SPYD

01Fund Overview

Full Name

State Street SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 High Dividend ETF

Ticker / Exchange

SPYD · NYSE Arca

Manager

State Street (SSGA Funds Management)

Launched

October 21, 2015 · first traded October 22

Net Assets

$7.4 billion (June 30, 2026)

Tracks

S&P 500 High Dividend Index

Expense Ratio

0.07% a year

Payouts

Quarterly

Tax Form

1099-DIV · No K-1

Fund Type

Index ETF · Dividend stocks

What This Fund Does

SPYD follows the S&P 500 High Dividend Index, which takes the 80 highest-yielding companies in the S&P 500, weights them equally, and redoes the list every January and July. Nobody is choosing stocks — the index rules decide what the fund owns.

The rule is yield, and yield has a share price in it. A company's yield here is its indicated annual dividend — the latest dividend, excluding one-off specials, times how often it is paid — divided by the share price on the rebalancing date. Because the price sits underneath, a falling share price raises a company's yield and can pull it into the index: SPYD buys what has become cheap relative to its dividend. Across the two rebalances in each of the last two years it swapped 12 to 15 holdings, taking in companies yielding about 4% and dropping ones at 3.4–3.5%. The index's full rules are published separately by S&P Dow Jones Indices and are not part of SPYD's SEC filings, so this page doesn't restate them.

Two things to know:

Its sector mix is a side effect of chasing yield. The largest industries — the labels the fund itself puts beside each holding — are electric utilities (9.1%), oil and gas (8.2%), apartment and housing REITs (7.7%), banks (7.4%) and specialized REITs such as cell towers and storage (7.4%). Where this page needs a broader view it gathers those 32 industries into the eleven standard sectors; it uses those two words in that sense throughout.
It's plain stock ownership. About 99% of the fund is in stocks and the rest in cash. It doesn't borrow money or use options to boost income; a small futures position just keeps its spare cash invested in the market.

The result is predictable: SPYD captures the dividend-paying, value-oriented part of the market and misses most growth-led rallies. That tilt is the most important thing to understand before comparing it with the S&P 500.

Sources: SPYD annual report for the year ended June 30, 2026 (net assets, expense ratio, industry weights); the fund's June 30, 2026 portfolio holdings filing (holdings, stock/cash split, futures position); prior-year annual report (launch date); the fund's current prospectus, its Principal Investment Strategy section (how the index selects, weights and rebalances — record: SPYD-index-rules.json). Filing references are in the Update Log.

02Research & Scores

Every fund is scored from 1 to 5 on six dimensions using the same rules for every fund — the inputs and thresholds behind each dimension are fixed in advance, not chosen fund by fund. The Overall Score is the simple average of the six. The Research View (Buy / Hold / Avoid) comes from the overall score and the pattern of individual scores, not from any single number. Blueprint inclusion requires an overall score of 4.0 or higher with no score below 2. Scores are reviewed quarterly and describe the fund as of the update date, not a forecast.

Overall Score

3.2/5

Research View: Hold

A cheap, simple, well-diversified dividend fund whose payouts come entirely from the dividends it collects and pass straight through to shareholders, so its income moves with whatever its holdings pay. Holding it back: payout growth that has come from the index swapping in higher-yielding stocks rather than from its companies raising dividends — 83–88% of it over the last two years — a heavy REIT weight that holds down the share of its dividends taxed at the lower qualified rate, and a value tilt that has trailed the S&P 500 — 8.6% a year against 15.5% over ten years.

Solid ground: a 0.07% fee, $7.4 billion in assets, no borrowing, and a structure designed to keep the share price near the value of its holdings. An IRA is the better home for it; a taxable account is workable, just less efficient.

Last updated September 2026 · Yield Files Research

Yield

4.3%

$2.03 paid per share ÷ $47.71 share value (June 30, 2026)

FY2026 Distribution

$2.03/sh

Up from $1.92 the year before

Price vs. Holdings Value

By design

Creation and redemption are meant to hold the price near the value of the holdings; the fund’s actual premium or discount isn’t in its SEC filings

Dimension Scores

Strong (4–5)

Moderate (3)

Weak (1–2)

💰

Distribution Sustainability

Payouts come entirely from the dividends SPYD collects, but it has paid out slightly more per share than it earned for three straight years — and its payout growth comes from the index replacing holdings, not from its companies raising dividends.
View full analysis →

