Photo: Freeimages.com/Eric Nelson

One of the things that I like to think I’ve gotten really good at by doing the Harvesting Dividends website is finding historical dividend information. In order to calculate the 5, 10 and 20 year average dividend growth for each of the companies I cover, I’ve created spreadsheets with their individual dividend payments. In order to do that, I had to go out and find the historical dividend information for each of the companies. Here are 4 places that I’ve found that have this data:

The Company’s Investor Relations Website

The most obvious and easiest place to find data is on the company’s website. Most companies are proud of their dividend history and use it as a selling point to convince people to invest. A good place to start is with the Investor Relations page. Most companies have a separate link to “Dividends” or “”Historical Dividends”, which contains the information. If these links aren’t there, you can generally find the information under the “Stock Information” section.

Yahoo Finance

Yahoo Finance (finance.yahoo.com) has extensive historical data on dividend payouts. To get to the data, type in a stock ticker in the search box at the top of the webpage and hit “Search”.  Once the data comes up, click on “Historical Data” underneath the price quote. Set the time period to the dates that you’re looking for and under the “Show” dropdown menu, select “Dividends Only”. Then click “Apply”. You’ll get all the dividends paid out over the selected timeframe.

Yahoo Finance (finance.yahoo.com) has an extensive database of historical dividends.  (Click for a larger image.)

DripInvesting.org

The DripInvesting.org website, run by David Fish, has a lot of resources about dividend reinvestment plans. They also provide on the tools page, free of charge for downloading, a spreadsheet in Excel and PDF format tracking the three categories of dividend growth stocks that they track. “Dividend Champions” have grown dividends for at least 25 years, “Dividend Challengers” have grown dividends for between 10 and 24 years, and “Dividend Contenders” have grown dividends for between 5 and 9 years. The wealth of information in the spreadsheet makes it a great resource for DG investors. In addition to the list of companies with dividend growth histories, the Excel version has dividends for each of the companies dating back to 1999.

Stockcharts.com

The popular charting site provides dividend data. Non-subscribers can create daily and weekly charts up to 5 years; subscribers’ charts can go back 20 years. The site has dividend data going back to the beginning of 2005 for most stocks and even further for others. This site is a great way to visualize the growing dividends from DG stocks:

Stockcharts.com has dividend data going back to at least 2005 for most stocks, shown here at the bottom of this monthly chart of Exxon Mobil stock prices.

The only thing to be aware of is that stockcharts.com’s data doesn’t distinguish between regular and special dividends. On Lancaster Colony’s (LANC) chart, the spikes in late 2005, late 2012 and late 2015 include special dividends:

Special dividends are not separated from regular dividends. The spikes at the end of 2005, 2012 and 2015 in this monthly chart of Lancaster Colony include very large special dividends.

LANC’s regular dividends have grown regularly for over 50 years, placing it solidly in the “dividend growth stock” category. Think of the special dividends as “bonuses” for investors.

I hope that these locations help you as much as they’ve helped me.  If you know of any other sites, feel free to leave a comment!