CVS Dividend Calculator
Dividend growth rate (CAGR)
| Year | Yield | Div / share | Annual income | Yield on cost | Cumulative income | Portfolio value | Shares |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2.7% | $2.66 | $274.00 | 2.2% | $274.00 | $12,993 | 130.08 |
| 2 | 2.8% | $2.86 | $371.84 | 2.5% | $645.84 | $16,170 | 157.44 |
| 3 | 2.9% | $3.07 | $483.32 | 2.8% | $1,129 | $19,549 | 185.12 |
| 4 | 3.0% | $3.30 | $610.30 | 3.1% | $1,739 | $23,153 | 213.23 |
| 5 | 3.2% | $3.54 | $754.92 | 3.4% | $2,494 | $27,004 | 241.88 |
| 6 | 3.3% | $3.80 | $919.64 | 3.8% | $3,414 | $31,132 | 271.20 |
| 7 | 3.5% | $4.08 | $1,107 | 4.1% | $4,521 | $35,566 | 301.33 |
| 8 | 3.6% | $4.38 | $1,321 | 4.5% | $5,843 | $40,342 | 332.42 |
| 9 | 3.8% | $4.71 | $1,565 | 5.0% | $7,408 | $45,500 | 364.64 |
| 10 | 3.9% | $5.06 | $1,844 | 5.4% | $9,252 | $51,086 | 398.18 |
Year 1-10 dividend income (preview)
Based on a $10,000 initial investment with $200.00 monthly contributions, DRIP on.
Historical dividends per share
Recent dividends
| Ex-date | Cash amount | TTM yield | Fwd yield | Share price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-04-23 | $0.67 | 3.4% | 3.4% | $78.86 |
| 2026-01-22 | $0.67 | 4.0% | 3.2% | $82.68 |
| 2025-10-23 | $0.67 | 3.3% | 3.3% | $81.07 |
| 2025-07-22 | $0.67 | 4.4% | 4.4% | $61.08 |
| 2025-04-22 | $0.67 | 4.1% | 4.1% | $65.45 |
| 2025-01-23 | $0.67 | 4.9% | 4.9% | $53.82 |
| 2024-10-21 | $0.67 | 4.6% | 4.6% | $58.17 |
| 2024-07-22 | $0.67 | 4.5% | 4.6% | $58.33 |
| 2024-04-19 | $0.67 | 3.6% | 3.8% | $69.75 |
| 2024-01-19 | $0.67 | 3.4% | 3.6% | $73.22 |
| 2023-10-19 | $0.61 | 4.2% | 3.4% | $70.61 |
| 2023-07-20 | $0.61 | 3.9% | 3.2% | $74.87 |
Source: Polygon.io. Last 12 dividend distributions, most recent first. TTM yield = sum of last 12 months of payments ÷ share price on ex-date. Forward yield = this payment × detected payout frequency ÷ share price on ex-date.
About CVS
CVS Health Corporation — ticker CVS — is a large diversified US healthcare company combining retail pharmacy, pharmacy-benefit management (PBM), and health insurance under a single corporate roof. The dividend record carries a specific recent event that every income-focused reader must understand before modeling the income line. CVS froze its dividend from 2017 to 2022 to deleverage after the Aetna acquisition. Increases resumed in 2022 with the post-deleveraging balance sheet. That five-year freeze is the central piece of the modern dividend story and the reason CVS sits outside the strict Dividend Aristocrat criteria: the freeze ended the prior consecutive-annual-increase streak that had been building through the 2000s and early 2010s, and the current streak counts from the 2022 resumption rather than from the longer pre-2017 history. The freeze was not a cut — the per-share quarterly amount was held flat at $0.50 for the entire 2017-to-2022 window rather than reduced — but the streak technicality breaks the pre-2017 count, and an income-focused reader needs to understand both the strategic reasons for the freeze and the current rebuild trajectory before treating CVS as a reliable annual-grower.
The strategic context for the 2017 freeze is the $69 billion Aetna acquisition announced in December 2017 and closed in November 2018. The deal combined CVS's retail-pharmacy and PBM businesses with Aetna's health-insurance franchise to create a vertically integrated healthcare company, and it loaded the combined balance sheet with material acquisition debt. Management's stated capital-allocation policy after the close prioritized debt reduction — using free cash flow to pay down leverage rather than grow the dividend — and the dividend was held flat for the entire deleveraging window. The 2022 resumption marked management's signal that the post-Aetna balance sheet had reached a leverage profile consistent with returning to the prior growth pattern. The current rebuild streak is approximately three years long.