3/5

Earned, Slow Growth

⚖️

Valuation

The ETF structure is designed to hold the price near the value of SPYD's holdings, though the premium or discount it actually traded at isn't in its SEC filings. Whether today's yield is high or low for SPYD needs daily price history that isn't available yet.
View full analysis →

3/5

Pending Feed

🌍

Portfolio Quality

78 large U.S. stocks, none more than 1.6% of the fund, all with quoted market prices, and no borrowing. The concentration is in sectors, not individual companies.
View full analysis →

4/5

Diversified

🧾

Tax Efficiency

Part of the payout qualifies for the lower dividend tax rate, but the fund's filings don't say how much — and its REIT holdings, whose dividends don't qualify, hold that share down. An IRA is the better home.
View full analysis →

3/5

Partly Qualified

💧

Liquidity

A large, established fund. Exact trading volume and trading costs need daily market data that isn't available yet.
View full analysis →

3/5

Pending Feed

⚠️

Risk-Adjusted Profile

No borrowing and no credit risk, but it's a full stock fund that falls with the market, and its value tilt has trailed the S&P 500 over one, five and ten years: 17.5% against 22.3% in the year to June 2026, and 8.6% a year against 15.5% over ten.
View full analysis →

3/5

Full Equity Beta

03Distribution Sustainability3/5Earned, Slow Growth

The payout is real dividend income, passed straight through: SPYD retains nothing, so the payout tracks what its holdings pay, and it has paid out slightly more per share than it earned in each of the last three years

Stable

FY2026 Distribution

$2.03/sh

Paid over the year ended June 30, 2026

Yield

4.3%

$2.03 ÷ $47.71: the year's payout over net asset value per share at June 30, 2026

Earnings Coverage

0.98×

Earned $1.98 per share, paid out $2.03

5-Year Payout Growth

3.6% a year

$1.64 (2020) → $1.96 (2025), calendar years. From 2021, after the 2020–21 dip: 6.0% a year

Dividend-Covering Holdings

79%

Of the fund is in companies that covered their dividends over the last three years · 76% in the latest year alone

Worst Payout Decline

−11%

$1.75 (2019) → $1.55 (2021), calendar years; back above the 2019 level in 2022. The worst six months, July–December 2021, paid 41% less than a year earlier

SPYD passes along the dividends its stocks pay, minus its small fee. In the year ended June 30, 2026, it earned $1.98 per share that way and paid out $2.03 — a little more than it earned, as in each of the two years before.

That isn't a red flag on its own. In all six years shown below, every dollar paid out came from the fund's investment income, and for tax purposes none of it was a capital gain or investors' own money being handed back. It does mean the payout is a straight passthrough: the fund keeps nothing back between years, so if the companies SPYD owns cut their dividends, SPYD's payout falls with them.

Share-price swings and other investors' selling don't by themselves change the payout, which follows the dividends the fund's stocks pay. When large investors cash out, the fund generally hands over stocks rather than selling them — its annual report records these as in-kind redemptions — and a standard accounting practice (equalization) keeps each remaining share's portion of undistributed income unchanged.

Earned vs. Paid Out

Did SPYD earn what it paid out?

Fiscal Year (ends June 30)	Earned	Paid Out	Coverage
2026	$1.98	$2.03	0.98×
2025	$1.84	$1.92	0.96×
2024	$1.73	$1.83	0.95×
2023	$1.66	$1.78	0.93×
2022	$1.60	$1.57	1.02×
2021	$1.48	$1.91	0.77×

Coverage = earned ÷ paid out. Below 1.0× means the fund paid out more than it earned that year. “Earned” is net investment income: the dividends the fund received, minus its expenses. How to read these: a fund like SPYD has to distribute essentially all the income it collects, so this ratio sits close to 1.0× by design — a few cents either way is timing, not a decision, and the 0.93× to 1.02× years are all within that range. The year to watch is 2021, when the fund paid out 43 cents more per share than it earned. The payout fell sharply in the half-year that followed. These are the fund's fiscal years, which end June 30 — the basis SPYD reports its earnings on, so earnings and payouts can be compared like for like. The chart further down shows the same payouts by calendar year, which is what a shareholder actually received in a tax year.

