The Biggest Dividend Raises of 2026 (So Far)

Dozens of major companies have announced their dividend raises for early 2026. But as dividend investors, we know not all raises are created equal. While companies like Dell have shocked the market with a 20% dividend increase, extremely popular dividend growth stocks like Home Depot barely raised at all at 1. 3%. Dividend growth is one of the most important factors, especially if you're planning to live off of your dividend income. And ideally, you want to target companies that are continually raising their payments year after year. And if

you're following that strategy, you need to make sure that you're tracking your portfolio, knowing when your dividend income is coming in and how it's growing over time. To help you do that, I built a free dividend portfolio tracker available in Google Sheets and Excel. And it automatically updates with the market prices, forward-looking dividend payments, X dividend dates, payment dates, dividend growth rates, payout ratios, and even valuation metrics like P ratios. And it helps let you know what dividends are coming up and give you a projected annual calendar. And this all automatically updates. All you have to do is enter in your ticker symbol and the shares you own. You can download your free copy of this template with the link in the description and pin comment

of the video. Here's the secret about dividend investing. A lot of these dividend raises and even cuts or pauses. They can be predictable if you look at the underlying fundamentals of the business. Dividend payments are downstream of business performance. If a company's earnings are plateauing or declining, they'll have less capacity to grow or even maintain their dividend. As an example, Home Depot had fast dividend growth in the prior decade, but that's because their earnings and free cash flow were growing in that time, but we have seen a slowdown in recent years. Other examples I'll share today like Fix Comfort Systems USA, they are seeing rapid earnings and free cash flow growth, and that is leading to rapid dividend growth as well. And when we're looking at dividend stocks, we're really just analyzing businesses because after all, dividends are just a portion of a company's profits that they're paying out to you, the shareholder. You have to analyze the financial health, the growth of the business, and the sustainability of the pale. And that's why I built divinata. com to help me analyze the fundamentals of the business. I can instantly tell how it's been growing and take into account analyst estimates for earnings per share growth in the coming years. I'll be using this throughout the video when I analyze the top six dividend raises in early 2026. Some of those examples will be of very high growth dividend stocks and then other companies will be ones with surprisingly low dividend raises. And I'll explain why that's happening and what it means going forward. So if you want to follow

along and use the same research tools that I use, you can sign up for Dividend Data Pro. We're doing a March Madness sale where you can get 50% off annual membership. It's the best deal we ever offer and you can lock in that low price for life and that gets you our dividend data terminal, the research product I'm using throughout plus dividend data for spreadsheets. You get access to all the data with very high usage rates and that's that tool that lets you take 30 plus years of all our financial metrics automatically bring it into Excel and Google Sheets and it powers these automatically updating spreadsheet templates like this portfolio tracker. And by the way, I'll be releasing a lot more of these templates in the coming weeks. So, click link in the description and pin comment if you want to get 50% off Dividend Data Pro. Now, let's dive

into the biggest raises of 2026. And some of these I'll quickly go over and then other examples I'll dive in cuz they'll have a very important lesson that we can learn from and apply to other stocks going forward. First, I'm

going to start with Domino's Pizza, ticker symbol DPZ. They just had a 14. 4% dividend increase. And when we dive in to take a look at their business fundamentals, you can see that earnings per share have consistently grown year after year. And in the recent quarter, they had all-time high quarterly EPS of $5. 35. This gives them a 22. 8 P ratio over the trailing 12 months. And on a forward-looking basis, they're expected $19. 86 of earnings per share, which is a 20. 2p ratio at current prices. And this business growth for Domino's has powered the growth of their dividend. They've become quite a reliable dividend growth stock. In fact, going back since 2013, they've been raising their payout every single year, and that's at a 10-year compound annual growth rate of 18%. The 3-year is still 18%. And if we take a look at their three most recent dividend raises, this one was 14%, the one prior was 15%, and the one before that was much higher at 24%. So, we're starting to see a trend around more of the 15% range in backtoback years. And with that dividend raise, the current forward-looking yield for Domino's Pizza is not too bad for a high growth dividend, 1. 98%. And if we head over to the AI analyst tool within dividend data. com, type in DPZ dividend yield, we can see that right now this is actually the highest dividend yield for Dominoes over the past 5 years. This is typically a very low yield stock. And that's because the stock price hasn't done that much over the past 5 years. It's only up 10% over the past 5 years, while the dividend in that time averaged a compound annual growth rate of 16. 18%. So, the price hasn't moved, but that dividend has kept compounding year-over-year. And it's still very sustainable as well. If we take a look at the payout ratio based on both free cash flow and net income, you can see the free cash flow payout ratio is 35%. And for the past decade, it's always been in that 20 to 40% range. Similar with net income, the current payout ratio is 39%. And it's been in that 20 to 40% range for about a decade. And if we take a look at the Domino's P ratio over time, the Ford looking P ratio right now at 20, that's historically low. And I haven't done a full analysis on Domino's Pizza, but it looks decently attractive, at least on a historical basis. Right now, could be a good entry point. And especially if you're someone who's trying to diversify away from tech stocks cuz you don't know what's going to happen with AI, pizza's pizza. probably not going to get disrupted that