CVS operates across three segments: Pharmacy & Consumer Wellness (the retail pharmacy chain of approximately nine thousand stores), Health Services (the Caremark PBM business), and Health Care Benefits (the Aetna insurance business covering medical, dental, vision, and Medicare-Advantage plans). The integrated model is intended to capture efficiency gains across the prescription-and-care continuum, but the three businesses face quite different competitive and regulatory pressures, and the durability of the synergy thesis is the active strategic question in the company's investor narrative.
Expense ratio is not applicable to individual stocks — the figure you'll see in the calculator above is zero, since there is no fund wrapper between you and the underlying shares. The dividend has not been cut in CVS's modern history; the only break in the prior increase cadence was the 2017–2022 freeze described above, and the current quarterly amount has been raised every year since 2022.
How CVS pays dividends
CVS pays cash dividends quarterly, on a February–May–August–November cadence. The board declares the per-share amount each quarter; the ex-dividend date typically falls in the last week of the first month of the cycle, and the pay date falls roughly four to five weeks after the ex-date. Holders who own shares as of the close on the day before the ex-date receive the dividend; holders who buy on or after the ex-date wait for the next quarterly payment. On the ex-date the share price drops by approximately the distribution amount on the open, reflecting the fact that the company has paid the cash out of its balance sheet.
Holders who DRIP through their broker receive additional shares purchased at the prevailing market price around the pay date. Most major brokers offer fractional-share DRIP for CVS, so the full cash distribution is reinvested even when the per-share amount divided by the share price doesn't produce a whole number. The mechanics are identical to any other quarterly US dividend stock — there is no managed-distribution policy, no covered-call overlay, and the cash that funds the dividend comes from operating free cash flow generated by the three segments combined.
Recent growth pattern: since the 2022 freeze resumption, CVS has raised the quarterly per-share amount once per year, with the new rate taking effect on the dividend payment following the late-year announcement. The size of the annual hike since 2022 has run in the high single digits to low double digits — modest in dollar terms because the post-freeze base was low, but meaningful in percentage terms. The pre-2017 growth rate before the freeze was broadly similar in percentage terms. The calculator on this page uses a recent dividend growth rate to project the income line forward; given the structural reality that CVS interrupted its prior growth pattern for five years in the recent past, modeling CVS with a more conservative growth assumption than the post-2022 rebound figures alone is generally more honest, because the rebound rate partly reflects catch-up after the frozen base. You can override the calculator's growth rate to model a more or less optimistic path.
CVS's dividends are qualified for the long-term capital-gains rate in taxable accounts, given the standard sixty-day holding-period rule. Most buy-and-hold investors clear this threshold easily. In tax-advantaged accounts the qualified-dividend treatment is moot because no current-year tax applies; for higher-yield stocks like CVS the qualified-dividend treatment is structurally meaningful in taxable accounts because the absolute dollars of dividend received are larger than at low-yield growers.
Who CVS suits
CVS suits investors who want a high current cash yield from a diversified US healthcare name — typically in the five-to-six-percent range currently, materially above most healthcare peers — and who are comfortable holding through the ongoing capital-allocation tension that has shaped the company's dividend history. The headline yield is high, but the honest reading is that it reflects market concerns about PBM regulatory pressure, the multi-year Aetna integration costs, retail-pharmacy demand trends, and capital allocation discipline — not simply unusual management generosity. The yield is what the market is pricing for a healthcare business with meaningful unresolved structural questions and a fresh memory of a five-year dividend freeze, not what a Dividend King with an unbroken streak would offer at the same payout level.
The 2017–2022 freeze is the single most relevant piece of historical evidence on CVS's capital-allocation behavior. It demonstrates that management has been willing in the recent past to prioritize balance-sheet repair over continued dividend growth when integration math required it. That is a meaningful caution for an income-focused reader: the explicit recent freeze is structural evidence that the dividend is treated as a secondary priority during periods of capital-allocation pressure, not as a contractual-style commitment that survives at any cost. If PBM regulatory pressure intensifies materially, or if Aetna integration math reopens leverage questions, the historical precedent is that management will protect the balance sheet first. That is not a prediction of another freeze; it is a structurally honest characterization of where the dividend sits in the company's capital-allocation hierarchy.
The comparison readers most often want is CVS versus Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA). Both are large retail-pharmacy companies that have faced PBM-and-pharmacy-margin compression; WBA cut its dividend in early 2024 (its first cut in over fifty years), while CVS held its dividend through the same broad sector-pressure window though with the freeze precedent on the record. Against insurance-pure-play peers (UNH, ELV, CI) CVS offers a higher yield with the trade-off of more diversified business risk and the freeze history. In taxable accounts, CVS's dividends benefit from qualified-dividend treatment.