So where did the extra come from? In the year ended June 30, 2026, SPYD earned $319.6 million and paid out $330.5 million. Most of the difference — $6.9 million, about 4 cents a share — came from “equalization,” a standard fund accounting practice that keeps each share's portion of undistributed income unchanged when shares are created or redeemed. The financial statements don't itemize the remaining $4.0 million. For tax purposes, the fund reported all $330.5 million as dividend income — no capital gains, and none of it was investors' own money being returned. Nothing is held back between years: the fund reported no undistributed income at the end of that year or of the year before — which is how an ETF works, since tax rules oblige it to distribute substantially all it collects and a retained buffer would be taxed. The practical consequence is that the payout depends on what its stocks pay, quarter by quarter.

Holdings Dividend Coverage

Can SPYD's companies afford their dividends?

The majority of SPYD (79%) is invested in companies that earned enough over the last three years to cover their dividends. Most of the rest (17%) covered the dividend from day-to-day operations but not once capital spending was paid — mainly utilities, which make up about two-thirds of that band.

SPYD's own payout is only as safe as the dividends it collects. So we looked at each of the fund's 78 stocks and asked a simple question: over its last three fiscal years, did the company earn enough to cover the dividends it paid? Looking at three years rather than one keeps a single unusual year — a big construction bill, a one-off charge — from deciding the answer.

Share of SPYD by Dividend Coverage

% of fund net assets · holdings as of 6/30/2026, each company's last three fiscal years · hover a band for detail

Comfortable 63%

Tight 16%

Covered before investment 17%

Not covered 3%

Cash & other 1%

Band	What it means	Last 3 years	Latest year
Comfortable	Paid out less than 75% of what they earned — room to spare	63%	59%
Tight	Paid out 75–100% of what they earned — covered, but with little cushion	16%	17%
Covered before investment	Day-to-day operations covered the dividend, but not once capital spending was paid; the rest came from other sources, such as borrowing, cash on hand or asset sales. Mostly utilities.	17%	20%
Not covered	Didn't cover the dividend even from day-to-day operations (for banks and asset managers, from profits)	3%	3%
Cash & other	Not invested in stocks	1%	1%

Seven companies are worth watching. Three didn't cover their dividends even from day-to-day operations or profits — Franklin Resources and KeyCorp over the last three years, and Dow in its latest year. Four more covered their dividends over three years but fell short in the latest one: ONEOK, Kimberly-Clark, LyondellBasell and Hormel. Together they are about 9% of SPYD and 11% of its income. If all seven halved their dividends, SPYD's income would fall by about 6%. Two have already cut: Dow paid $2.10 a share in 2025, down from $2.80 in 2024, and LyondellBasell halved its quarterly dividend to $0.69 from $1.37 in 2026, after the fiscal year these figures cover.

See each company's three-year record

Company	Share of fund	FY2023	FY2024	FY2025	Why it's listed
Franklin Resources	1.6%	✓ Covered · 70%	✗ Not covered · 146%	✗ Not covered · 141%	Not covered over 3 years
KeyCorp	1.3%	✓ Covered · 93%	✗ Not covered · loss	✓ Covered · 54%	Not covered over 3 years
Dow	1.2%	✓ Covered · 69%	◐ Before investment · 67%	✗ Not covered · 144%	Not covered in latest year
ONEOK	1.4%	— before merger	✓ Covered · 81%	◐ Before investment · 46%	Slipping
Kimberly-Clark	1.3%	✓ Covered · 57%	✓ Covered · 65%	◐ Before investment · 60%	Slipping
LyondellBasell	1.2%	✓ Covered · 47%	✓ Covered · 87%	◐ Before investment · 78%	Slipping
Hormel	1.2%	✓ Covered · 76%	✓ Covered · 61%	◐ Before investment · 75%	Slipping

Each company's own fiscal years, judged by the same test as the bands above. For covered years the percentage is dividends as a share of what the company earned — free cash flow for most companies, profits for Franklin Resources and KeyCorp; for “before investment” years, and for Dow's FY2025, it is a share of cash from day-to-day operations. KeyCorp's shortfall comes from one loss year: in 2024 it recorded a $1.8 billion loss on the sale of securities, which it describes as a securities repositioning. ONEOK's FY2023 isn't compared because its Magellan Midstream acquisition closed in September of that year. Shares of SPYD's income use the shares the fund held on June 30, 2026 and each company's dividend per share for its latest fiscal year — the amount declared for most companies, and the amount paid or allocated in the year for the few that report it that way (among them Realty Income, International Paper and American Tower); halving is an illustration, not a forecast.

