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Is there a source for a US stock's dividend cover ratio?

Dividend cover in respect of ordinary share capital may be calculated as follows:

Dividend Cover Ratio = Profit after tax - Dividend paid on Irredeemable Preference Shares Dividend paid to Ordinary Shareholders

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  • Can you mention the market/country you need this data for? Also list the sources that you already use to get information for stocks. Sep 16, 2016 at 14:50

2 Answers 2

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Sources such as Value Line, or S&P stock reports will show you dividend payout ratios (the American usage. These are the inverse of dividend cover ratios, with dividends being in the numerator, and earnings in the denominator. For instance, if the dividend cover ratio is 2, the dividend payout ratio is 1/2= 50%.

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"Profit after tax" can have multiple interpretations, but a common one is the EPS (Earnings Per Share). This is frequently reported as a TTM number (Trailing Twelve Months), or in the UK as a fiscal year number. Coincidentally, it is relatively easy to find the total amount of dividends paid out in that same time frame.

That means calculating div cover is as simple as: EPS divided by total dividend. (EPS / Div).

It's relatively easy to build a Google Docs spreadsheet that pulls both values from the cloud using the GOOGLEFINANCE() function. I suspect the same is true of most spreadsheet apps. With a proper setup, you can just fill down along a column of tickers to get the div cover for a number of companies at once.

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