Dividend Champions

About & methodology

In December 2007 David Fish began publishing the Dividend Champions, Contenders and Challengers - a free, meticulously maintained list of every US company with a long record of annual dividend increases. He shared it openly, updated it every month, and a generation of dividend-growth investors grew up on it. He died in 2018; the canonical free list has faded since.

This is an independent homage - not his list, and not an endorsement by him or his estate. We revive the idea with our own data: current, computed transparently, extended to Canada and Europe, and free, with a Dividend Safety score on every name. It is built by the team behind the Dividend Freedom Tribe.

The tiers

  • Champions - 25 or more consecutive years of increases.
  • Contenders - 10 to 24 years.
  • Challengers - 5 to 9 years.

There is no separate "Kings" tier - a 50-year streak is simply a long-streak Champion. REITs and MLPs are included, not split out.

How we count a streak

  1. 1Home listing, declared currency. A dual-listed company is counted once, on its home listing, in the currency the dividend is declared in - so exchange-rate moves never create a fake raise or a fake cut (we count Bank of Nova Scotia on Toronto in Canadian dollars, not New York in US dollars). Supported currencies: USD, CAD, EUR, GBP.
  2. 2Split-adjusted, regular dividends only. We use split-adjusted amounts and exclude special one-off dividends, so neither a stock split nor a special payment is mistaken for a change in the regular dividend.
  3. 3Whole years, compared like-for-like. We total each calendar year's regular dividends and compare a year only against the prior complete year. A year counts as an increase if its total is higher than the one before.
  4. 4Seeded, then rolled forward. Our data does not reach back forever, so for long-standing raisers we anchor the streak with an authoritative count as of a date - from the David Fish / DRiP archive, the Canadian Dividend All-Star List, published Dividend Kings lists and the like - and extend it with our own data. Every seeded streak shows its source.
  5. 5A break always wins. If our data shows any year that is not an increase after the anchor - a freeze or a cut - the seed is void and the streak resets. Where we have no anchor and our earliest data is itself already an increase, we show a floor ("54+") rather than invent a start date.

This is a transparent reconstruction, not a copy of any one provider's list; where our rule or data differ, a number can differ by a year. See the three lists: Champions, Contenders, Challengers.

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