Coverage asks whether a company earned enough to pay its dividend. What it owes is a separate claim on the same cash: interest and maturing debt get paid whether or not the dividend does. Measured against what they owe, the typical SPYD holding carries 5.4 years of its operating cash flow in borrowings.

What the companies owe	Share of fund
Under 3 years of cash flow — 13 holdings	17%
3 to 6 years — 26 holdings	33%
6 to 9 years — 25 holdings	32%
9 years or more — 3 holdings	4%
Not measured — banks, insurers and Ford	15%

Years owed is total borrowings at the latest fiscal year end divided by that year's cash from day-to-day operations. REITs and utilities, the two sectors the fund's income leans on most, each owe about 7.0 years; chemicals, paper and packaging owes the most, at 7.7. Debt alone doesn't decide a dividend — Dominion Energy and Exelon are among the ten most indebted holdings and paid out only 40% and 28% of their operating cash flow over three years — but it is what the coverage bands above cannot see.

How we measured what they owe

Total borrowings come from each company's own annual filing — its balance sheet where the tagged figures do not add up to it. Seven holdings had to be read that way: the tagged data understated Host Hotels' borrowings by $3.8 billion against the “Total debt” line on its own balance sheet, Realty Income's by $3.8 billion, BXP's by $1.8 billion and Kimco's by $0.5 billion; American Tower, Extra Space Storage and AES carry no single tagged figure that covers all of theirs. Every company's result is checked against the interest it actually paid: interest divided by average borrowings has to land between 1.5% and 10% a year, or the debt figure is treated as wrong and read from the statement instead. All 67 pass. Two limits: where a company reports debt and finance leases on one line, as American Tower does, the leases are included; and interest paid is reported net of interest a company capitalises into its buildings, which understates the burden for developers — Alexandria's interest looks like just 13% of its cash flow on that basis. Banks and insurers are left out because deposits and policy reserves are not borrowing in this sense, the same reason their dividend coverage is judged on profits; Ford is left out because Ford Credit's $141.4 billion of lending debt sits on the same balance sheet as the car business's $21.9 billion. Records: SPYD-leverage.jsonl, SPYD-leverage-report.json.

How we measured coverage

Each company is judged on the figure that fits its business — cash left over after capital spending for most companies, rental earnings (funds from operations) for real estate trusts, and profits for banks and insurers, with non-cash goodwill write-downs added back. The bands add up each company's last three fiscal years, so one unusual year doesn't decide the verdict; the latest year alone is shown alongside. Years before a large merger or a spin-off are left out because they describe a different company, so eight holdings are judged on one or two years instead of three. Five holdings are handled differently: Iron Mountain is judged on the “FFO (Normalized)” figure it reports, because its standard FFO was less than half its operating cash flow in each of the three years; Crown Castle on operating cash flow, because its annual report gives no FFO; Simon's dividends are estimated from its dividends per share times its average shares, and Public Storage's from a combined distributions line less preferred dividends, because neither company's structured filing data carries common dividends paid as a single figure; and American Tower's are the cash it paid, from its cash flow statement, because its tagged figure is the amount declared. Holdings are as of 6/30/2026. SPYD's index is rebalanced every January and July, so the holdings — and the figures in this box and the next — change twice a year. Company figures are from each company's own SEC filings, for its latest completed fiscal year: for 67 of the 78 holdings the year ended December 2025, and for the rest years ending between June 2025 and June 2026. One exception: Clorox's figures are for its year ended June 2025, and its annual report for the year ended June 2026, filed August 7, 2026, is not yet reflected. What has happened to their dividends since is set out in Holdings Dividend Growth.

This is Yield Files analysis built from those companies' filings, not a figure SPYD reports, and past coverage does not guarantee future dividends: it shows whether a dividend was affordable, and two holdings that cut theirs in the past year were in the Comfortable band at the time. Holdings Dividend Growth sets that alongside where the cuts have come from.

How firm are these figures?

The 79% covered depends on the choices above, so we re-ran it under alternatives. Judging on the latest year alone gives 76%, and on two years 78%. Moving the line between “comfortable” and “tight” to 70% or 80% doesn't change the covered total at all — it only shifts holdings between those two bands. Across every alternative we tested, including a 15% or 25% merger threshold, leaving goodwill write-downs in, and judging Iron Mountain on standard FFO, the covered share ranges from 76% to 80%. The “not covered” band is the most sensitive, because it is small: it ranges from 1.6% to 4.4% of the fund. Three holdings sit on a judgment. Truist is covered only because non-cash goodwill write-downs are added back. Iron Mountain is covered only on the adjusted FFO measure it reports. And KeyCorp counts as not covered only because its share count rose 17%, just under the 20% mark at which we treat an earlier year as describing a different company — leaving its 2024 loss year in the window.