much. Next up, I'm going to have an interesting one to discuss, which is Walmart, ticker symbol WMT. They had a 5. 3% dividend raise. Plus, they announced a $30 billion stock buyback program. That is another way that companies reward their shareholders, and Walmart stock has absolutely been crushing it in recent years. In terms of share price, it's up 171% over the past 3 years. That's about 5% off its all-time high. Now, this one is interesting because on the surface, Walmart's looking quite overvalued, and it's a similar story to what people say when they analyze Costco stock. These companies are starting to trade at very high multiples. But this is where you have to dive into the actual businesses underneath cuz there's actually a very interesting story to tell. With Costco, you have a very significant portion of their profitability, which is coming from their memberships. So, although that's a small portion of their revenue, that is high margin subscription profits. and they have a clear path to growing that membership base year after year, not even accounting for any potential price increases. And they definitely underpric their memberships, but that's on purpose. That's part of their strategy. And I think this is a factor that people aren't thinking about when they analyze Costco. And there's some of that going on even with Walmart. Slightly different. And we'll be able to see this actually if we load into Excel and I try and copy in the KPIs for Costco. So here you can see a little graph of the Costco membership fee, their quarterly revenue. And over the past six years, this has nearly doubled. So, as we go back to Walmart, there is a similar story going on. And it's in two businesses. They have their own membership business. I believe they call it Walmart Plus or something like that. So, this is a subscription membership, high margins. Then they also have a Walmart advertising business, which will be another big profit generator long-term for the company, for their e-commerce side. And if you've studied Amazon stock, you know what a big profit driver ads is for Amazon. So, in my opinion, I think that's why we've seen such an acceleration in the PE ratio that Walmart and going back to Costco, why these companies trade at such a high multiple. We know that they're huge. They have a dominant market position, but retail, it's super low margin. It's not a very profitable business. But with Walmart, we have their membership and their digital ads business, which is increasingly becoming a larger portion of their overall profitability and arguably will attribute more to their bottomline profits in the coming years. And what that will mean is that they'll have more capital available to reward shareholders and raise their dividend. But with that said, this latest 5% raise, it's pretty conservative. It's actually fallen below what they were doing recently. The raise prior was 13. 2% 2% and the one before that was 9. 2%. So, personally, I was thinking Walmart would stay on a heavy pattern of higher dividend increases and I think in the coming years they'll go back to that. But for a while, I thought Walmart was a complete dog that was overvalued because from 2013 to 2023, they had a decade where they were only raising their dividend payment 1% about a year. And the company, they have a lot of room to be raising this payout because it is quite sustainable around a 20% free cash flow payout ratio, 34% net income payout ratio, and we know that they're accelerating their share repurchase program. So on a go forward basis for Walmart, I would expect higher dividend raises, but with a 0. 78% forward-looking dividend yield and a historically high P ratio. Like I said, Walmart's been starting to trade at a much higher multiple. They were never even in the 30p ratio range and now they're in the 40s. So Walmart, it's trading at a premium right now. I don't think it's a buying opportunity, but it's also not super overvalued because as I was mentioning, they're rerating the business because a higher portion of the actual profits of the business are becoming these higher growth. They're businesses with a higher capacity to grow in the future and they'll typically trade at a higher multiple compared to retail. So, it makes sense, but that doesn't mean that it's attractive right now either. Next up for stock number

