S&P 500 Stock Dividends

• The 500 companies included in the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index are the 500 largest U.S. companies by stock value and represent 75 percent of the total U.S. market. The average dividend yield of the stocks in the index is representative of the dividend yield of U.S. stocks. As of May 2011, 390 stocks in the S&P 500 paid a regular dividend and 110 stocks were not paying dividends.
  
  

Average Dividend Yields

• The average yield for all S&P 500 stocks in May 2011 was 1.74 percent. If the average dividend is calculated using only the stocks that were paying dividends, the average dividend yield was 2.23 percent. The highest dividend yield in the S&P 500 stocks at that time was 8.5 percent. Approximately 20 of the S&P 500 stocks had dividend yields over 5 percent. At the other end of the list, 75 of the 390 dividend-paying stocks were yielding less than 1 percent.
  
  

Historical Dividend Yields

• From the 1880s until the middle of 2011, the average dividend yield on the U.S. stock market as represented by the S&P 500 was 4.34 percent. The record average yield for the U.S. stock market was 13.8 percent in June 1932. The yield of the S&P 500 hit its historic low in August 2000, when the stock index yield was 1.11 percent.
  
  

Stock Values and Yields

• The average yield of the stock market is primarily dependent on the level of the market. The record high and low dividends listed above occurred when the market hit a new low and a record high. In a recent example, the S&P 500 dividend yield was 1.89 percent at the end of 2007, when the S&P 500 stock index was at 1,470. A year later, the index had fallen to just over 900 and the dividend yield on the index had increased to 3.11 percent. During the year, the dividends on the index increased by very little.