Holdings Dividend Growth

Where does SPYD's income come from, and is it growing?

SPYD holds its 78 companies in roughly equal amounts — none is more than 1.6% of the fund — so its income is concentrated by sector rather than by company: real estate investment trusts supply 28% of it, consumer staples 16%, and banks and insurers 11%. Across the 85% of the fund with a five-year record, those companies raised their dividends by a median of 4.1% a year over the past five years (weighted average 5.4%).

That's the companies' own record, not SPYD's: its index replaces holdings every January and July, so the companies it held on June 30, 2026 are not all the ones behind its past payouts. SPYD's Own Payout, below, shows how its own payout grew and why.

Where SPYD's Dividend Income Comes From

% of the dividend income the fund collects · holdings as of 6/30/2026 at each company's latest annual dividend · hover a bar for detail

Share of income is each company's latest annual dividend per share times the shares SPYD held on June 30, 2026 — $322 million a year in total. Percentages are rounded, so they don't add to exactly 100. Hovering a bar also gives that sector's share of the fund's net assets, which differs from its share of the income wherever a sector yields more or less than the fund as a whole.

Dividends within a sector tend to move together — REIT payouts follow rents, occupancy and the cost of refinancing debt — and by sector, SPYD's largest source of income has turned. The dividends its REITs pay the fund grew 4.5% a year over five years, then fell 1.6% in the latest year: the raises across the other REITs did not make up for the three that cut. Chemicals, paper and packaging — 6% of the fund but 9% of its income — fell 6.6%. Every other sector grew.

Growth in the Dividends Each Sector Pays SPYD

% a year over five years, against the change in the latest fiscal year · hover a bar for both figures

Five years

Latest year

See the figures

Growth in the dividends each sector pays SPYD	Five years	Latest year
Whole fund	+4.0% a year	+0.8%
Real Estate	+4.5% a year	−1.6%
Consumer Staples	+5.0% a year	+2.6%
Financials	+4.5% a year	+3.1%
Utilities	+2.4% a year	+3.4%
Materials (chemicals, paper & packaging)	not shown	−6.6%
Energy	+5.8% a year	+3.9%
Communication Services (telecom & media)	not shown	+2.7%
Health Care	+4.3% a year	+1.4%
Consumer Discretionary (retail, cars & leisure)	not shown	+4.7%
Information Technology	not shown	+4.1%
Industrials	not shown	+0.9%

Growth in the dividends each sector pays SPYD, weighted by how much of each company the fund holds, so the whole-fund bar is the net of every raise and cut. The 4.1% median at the top of this box describes the typical company instead, which is why the whole-fund figure here differs from it. Five years runs to each company's latest fiscal year and covers the 67 holdings with a five-year record. Every sector now has its own row. Where a five-year figure would rest on too little it is withheld rather than the sector being hidden: the rule is fewer than three holdings with a clean five-year record, or a figure that moves more than five points when any single company is dropped. That withholds materials, communication services, consumer discretionary, information technology and industrials. Chemicals, paper and packaging has no five-year figure because only three of its five holdings have a clean record. SPYD's own payout has grown faster than these figures — 5.4% in 2025 — mainly because its index keeps changing what it owns; SPYD's Own Payout, below, measures by how much.

What the Companies Did With Their Dividend

% of the fund · the same 78 holdings over five years and in their latest fiscal year · hover a band for detail

Cut it

Held it flat

Raised it

Not measured, or cash

See the figures, with the raises by size

What the companies did with their dividend	Over five years	In the latest year
Cut it	7%	4%
Held it flat	1%	19%
Raised it	76%	74%
— slowly (up to 3% a year)	21%	—
— moderately (3–7% a year)	31%	—
— strongly (7%+ a year)	24%	—
Not measured	15%	1%