three, I'm going to talk about Coca-Cola, ticker symbol KO. One of the classic dividend stocks, 50 plus years of dividend increases, they just had a 3. 9% raise, which is on the lower side, but if you've been analyzing Coca-Cola stock over the years, I've been kind of saying this is going to happen. You'll have a very reliable payment, but you're not going to be getting high dividend growth out of Coca-Cola. The company trades at a premium for its low earnings growth. You've been seeing a slight reaceleration in earnings per share growth in the last 5 years, but it was pretty flat before that. Right now, analysts are projecting 8 to 7% annual EPS growth, which is actually pretty good considering this is a giant stable company. So, with these expectations, if they do start growing earnings per share, a couple years from now, you could see dividend growth start to accelerate again. Right now, the 10-year compound annual growth rate for the Coca-Cola dividend is 4. 24%. 24% and they've been basically averaging four or 5% annually and this 3. 92 basically 4%. Now for analyzing the sustainability of this dividend payment though it might jump off the screen here that for 2 years in a row the free cash flow payout ratio has seemed unsustainable 165% and 176% last year. So what that means is they're paying out more in dividends than they're actually generating in free cash flow. The interesting part is their net income payout ratio is actually proving to be sustainable though at 66%. So I did some digging about why this actually is and the discrepancy. So I'm going to use the dividend day for spreadsheets load in the cash flow statement here for Coca-Cola. I'm going to look at it annually and dude look how fast that loads in. It's pretty cool. And I'll chart out here the operating cash flow and free cash flow so you can see what I'm talking about. we've had a huge drop in the operating cash flow here in the orange. And when I saw this I was actually very surprised. I'm like, "This doesn't make any sense when you just look at their quarterly EPS. Why is their cash flow situation bad? " And it's weird because typically you'll see errors in the GAP earnings per share. While the cash flow side of the business is usually the more accurate take of the business, we've seen this in the past when we analyze things like the Altria Group. GAAP accounting can get messed up for many different reasons. We could go into that another time. So, I did some research into what was happening in these years because I want to know whether the Coca-Cola dividend is sustainable. That would be a big story if Coca-Cola, something that's been increasing its dividend for 50 plus years, suddenly had to cut it for any reason, or even if they just stopped raising it. And it's pretty interesting. There are basically two outlier events that happened. In 2024, they had to make a settlement with the IRS. So, they had a $6 billion onetime expense, and that had to do with how they trade their international business in many prior years. Then the other thing was a $6. 1 billion payment. This was in 2025 and it was their final payout in the acquisition of the Fairlife company. That's that milk business. Remember, Coca-Cola is not just Coca-Cola. They're a diversified beverage company. They own tons of different brands. So, I guess they had these payouts for this acquisition. But even that, those explanations, they seemed weird to me. I didn't really get it because usually it's the GAP accounting that accounts for a lot of these one-time expenses, whether it's lawsuits or any kind of thing like that or acquisitions. But Coca-Cola apparently they follow a very strict GAAP accounting even with their operating cash flow and free cash flow and basically since they had the money go out in those years they did take it out of their cash flow and they actually took the YAP accounting hit in prior years. So anyway, it's a little bit of a niche reason, but I thought it was interesting. And as we analyze Coca-Cola stock and their free cash flow that they're generating in 2026 and future years, we'll be back up to these prior highs likely. And overall, I would still say Coca-Cola's dividend payment is quite sustainable. And this latest dividend raise, I would say that's a signal towards that as well. So if you own the company and it's a part of your dividend income, I wouldn't be worried about a cut even with these higher payout ratios. But if you're looking at Coca-Cola stock to buy right now, it's definitely trading at a premium, not a discount. Stock number four I'm going to

