MRK Dividend Calculator
Dividend growth rate (CAGR)
| Year | Yield | Div / share | Annual income | Yield on cost | Cumulative income | Portfolio value | Shares |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2.7% | $3.32 | $293.00 | 2.4% | $293.00 | $13,516 | 111.09 |
| 2 | 2.7% | $3.51 | $389.73 | 2.6% | $682.73 | $17,387 | 133.21 |
| 3 | 2.6% | $3.70 | $493.43 | 2.9% | $1,176 | $21,648 | 154.60 |
| 4 | 2.6% | $3.91 | $604.61 | 3.1% | $1,781 | $26,334 | 175.30 |
| 5 | 2.6% | $4.13 | $723.83 | 3.3% | $2,505 | $31,485 | 195.37 |
| 6 | 2.5% | $4.36 | $851.69 | 3.5% | $3,356 | $37,143 | 214.84 |
| 7 | 2.5% | $4.60 | $988.83 | 3.7% | $4,345 | $43,355 | 233.75 |
| 8 | 2.4% | $4.86 | $1,136 | 3.9% | $5,481 | $50,171 | 252.15 |
| 9 | 2.4% | $5.13 | $1,294 | 4.1% | $6,775 | $57,647 | 270.06 |
| 10 | 2.4% | $5.42 | $1,463 | 4.3% | $8,238 | $65,842 | 287.52 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-03-16 | $0.85 | 3.6% | 2.9% | $115.43 |
| 2025-12-15 | $0.85 | 4.1% | 3.4% | $100.26 |
| 2025-09-15 | $0.81 | 4.9% | 4.0% | $81.02 |
| 2025-06-16 | $0.81 | 4.9% | 4.0% | $80.96 |
| 2025-03-17 | $0.81 | 3.3% | 3.4% | $94.79 |
| 2024-12-16 | $0.81 | 3.1% | 3.2% | $100.06 |
| 2024-09-16 | $0.77 | 2.6% | 2.6% | $117.96 |
| 2024-06-17 | $0.77 | 2.4% | 2.4% | $127.50 |
| 2024-03-14 | $0.77 | 2.5% | 2.6% | $120.51 |
| 2023-12-14 | $0.77 | 2.8% | 2.9% | $105.88 |
| 2023-09-14 | $0.73 | 2.7% | 2.7% | $108.24 |
| 2023-06-14 | $0.73 | 2.7% | 2.7% | $108.66 |
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 MRK
Merck & Co., Inc. — ticker MRK — is one of the largest US pharmaceutical companies and a long-running dividend payer whose modern record carries a specific piece of history that every income-focused reader should understand before modeling the income line. Merck's dividend record was reset after the 2004 Vioxx withdrawal and the litigation overhang that followed. The Vioxx pain reliever was pulled from the market in September 2004 over cardiovascular safety findings, and the multi-year litigation that followed combined with the broader patent-cliff pressure of the late 2000s to put the dividend under structural strain. Merck did not formally cut the per-share quarterly amount during that window, but the company held the dividend flat for an extended stretch — the streak of consecutive annual increases that many trackers credit to Merck today restarts from the post-flat period rather than the longer pre-Vioxx history. The current rebuild streak is approximately thirteen years long, dating from the resumption of regular annual increases in the early 2010s. Treating Merck as a multi-decade unbroken Aristocrat or King is wrong: the post-Vioxx hold period broke the prior cadence, and the relevant track record for an investor entering today is the post-hold rebuild.
Merck operates in the Healthcare sector, specifically branded pharmaceuticals. The portfolio's current center of gravity is Keytruda, the PD-1 immuno-oncology checkpoint inhibitor that has become the best-selling pharmaceutical product in the world and that on its own contributes a meaningful share of total company revenue. Keytruda's commercial expansion has been the defining tailwind of Merck's modern earnings trajectory and is the proximate reason the dividend has been raised reliably during the post-2010 rebuild window. The portfolio also includes vaccines (Gardasil, Pneumovax), animal health (a sizeable and underappreciated segment), the cardiovascular and metabolic franchises, and rare-disease and ophthalmology assets. The 2021 Organon spinoff separated the established-products and women's-health portfolio into a standalone company, sharpening Merck's focus on the higher-growth oncology and vaccines core.
The dominant structural risk for Merck's dividend over the next several years is the Keytruda patent cliff in 2028. Loss of US exclusivity is widely expected to drive biosimilar competition against a product that has been carrying an outsized share of Merck's revenue and free cash flow. Management has been deploying acquisition and internal R&D capital to refill the post-Keytruda pipeline — recent deals including Prometheus Biosciences and the Acceleron acquisition of Sotatercept (now Winrevair) are part of that response — but the multi-year arc from the cliff date to a recovered earnings base is a real open variable. Modeling Merck's dividend forward requires looking at the post-Keytruda portfolio rather than extrapolating from current-period figures. 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.
How MRK pays dividends
Merck pays cash dividends quarterly, on a January–April–July–October cadence. The board declares the per-share amount each quarter; the ex-dividend date typically falls in the third or fourth week of the first month of the cycle, and the pay date falls roughly two to three 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 Merck, 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 oncology, vaccines, animal health, and broader pharmaceutical businesses combined.
