IBM Dividend Calculator
Dividend growth rate (CAGR)
| Year | Yield | Div / share | Annual income | Yield on cost | Cumulative income | Portfolio value | Shares |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2.8% | $6.73 | $308.00 | 2.5% | $308.00 | $13,783 | 57.63 |
| 2 | 2.6% | $6.82 | $393.24 | 2.7% | $701.24 | $18,015 | 68.78 |
| 3 | 2.4% | $6.92 | $476.11 | 2.8% | $1,177 | $22,737 | 79.26 |
| 4 | 2.2% | $7.02 | $556.63 | 2.8% | $1,734 | $27,993 | 89.10 |
| 5 | 2.1% | $7.12 | $634.79 | 2.9% | $2,369 | $33,830 | 98.32 |
| 6 | 1.9% | $7.23 | $710.64 | 2.9% | $3,079 | $40,303 | 106.95 |
| 7 | 1.8% | $7.33 | $784.22 | 2.9% | $3,864 | $47,469 | 115.02 |
| 8 | 1.6% | $7.44 | $855.60 | 2.9% | $4,719 | $55,391 | 122.55 |
| 9 | 1.5% | $7.55 | $924.83 | 2.9% | $5,644 | $64,140 | 129.57 |
| 10 | 1.4% | $7.66 | $992.00 | 2.9% | $6,636 | $73,793 | 136.11 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-05-08 | $1.69 | 3.7% | 2.9% | $229.76 |
| 2026-02-10 | $1.68 | 2.3% | 2.3% | $291.76 |
| 2025-11-10 | $1.68 | 2.7% | 2.2% | $309.13 |
| 2025-08-08 | $1.68 | 3.5% | 2.8% | $242.27 |
| 2025-05-09 | $1.68 | 2.7% | 2.7% | $249.20 |
| 2025-02-10 | $1.67 | 2.7% | 2.7% | $249.27 |
| 2024-11-12 | $1.67 | 3.2% | 3.2% | $210.86 |
| 2024-08-09 | $1.67 | 3.5% | 3.5% | $191.45 |
| 2024-05-09 | $1.67 | 4.0% | 4.0% | $166.27 |
| 2024-02-08 | $1.66 | 4.5% | 3.6% | $184.36 |
| 2023-11-09 | $1.66 | 4.5% | 4.5% | $146.62 |
| 2023-08-09 | $1.66 | 4.6% | 4.7% | $142.49 |
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 IBM
International Business Machines Corporation — ticker IBM — is one of the oldest US technology companies and the longest-running dividend payer in the sector, with continuous quarterly cash distributions dating back to 1916. The modern dividend-growth record is shorter but still long: IBM has raised its dividend in each of the last twenty-eight-plus consecutive years, placing it within the Dividend Aristocrat bracket. The pre-2022 IBM was easy to characterize — a mature enterprise-IT incumbent with steady cash flow, modest revenue growth, and an aggressive capital-return policy weighted toward dividends and buybacks. The post-2021 IBM is a different shape of business, and the dividend story has to be read against that change. The November 2021 spinoff of Kyndryl separated the legacy managed-infrastructure-services business from the rest of IBM, leaving the remaining IBM more concentrated in software (including Red Hat, acquired in 2019 for $34 billion), hybrid cloud, consulting, and the emerging watsonx AI platform. The dividend was technically reduced at the spinoff to reflect the smaller residual company, though IBM held the consecutive-increase streak intact via an offsetting raise — a mechanical adjustment that allowed the Aristocrat record to continue while the business itself shrank.
IBM operates in the Technology sector, specifically enterprise IT software and services. The current business is organized around four primary segments: Software (Red Hat OpenShift, hybrid-cloud platforms, automation tools, and the watsonx AI platform), Consulting (the IBM Consulting integration-services arm, formerly part of Global Business Services), Infrastructure (mainframe systems — Power and Z — plus storage and supporting middleware), and Financing (a small remaining captive-financing arm). The strategic narrative since the Kyndryl spinoff has been the pivot from low-margin managed services toward higher-growth software and AI, with Red Hat as the platform anchor and watsonx as the AI-era growth vector. Execution on that pivot is the live strategic question, and the recent revenue growth profile — modest but improving — reflects partial success in transitioning the mix.
The dividend mandate sits at the center of IBM's capital-allocation policy and has for decades; the company is structurally identified with capital return rather than reinvestment. Management's stated capital plan prioritizes maintaining the dividend, funding software-and-AI acquisitions (Red Hat was the largest in IBM's history; recent additions in the data and automation space have continued the pattern), and returning surplus cash through share repurchases when free cash flow allows. IBM maintains an investment-grade credit profile (A-rated), supported by the recurring software-and-services revenue stream. 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 IBM's modern public-company history; the mechanical Kyndryl-spinoff adjustment in 2021 preserved the streak technically by structuring the offsetting raise to keep year-over-year comparison positive.
How IBM pays dividends
IBM pays cash dividends quarterly, on a March–June–September–December cadence. The board declares the per-share amount each quarter; the ex-dividend date typically falls in the second week of the second month of each quarter, and the pay date falls roughly four 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 IBM, 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 Software, Consulting, and Infrastructure segments combined.