share today. One that I've highlighted on the channel over this past year. I wish that I bought it. Some of you I know watching this did buy it and you're welcome. I guess sometimes you make more money off of what I say than I do. That's Comfort Systems USA, ticker symbol FIX or FIX. They just raised their dividend payment by another 16. 7%. And this company has absolutely been crushing it over the past 3 years. On stock price alone, it's up 900% over the past 3 years. 294% over the past year and you can see the rapid increase in the earnings per share and the stock price has followed suit as it should. Remember, in the short term, this is a Warren Buffett quote. In the short term, the market is a voting machine. So, it's very emotional. Sometimes it's divorced from reality, but over the long term, it's a weighing machine. And if you see a business that's consistently growing, if they're raking in giant profits on an increasing basis, they'd call this a heavy company. And eventually, the valuation will reflect the earning power of the business. So, that's why you've seen this major raise in the stock price for fix. And the dividend yield for this super low at 0. 21% but the payout ratio is less than 10%. And you're seeing the rapid dividend growth here underneath because the fundamentals of the business are exploding. 3year compound annual growth rate of the dividend 67%. 75% in the past year and they're raising it every single quarter. Super sustainable payout. If you don't know what this company is, they are basically a services company. They do HVAC, plumbing and piping, electrician services, and the reason why they're making such a killing right now is that they are taking advantage of the data center boom. And they are helping install and build all of these massive data centers. So that's why in the past 2 years, their quarterly earnings per share have more than tripled, going from $255 to $9. 37. And analysts are projecting another 40% annual growth this year, 20% the year prior. And these might be low estimates cuz they beat those prior estimates by a ton. Now, I didn't buy this stock last year. Probably should have, but I didn't dive into it because I'm I knew enough to know that they'd have a lot of demand, but I've never in-depth analyzed a lot of these services, business, and HVAC. I didn't really know a lot about it. If you're interested, this is probably one to have on your watch list. I know I do. Now, next up, I'm going to

be talking about Dell, ticker symbol D L. They just had a 20% dividend raise. And on the surface level, when you think Dell, you're probably thinking about the consumer side of the business. You're just thinking PCs, laptops, and that has not been a growth business really for a decade. And that's why Dell, I think, was looking quite unattractive. And I personally wasn't getting it. I wasn't getting why the stock was going up. But Dell has become a much more interesting story to me. First off, I started learning a lot more about the founder, Michael Dell. That dude's a killer. Arguably one of the best businessmen of all time. And Dell is today still a founder business. He's highly involved and with AI, they kind of have a new growth business on their hands. For the past couple years, they've been building up their data center business. They've designed these highly performative racks that are designed specifically for data centers, putting together all the parts, easy installation, and that's become a pretty good growth business for them. And I think that data center side of the business will see pretty high growth. I think that's likely why they did such a high dividend raise here. But Dell does have a big consumer and enterprise just in the PC business. Overall, I'm not that bullish on that segment. I think it will exist, but it's a mature segment. Although, in the past couple months, I'm starting to see a potential opportunity that people like Dell could take advantage of. We've seen the craze of Mac minis going off the shelf, like Wild and Mac Studios even, and that's becoming a notable business now. And I think there's probably a lot of room to create Windows alternatives there. Just AI optimized computers to run local models. You've seen Nvidia put out a few consumer ones. Dell is even starting to launch this. they have this smaller version and then this super big one that can support trillion parameter models. So, who knows? This could be an interesting business even for Dell. And long-term, we could see some of these local models even be able to run on laptops. And who knows, that could create a new surge of demand for people buying the latest laptops. So, I say this to say and really to remind myself that Dell is not the slouch that I thought it once was, and they're probably going to see some business growth in the coming years. You can already see their earnings per share are starting to track up again. Analysts are projecting 27% EPS growth in the following year and doubledigit growth every year after that. We're also seeing a large expansion in revenue. And the Dell dividend when we take a look at this $2. 52 annual dividend per share, 1. 66% dividend yield, and this is a sustainable payout. 17% free cash flow payout ratio, 24% based on earnings per share, and the 3-year kegger of the dividends 24%. With expectations of high growth, this is probably going to keep growing this dividend. I mean, look, the latest dividend 20%, the one prior 17. 98%. One before that 20. 27%. And they're starting this pattern of annual dividend increases. It's early still, but now it goes back to 2022. I'd expect it going forward. And Dell's interesting in that it plays on the more certain side of the AI spend right now. They are a supplier. They're providing the compute. They're providing the infrastructure. And one thing we know right now is that companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on capex. Some of that money is going to go to Dell. So if you're like me and you also thought of Dell as being some like old dinosaur company that's just the laptops, they are a lot deeper than that. It's pretty interesting. And Michael Dell, one of the best founders of all time, still at the helm. He's innovative. He's on top of it. So I wouldn't be surprised at all if Dell goes on another 10-year run here. And to give some additional context here of Dell not being just the laptops that you think of that you see at Best Buy right now 59% of their overall revenue in the latest quarter it's from their infrastructure segment 19. 6 billion and also that consumer business it's only 6% of their overall revenue. They do have a 35% enterprise segment, but really the big growth segment with Dell is their server and networking business and a lot of that is for these AI data centers. You're seeing rapid growth there and it's their biggest business segment right now. And if you follow me and you know when I'm analyzing businesses, my favorite thing is when someone's largest business segment is also their fastest growing business segment. In the latest quarter, they hit 14. 8 billion of revenue for Dell. And if we go back just 2 years ago, that was 4. 8 8 billion. So we've more than 3xed in that time. So if Dell just even has another double in it, that will mean a lot for the bottom line of Dell stock. Again, it will become a heavier company. We'll likely see the stock price grow and you'll likely see dividend increases. So that 20% increase, that's big signal for Dell

