IBM has paid a dividend every quarter since 1916 and raised it for 31 straight years. See IBM's dividend history, safety outlook, penny-raise risks, and payout.
About $284/year at the current 2.8% yield, before any future raises or reinvestment.
IBM has mailed a dividend check every quarter since 1916 — through the Depression, two world wars, and its own near-death experience in the early 1990s. The modern raise streak is younger: 31 consecutive annual increases as of April 2026, which earned IBM a seat on the dividend aristocrats list in 2020. The honest catch is that the seat was bought with pennies. Every raise since then has been exactly one cent per quarter.
| Consecutive quarterly dividends since | 1916 |
| Consecutive annual raises | 31 years |
| Status | Dividend Aristocrat (joined 2020) |
| Payment months | March, June, September, December |
| Recent raise pace | Token — one cent per quarter each April since 2020 |
| Payout ratio | Roughly 60% of earnings; about 43% of free cash flow |
Current yield, annual dividend, and the exact streak length are shown live in the stats bar above.
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1916 | First quarterly dividend — paid without interruption ever since |
| 1993 | An $8 billion quarterly loss forces two dividend cuts in one year; the modern raise streak begins afterward |
| 2012–2017 | Revenue falls for 22 straight quarters, from nearly $107 billion in 2011 to $79 billion in 2017 — the dividend keeps rising |
| 2019 | Buys Red Hat for $34 billion, IBM's largest deal ever, to anchor a hybrid-cloud strategy |
| 2020 | 25th consecutive raise ($1.62 to $1.63) makes IBM a Dividend Aristocrat |
| 2021 | Spins off the managed-infrastructure business as Kyndryl |
| 2025 | Closes the $6.4 billion HashiCorp acquisition; free cash flow hits $14.7 billion |
| 2026 | Closes the $11 billion Confluent deal; 31st straight raise lifts the quarterly payout to $1.69 |
Banks, airlines, and governments still run core transaction systems on IBM mainframes, and those customers pay for hardware, software licenses, and support year after year. Add Red Hat subscriptions and decades of consulting relationships, and IBM has a large base of recurring revenue that doesn't disappear in a bad year.
IBM's revenue shrank for most of the 2010s, yet the company kept generating enough cash to pay — and raise — the dividend. Free cash flow reached $14.7 billion in 2025, and management guides to roughly $1 billion more in 2026. Dividends of about $6.3 billion take less than half of that.
Through a $34 billion acquisition, a spin-off that took $19 billion of annual revenue with it, and two more multi-billion-dollar software deals, IBM never let the dividend slip. The raises got small, but the priority never changed — and the payout ratio still leaves room to keep going.
The realistic downside: more one-cent raises for years. An outright cut would take a cash-flow collapse that nothing in the past decade — not 22 quarters of falling revenue — came close to producing.
The income callout above shows what a $10,000 position generates at today's yield. With IBM, two things shape the number more than the streak does:
IBM is a high-yield tech income holding: one of the few large technology companies that pays a substantial dividend, with a century-old payment record and a streak that's safe but slow.
Every major broker offers IBM with fractional shares and free reinvestment — compare platforms, or see which streaks have already reached 50 years on the dividend kings list.
Yes. IBM joined the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats after its April 2020 raise marked 25 consecutive years of increases. The April 2026 raise to $1.69 per quarter was the 31st in a row. It is not a Dividend King — that requires 50 straight years, and IBM's streak reset in the mid-1990s.
IBM has paid consecutive quarterly dividends every year since 1916 — more than a century without a missed payment. The unbroken streak of annual increases is much shorter, dating to the mid-1990s, because IBM cut its dividend twice during its near-collapse in 1993.
The payout itself looks well covered: 2025 dividends of about $6.3 billion consumed roughly 43% of IBM's $14.7 billion in free cash flow and about 60% of earnings. The bigger question is growth — every raise since 2020 has been a single cent per quarter, so the streak is safe but income growth has barely kept pace with anything.
Every top broker we review offers IBM with $0 commissions, fractional shares, and free dividend reinvestment.