Recent growth pattern: IBM has typically raised the quarterly per-share amount once per year, with the new rate taking effect on the June payment following the April-or-May announcement. The size of the annual hike has shrunk markedly over the past decade — from the high-single-digit pace of the early-2010s capital-return-heavy era to a token rate, typically a single cent per quarter, in recent years. The five-year trailing dividend growth rate is in the low single digits, and the calculator on this page reflects that rate by default. The modest growth pattern reflects the maturity of the underlying business and the structural decision to prioritize preserving the streak with small raises rather than meaningful per-share dividend growth — an honest read is that IBM's dividend functions today more as a high-yield income stream with token annual increases than as a growth-of-income compounding story.
IBM'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 names like IBM 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 IBM suits
IBM suits investors who want a moderate-to-high current cash yield from a long-running US technology incumbent and who accept the trade-off of token annual increases rather than meaningful per-share dividend growth. The yield typically sits in the three-to-four-percent range — well above the broader S&P 500 average and at the high end of the large-cap technology sector. The yield is high partly because IBM's share price has been range-bound for much of the post-2013 window while the dividend has continued to drift up, and partly because the market prices IBM as a mature business in transition rather than as a high-growth technology name. The trade-off is the canonical mature-incumbent pattern: a meaningful current cash yield in exchange for a slow-growth income line and the ongoing work of evaluating whether the Red Hat–and–watsonx pivot can produce the revenue and free-cash-flow growth needed to support faster future raises.
The comparison readers most often want is IBM versus other long-streak technology dividend names — there are surprisingly few. Cisco (CSCO), Texas Instruments (TXN), Microsoft (MSFT), and Oracle (ORCL) all pay meaningful dividends but with different shapes: Cisco yields broadly similar to IBM with similarly modest growth; Texas Instruments yields lower but grows the dividend faster; Microsoft yields well below IBM but with substantial per-share growth and far stronger share-price compounding; Oracle yields lower than IBM with modest growth. Within that peer set, IBM's distinctive feature is the high current yield combined with the Aristocrat-bracket streak — a combination that is unusual in technology and reflects the post-2013 pattern of share-price stagnation while the dividend continued upward.
In taxable accounts, IBM's dividends benefit from qualified-dividend treatment. In tax-advantaged accounts the treatment is moot. As with any single-stock position, this content is educational only; it is not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold IBM, and individual circumstances vary. Technology-and-incumbent-specific risks — including the path of the Red Hat–and–watsonx pivot, competitive pressure on hybrid cloud from AWS, Azure, and GCP, mainframe-replacement cycle dynamics in the Infrastructure segment, and the limited growth in the per-share dividend going forward — should be weighed against the long dividend continuity record.
Hypothetical scenarios
Scenario 1: $10,000 invested in IBM ten years ago
Consider a hypothetical purchase of $10,000 of IBM stock ten years ago, held through to the present with quarterly dividends reinvested via DRIP. The ten-year window for IBM is informative because it covers most of the post-2013 share-price stagnation, the multi-year Red Hat acquisition window, the November 2021 Kyndryl spinoff, and the emerging post-spinoff revenue-growth recovery driven by software and AI. IBM's annual-increase cadence held through the entire window, with one annual hike per year typically announced in spring and taking effect on the June payment — though the size of the hike has shrunk progressively, from mid-single-digit pace at the start of the window to token raises (often a single cent per quarter) more recently.
Three structural forces operate over the holding window. First, the per-share dividend grew each year at a declining pace, with the trailing growth rate compressing from mid-single-digits early in the window to low single digits in recent years. Second, the share count grew as DRIP reinvested every quarterly distribution; given IBM's high entry yield (typically four-to-five percent across the window), DRIP-driven share-count growth was a structurally larger contributor than at lower-yield names. Third, the share price was range-bound for most of the window, dipping in 2018-19 around competitive concerns and re-rating upward in the post-2022 watsonx and AI-narrative window. The DRIP component therefore reinvested at relatively stable prices for much of the holding period, which converts the high entry yield into substantial share-count accumulation over a decade.
The illustrative outcome is not a precise dollar figure. The structural point is that IBM's recent shape — high entry yield, slow per-share growth, and range-bound price — produces a total return whose income line is dominated by the share-count-multiplied current yield rather than by per-share dividend growth. This is the canonical shape of a mature-incumbent dividend hold: the income comes from the yield level and DRIP accumulation, not from a compounding hike pattern. IBM is offered as a structural illustration, not a forecast — particularly because the Red Hat–and–watsonx pivot may eventually re-rate the share price upward and shift the long-run return profile away from the pure-yield-and-DRIP shape of the past decade.
Scenario 2: $50,000 today plus $500/month for 20 years
Consider a hypothetical accumulation strategy in IBM: $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 single digits — consistent with the recent trailing pattern of token annual hikes rather than the pre-2015 mid-single-digit growth rate.
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, adding more shares at the prevailing price. Because IBM's entry yield is high — typically three to four percent — 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 dual-track accumulation builds a position whose annual cash distribution is meaningful even at a near-flat per-share dividend, because the share count has grown substantially via both monthly contributions and quarterly reinvestment.
What's worth focusing on is how sensitive the projection is to the dividend growth assumption. With 1% per-share growth, the income line grows almost entirely through share-count expansion from contributions and DRIP — the canonical high-yield-low-growth pattern. With a 4% per-share growth assumption — modeling a successful Red Hat–and–watsonx pivot — the income line grows along two axes and reaches a higher terminal value. The post-2013 trajectory has been closer to the low end of that range; modeling IBM conservatively is the structurally honest approach. Real outcomes depend on IBM's free-cash-flow generation, the path of the software-and-AI pivot, tax treatment in your specific account, 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.