Recent growth pattern: Merck has typically 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 during the post-2010 rebuild has run in the mid single digits — moderately ahead of inflation, faster than at Pfizer's post-2009 rebuild, and broadly consistent with what a mature pharma with an outsized oncology franchise can support out of free cash flow while preserving capacity to fund the post-Keytruda transition. The calculator on this page uses a recent dividend growth rate to project the income line forward; given the 2028 Keytruda cliff, modeling Merck with a conservative growth assumption is generally more honest than extrapolating from windows that span the Keytruda peak.
Merck'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; the structural advantage of a long-running dividend grower is the compounding of share count via DRIP without tax friction.
Who MRK suits
Merck suits investors who want healthcare-sector exposure with a moderate current yield — typically around three percent — and who are comfortable holding through the 2028 Keytruda patent cliff and the subsequent multi-year portfolio transition. The yield sits above the broader S&P 500 average and reflects both the maturity of the branded-pharma business model and the market's pricing of the upcoming patent-cliff transition. The trade-off is the canonical pharma-with-patent-exposure pattern: meaningful current cash yield in exchange for the work of evaluating whether the successor portfolio (the recent acquisitions plus internal R&D) can sustain the cash flow that supported the dividend during the Keytruda peak years.
The comparison readers most often want is MRK versus PFE — the two large US pharma names with broken-streak rebuild histories. Both companies sit outside the strict Dividend Aristocrat criteria because both have prior breaks in their increase records: Pfizer's 2009 cut tied to the Wyeth acquisition, and Merck's post-Vioxx hold period through the late 2000s. Both have been raising annually for roughly the past decade-plus. The substantive difference is portfolio quality. Merck's Keytruda franchise is widely regarded as the strongest single growth asset in large-cap pharma, with multi-indication oncology expansion that has driven revenue and earnings well above pre-2010 levels; Pfizer's COVID-vaccine windfall produced a one-time revenue surge that has since normalized, and the broader portfolio faces a denser near-term patent-cliff list. Many income-focused readers view MRK as the higher-quality of the two rebuild stories, even though Pfizer's headline yield is typically higher.
In taxable accounts, Merck'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 Merck, and individual circumstances vary. Pharmaceutical-sector-specific risks — including the 2028 Keytruda patent cliff, US drug-pricing policy (notably Inflation Reduction Act Medicare price negotiation), and the integration outcomes of recent acquisitions — should be weighed against the post-rebuild dividend continuity record.
Hypothetical scenarios
Scenario 1: $10,000 invested in Merck at the start of 2012, after the post-Vioxx rebuild began
Consider a hypothetical purchase of $10,000 of Merck stock at the start of 2012, immediately after the company resumed regular annual dividend increases following the extended post-Vioxx hold period. We use this entry point deliberately. The pre-2005 dividend record reflects a different capital-return policy and a streak that was effectively broken by the multi-year flat window through the late 2000s; treating the pre- and post-Vioxx periods as a continuous holding overstates both the historical yield-on-cost and the historical compound growth of the income line. Starting the scenario at the beginning of the modern rebuild is the honest framing for an income investor evaluating Merck's track record today. At the early-2012 entry price, the $10,000 would have purchased roughly two hundred sixty shares.
Holding from 2012 through to the present, with quarterly dividends reinvested via DRIP, three forces compound together. First, the per-share dividend grew each year as Merck maintained the rebuild — annual hikes in the mid single digits, supported by the Keytruda revenue ramp and broader portfolio cash flow. Second, the share count grew as DRIP reinvested every quarterly distribution at the prevailing market price; given Merck's moderate entry yield, share-count growth alone, independent of price, contributed a meaningful share of income-line growth over the holding period. Third, the share price climbed substantially across the multi-year window, driven primarily by the Keytruda commercial expansion that transformed the company's earnings base, with sector-specific drawdowns at various points (notably the 2017–2018 immuno-oncology competition window and the 2024 GLP-1-driven sector rotation).
The illustrative outcome is not a precise dollar figure. It depends on the exact reinvestment prices, dividend taxes paid along the way in a taxable account, and the specific entry and exit timing. The structural point is that Merck's post-Vioxx rebuild has been more constructive than Pfizer's post-Wyeth rebuild over the same window, primarily because the Keytruda franchise produced an earnings tailwind that supported faster per-share growth and substantial price appreciation simultaneously. MRK is offered as a structural illustration, not a forecast — particularly because the historical window contains the Keytruda growth phase, which by definition cannot repeat after the 2028 patent cliff.
Scenario 2: $50,000 today plus $500/month for 20 years
Consider a hypothetical accumulation strategy in Merck: $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-2010 trailing average, consistent with the structural reality that the 2028 Keytruda cliff sits squarely inside the 20-year projection 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, adding more shares at the prevailing price. Because Merck's entry yield is moderate — typically around three percent — the DCA contribution component dominates share-count growth in the early years, with DRIP contributing more materially after the position has built up over the first decade. Over 20 years this dual-track accumulation builds a position whose annual cash distribution is meaningful, though sensitive to the per-share growth assumption.
What's worth focusing on is how sensitive the projection is to the dividend growth assumption across the 2028 cliff. With 0% per-share growth — effectively modeling Keytruda biosimilar erosion offsetting per-share hikes — the income line grows mostly through share-count expansion. With a 3% growth assumption — modeling a successful post-Keytruda portfolio transition — the income line grows along two axes and reaches a higher terminal value. Modeling Merck with a more conservative growth path than the recent trailing average is the structurally honest approach across the patent-cliff window. Real outcomes depend on Merck's post-Keytruda portfolio performance, US drug-pricing policy, 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.