As with any single-stock position, this content is educational only; it is not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold CVS, and individual circumstances vary. Healthcare-sector-specific risks — including PBM regulatory and reimbursement pressure, the ongoing Aetna integration outcome, retail-pharmacy demand and reimbursement trends, and capital-allocation tension between dividend growth and balance-sheet management — should be weighed against the current high yield and the explicit recent freeze history.
Hypothetical scenarios
Scenario 1: $10,000 invested in CVS at the start of 2023, after the freeze ended
Consider a hypothetical purchase of $10,000 of CVS stock at the start of 2023, immediately after the company resumed regular annual dividend increases following the five-year freeze that ran from 2017 to 2022. We use this entry point deliberately. The pre-2017 dividend record reflects a different capital-allocation environment and a streak that was effectively broken by the multi-year flat period through the Aetna deleveraging window; treating the pre- and post-freeze periods as a continuous holding overstates the historical compound growth of the income line. Starting the scenario at the beginning of the post-freeze rebuild streak is the honest framing for an income investor evaluating CVS's track record today. At the early-2023 entry price, the $10,000 would have purchased roughly one hundred ten shares.
Holding from 2023 through to the present, with quarterly dividends reinvested via DRIP, three forces operate against a difficult business backdrop. First, the per-share dividend grew each year since 2022 — annual hikes in the high single digits and low double digits, working from the low post-freeze base. Second, the share count grew as DRIP reinvested every quarterly distribution; given CVS's high entry yield (five-to-six-percent range), DRIP-driven share-count growth is a structurally larger contributor than it would be for a lower-yield stock. Third, the share price declined materially across the holding window as the market repriced PBM regulatory risk, retail-pharmacy demand softness, and Aetna-segment margin pressure. The DRIP component therefore reinvested at falling prices, which raised the share count more quickly than it would have at a stable or rising price.
The illustrative outcome is not a precise dollar figure. The structural point is that CVS's recent shape — high entry yield, modest per-share growth, and a declining share price — produces a total return shape dominated by the income line and DRIP share-count accumulation at low prices, with the price line working against the position. CVS is offered as a structural illustration, not a forecast — and the central uncertainty is whether the post-freeze increase pattern survives the next round of capital-allocation pressure.
Scenario 2: $50,000 today plus $500/month for 20 years
Consider a hypothetical accumulation strategy in CVS: $50,000 starting capital, plus $500 per month added on a regular cadence for 20 years. The calculator on this page can model this exactly — set Initial investment to $50,000, Extra contribution to $500, Contribution frequency to Monthly, time horizon to 20 years, and leave DRIP on. Use a conservative dividend growth assumption — low to mid single digits, more conservative than the post-2022 rebound figures — consistent with the structural reality that another freeze cannot be ruled out across a 20-year window.
The mechanics: each month, the new $500 buys additional shares at the current price, which adds to the share count and therefore to next quarter's dividend. Each quarter, the dividend received from all accumulated shares is reinvested. Because CVS's entry yield is high — typically in the five-to-six-percent range — the DRIP component contributes a relatively larger share of total share-count growth than the same DCA setup would for a lower-yield stock. Over 20 years this builds a position whose annual cash distribution is meaningful, with the magnitude sensitive to the per-share growth assumption and to whether the post-freeze increase pattern persists.
What's worth focusing on is how sensitive the projection is to whether another dividend freeze occurs during the 20-year window. With the historical precedent of a recent five-year freeze on the record, modeling CVS with a conservative growth path — or running a scenario with 0% per-share growth for an extended sub-window — is a structurally honest exercise. The base case might assume continued mid-single-digit growth; a stress case might assume a 5-year flat window to capture the precedent risk. The honest reading is that CVS's high yield reflects the market's pricing of both the underlying business pressures and the explicit freeze precedent. Real outcomes depend on CVS's PBM regulatory environment, Aetna integration outcomes, future capital allocation decisions, tax treatment, and the broader path of US equity markets. Educational only; not a forecast.
Sources & methodology
Dividend history and price data come from Polygon.io's reference and aggregates endpoints. Forward yield is computed as the sum of the most recent four cash distributions divided by the previous-close share price. The dividend growth rate shown on this page is the compound annual growth rate of total annual distributions across the available history in this snapshot.
Last updated: 2026-05-15.
Information here is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Past dividend history does not guarantee future payments. Verify all figures with the issuer or a registered financial advisor before making investment decisions.