen 65%. And if you reinvested your dividends for the five years, the stock has returned 108%, which is double the S&P 500’s return for the same period.

So here is a new expanded screen to look at compound annual growth rates (CAGR). This time around, we are expanding beyond the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats to include two other groups of companies that consistently raise payouts, as tracked by S&P Dow Jones Indices:

• The S&P 400 Dividend Aristocrats Index has 45 stocks of companies that have raised dividends for at least 15 consecutive years, drawn from the S&P Mid Cap 400 Index MID. It is tracked by the ProShares S&P MidCap 400 Dividend Aristocrats ETF REGL.
• The S&P High Yield Dividend Aristocrats Index XX:SPHYDA is made up of the 119 stocks in the S&P Composite 1500 Index XX:SP1500 that have increased dividends for at least 20 straight years. It is tracked by the SPDR S&P Dividend ETF SDY. The S&P Composite 1500 is combination of the S&P 500, the S&P Mid Cap 400 and the S&P 600 Small Cap Index SML. So the S&P High Yield Dividend Aristocrats Index includes all the stocks in the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats Index. But it excludes some that are in the S&P 400 Dividend Aristocrats Index. The name of the High Yield Dividend Aristocrats Index is confusing because the yields aren’t necessarily high — they range from 0.33% to 6.91%.

Altogether, there are 134 S&P Dividend Aristocrats.

For our dividend growth review, we looked at regular dividend payouts five years ago to narrow the list to 74 that had dividend yields of at least 2.00% at that time.

Among the 74 companies, here are the 15 that have increased their dividend payouts the most over the past five years. The list is sorted by five-year CAGR for annual dividend rates:

Click on the tickers for more about each company.

Click here for Tomi Kilgore’s detailed guide to the wealth of information for free on the MarketWatch quote page.

Among these 15 Aristocrats, 11 have beaten the S&P 500’s five-year total return.

Looking back at last year’s list

A year ago we ran a similar screen to list the 12 best payout compounders among the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats for five years through 2021. (Ten of those stocks also appear on the new list, above.)

Leaving the list in the same order they were presented a year ago, here’s how the 12 Aristocrats listed then fared during 2021, as the S&P 500 declined 19% with dividends reinvested:

Nine of the 12 best compounders among the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats for five years through 2021 outperformed the S&P 500 during 2022.

Don’t miss: 20 stocks expected by Goldman Sachs to gain the most from Washington’s clean-energy spending