Dividend calculator
What a holding pays a year, what that is as a yield today, and what it is as a yield on what you paid. Those are three different numbers people often treat as one. If you reinvest, it also shows the cost base that reinvestment is quietly building. It runs in your browser: nothing you type is sent anywhere, and nothing is saved when you leave.
- Income a year
- $600.00
- Current yield
- 2.86%
- Yield on your cost
- 4.00%
- Position value
- $21,000.00
$150.00 × 4 payments, before any tax.
What a buyer at today’s price would receive.
A fact about what you paid, not about what the holding yields now.
At the price entered above.
Current yield and yield on cost are not the same claim
Current yield divides the annual dividend by today’s price. It answers what someone buying now would receive, which makes it the only one of the two that describes the holding rather than the holder.
Yield on cost divides the same dividend by what you paid. It has a genuine use (seeing what a long-held position now pays against the capital you committed) and one badly misleading property: it rises when the price rises, because the denominator is frozen in the past. So a holder can watch their yield on cost climb for years while the yield an incoming buyer receives falls. It is a record of a decision, not a measure of a return, and it should never be compared against another security’s current yield.
What this does not handle
- Tax. Nothing here is an after-tax figure. Canadian eligible dividends are grossed up and then partly offset by a dividend tax credit, foreign dividends are treated differently again, and the result depends on your province and your income. Dividend investing in Canada explains the mechanism without pretending to compute your rate.
- Whether the distribution is even income. Part of a fund distribution can be return of capital, which is not taxed on receipt and instead reduces your adjusted cost base, the opposite direction from a reinvestment. The split is only known from your tax slip after year end. See return of capital and your cost base.
- Dividends are not contractual. They are declared payment by payment and can be raised, cut or suspended. Every figure here is what today’s rate implies, not what will happen.
- Total return, which is the figure that decides outcomes. A dividend is a transfer of value out of the company to you, not a bonus on top of the share price. Income alone says nothing about whether the position gained.
- Whole-share reinvestment plans. The projection buys fractional shares. Some plans buy whole shares and pay the remainder as cash, which changes the path slightly and is specific to the plan.
Educational only, and accurate to what you enter. This is not advice, not a projection, and not a recommendation of any security. To track the cost base this builds, use the adjusted cost base calculator, and see why two brokerages make cost base harder if the same security is held in more than one account.