Dividend calculator

Dividend reinvestment and dividend income, year by year. See what reinvesting does over time, what taking the cash instead would have left you with, and how much you would need invested to live on the income.

Disclosure: I earn nothing from this page. There are no affiliate links here, no broker deals, and nothing is gated. If that ever changes, I will say so right here, in this spot, before anything else.

Every number below is arithmetic on the inputs you type. The defaults are example inputs, not a forecast. Change them.

Your plan

Starting amount ($)

Monthly contribution ($)

Years

Reinvest dividends

Dividend yield (% per year)

Dividend growth (% per year)

Share price growth (% per year)

Payout frequency

Tax on dividends (%)

0 for a tax-advantaged account

Share price today ($)

Only sets the share count. Results are the same at any price.

Ending value

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Dividends collected

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Final-year income

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Reinvesting added

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Portfolio value: reinvesting against taking the cash

Dividends reinvested Dividends taken as cash, cash kept uninvested Money you put in

The gap between the green and the brown line is what reinvesting earned. The brown line still counts the cash dividends you kept, so the comparison is fair: same money in, same shares bought, the only difference is what happened to each payout.

Income target

Monthly income you want ($)

At a dividend yield of (%)

Portfolio needed today

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Your plan gets there in

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The first tile is the yield arithmetic: income divided by yield. The second reads the plan above and reports the first year in which its dividend income, after tax, covers the target. Dividend growth is why the second number is usually smaller than the first tile implies.

Year by year

Year	Put in	Shares	Dividends that year	Yield on cost	Value, reinvested	Value, cash taken

How the numbers are built

Shares, not dollars. The model tracks shares. Your starting amount and every monthly contribution buy shares at that month's price. Each payout pays the dividend per share on every share you hold.

Reinvesting buys more shares at the current price. After tax, if you set one. Those shares earn the next payout, which is the compounding. When you take the cash instead, the cash sits in the total but never earns anything, which is the most generous fair comparison: a real cash pile would usually be spent.

Two growth rates, applied separately. The share price compounds monthly at the rate you set. The dividend per share steps up once a year by the dividend growth rate. Yield is not held constant, it is the result of those two, which is how it works in a real account and why a stock whose dividend grows faster than its price ends up yielding more on your cost.

Yield on cost is the year's dividends divided by everything you have put in so far. It is the number dividend investors quote to each other, and it is the number that rises when you sit still.

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What this is not. It is not a forecast. Dividends get cut, prices fall for years at a time, and you should not assume a payout grows at one smooth rate for two decades. Run the plan with a lower yield and a zero growth rate before you trust the happy version.

Fees and trading costs are not modelled. Taxes are modelled only as a flat percentage of each payout, which ignores brackets, qualified versus ordinary treatment, and foreign withholding. Inflation is not modelled: every figure is in today's dollars only if you treat the growth rates as real rather than nominal.

Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or a solicitation.