stock. And then finally, stock number six, the last stock I'm going to share today is Home Depot, ticker symbol HD. And this is a different story in that they've been underperforming a 1. 3% dividend raise. And as I was mentioning at the beginning of the video, you could see this coming. If you were looking at their quarterly earnings per share performance, you saw for years that they were starting to plateau, and you're even seeing a decline. Their latest quarter was the lowest they've had in 5 years. Analysts are projecting only 3% annual growth this coming year and then a slight reaceleration around 8% annual growth. But the Home Depot of decades past was a rapid high growth stock and that's why the stock crushed it. You're seeing a big dividend slowdown at Home Depot. The past 2 years it was a 2. 2% increase and now we're down to a 1. 3% increase and the next payout will probably also be on this lower end. You're starting to see their payout ratio rise. It hit 72% free cash flow payout ratio and 64% net income payout ratio. This is sustainable. I'm not necessarily worried about a dividend cut from a cash flow perspective, but I don't think they're going to be reacelerating, especially not back to like doubledigit 15% 20% increases like they had in the decade past. And I'm not worried about the sustainability of the dividend, but they're also not in the best financial position. They have a lot of debt. They're at all-time highs of $72 billion net debt. And I've talked about this when I've analyzed Lowe's stock in the past. These companies, they love debt, but they use it for expansion. Lowe's even uses it for share repurchases. It's kind of nuts. And with Home Depot, you've also seen extremely aggressive share repurchases, and that has slowed down. And it makes sense cuz they can't afford to keep doing it. That's why the dividend growth is slowing down now, too. And basically, we're at a year and a half of no share repurchases for Home Depot after them reducing the shares outstanding by more than 50% over 15 years. So this is just an interesting example of how the dividend raises it often just has to do with the fundamentals of the business because at the core we're analyzing businesses and that's why I built this tool over at dividend data. com. I like to visually see how the businesses are doing the different financial metrics in comparison to each other especially earnings compared right next to stock price. It really starts to give a good picture of the business. And if you want to use the stock research tool I showed throughout all of this is available at dividendata. com. You can automatically track your own portfolio, research 80,000 plus stocks, chat with an AI analyst and stock screener, and you get our new spreadsheet add-ins which let you build with live data in Excel. You can use that dividend tracker template that I provided for free, link in the description and pin comment that is powered by our dividend data addin. So, if you found this interesting and want to use the same research tools I do, all of this is available at dividendata. com. We have a March Madness sale where you can lock in 50% off annual membership. So you can sign up now and keep that discounted price for life. That gets you the terminal and our new spreadsheet tool. So again, link in the description and pin comment. And with that said, I'll see you in the next video. Thanks for watching.