How much will real estate income pay out in dividends this year?

Real estate income (A 0.97%) it is one of the best dividend stocks you can buy. The real estate investment trust (REIT) has a long track record of paying and growing its dividend, which is reliable and high-yielding. Let’s see how much the company will pay out in dividends this year.

Monthly payments add up

Even though Realty Income is a top REIT, it stands out among other big dividend payers because it is one of the few stocks that pays monthly. It has paid a dividend for 650 consecutive months and raised it 107 times consecutively quarterly. At the current price, the dividend yield is 5.1%, or nearly four times the average S&P 500 Yield.

As a REIT, Realty Income is structured in a specific way that requires paying out at least 90% of its income as dividends. For any other company, paying dividends is at the discretion of management, although it is a classic dividend stock such as Coca colatends to keep the payout ratio fairly high at around 75%.

A REIT is more complicated than a standard stock, and its profitability is more commonly measured by funds from operations (FFO) and even more commonly by adjusted rather than net income. You’ll often see a REIT’s payout ratio well above 90% because it uses FFO as a benchmark for earnings, and FFO represents more cash transactions. Over the last 12 months, Realty Income’s payout ratio was 287%, and the company paid out $2.4 billion in dividends.

Realty Income currently pays a monthly dividend of $0.26 per share, which works out to $3.16 annually, but has already quadrupled in 2024. It paid out $2.1 billion in total dividends in 2023, or with $30 million more than the previous year. There is no guarantee, but it is reasonable to expect further increases by the end of the year.