Percentages are rounded; each bar is a share of the whole fund. Over five years: the six companies that cut are AT&T (−11.8% a year), Dow, Dominion Energy, Healthpeak Properties, International Paper and Crown Castle; Kraft Heinz held its dividend at $1.60 a share in both 2020 and 2025; and four of those in “raised it strongly” — Ford, Kimco, Molson Coors and Simon Property — cut their dividends in 2020, so their rates, 7% to 38% a year, are measured from that cut (Kimco paid $1.01 a share in 2025 against $1.12 in 2019, and Molson Coors $1.88 against $1.96; Ford's 2025 figure includes a $0.15 supplemental dividend). In the latest year: the four that cut are Dow (halved), Alexandria Real Estate (by 45%), Crown Castle (by about a third) and BXP (by 29%) — Alexandria and BXP cut only in that year, so the five-year bar still counts them as raising. Weighted by the income each company pays SPYD, that year's raises added about 2.8% and its cuts took about 2.0%, a net gain of 0.8%; and because the cuts came late in the year — Crown Castle's in the second quarter, Dow's and BXP's in the third, Alexandria's in the fourth — the four remove about another 2% at their new rates. Smurfit Westrock, 1% of the fund, isn't compared in the latest year because the year before was its merger year.

Since those fiscal years ended: the figures in this section rest on each company's fiscal-year results — for 67 of the 78 holdings, the year ended December 2025 — so we checked every holding's quarterly reports since. Through each company's latest report, mostly to June 30, 2026, companies making up 40% of SPYD raised their dividends again, 56% kept them unchanged, and one cut: LyondellBasell halved its quarterly dividend, to $0.69 from $1.37, starting in March 2026. That removes about another 1.4% of SPYD's income, bringing the five cuts to about 3.3%. Raises declared since then add back about $3.2 million a year against LyondellBasell's $4.6 million, so at current rates the holdings pay slightly less than at their fiscal year ends — the reverse of the latest year's balance. Many companies raise later in the year, so this is a snapshot, not a trend. Amcor and General Mills, 2% of the fund, closed their fiscal years recently enough that there is nothing newer to check.

Where the cuts came from. Three of the five holdings that have cut their dividend recently are REITs; the other two are chemical companies, two of the five chemicals, paper and packaging holdings. By weight, 12% of the fund's REITs cut, against none of its utilities, banks, consumer staples, energy, healthcare or telecom holdings, and 2020 went much the same way: two of the four holdings that cut in 2020 are REITs. Coverage did not single the REITs out — two of them were in the Comfortable band when they cut, paying out 67% and 60% of their rental earnings over three years; a dividend can be affordable and still be reset. Debt did: Dow, BXP, Alexandria and Crown Castle rank 1st, 2nd, 4th and 7th of the 67 holdings whose borrowings can be measured, a median of 13.3 years of cash flow owed against 5.4 for the typical holding. LyondellBasell, 32nd at 5.6 years, was flagged by coverage instead — it is on the watch list in the coverage box. Between them, the watch list and the ten most indebted holdings name 16 holdings, 21% of the fund: all five cuts came from those 16, none from the other 62. Neither list is a forecast. Iron Mountain is the third most indebted holding and spends 38 cents of every dollar of operating cash flow on interest, and it raised its dividend; most of the 16 have not cut.

Utilities look different, and they are the test of whether debt alone tells you anything. All nine of them sit in “covered before investment” — two-thirds of that whole band — because regulated construction is funded with borrowing and share sales by design, not out of operating cash alone. They owe as much as the REITs, about 7.0 years of cash flow each, and the two that owe the most — Dominion Energy and Exelon — paid out only 40% and 28% of their operating cash flow over three years. In the latest year 89% of the fund's utility weight raised its dividend, and none cut. Borrowing to build is not the same as borrowing to pay.

How we measured growth

Each company's dividends per share come from its own annual filings, comparing its latest full year with the year five years earlier, cross-checked against the growth in total dividend dollars it paid. Four holdings' windows start on a 2020 dividend cut — their starting dividend was more than 10% below the year before — so their rates measure a rebound from a trough of their own making. They are counted in the bands, the median and the average like every other holding, and named under the table; without them the median would be 4.0% a year and the weighted average 4.5%. About 15% of the fund couldn't be measured over five years: three have no five-year dividend history in their filings (Kenvue, Viatris, Smurfit Westrock); five have jumps in their per-share dividend data that their total dividend payments don't confirm (APA, Host Hotels, American Tower, Equity Residential, Amcor); two are missing a year of per-share dividend data (UPS, Principal Financial); and one (BXP) has no per-share dividend figure in its structured data after 2017. The latest-year view compares each company's regular dividend per share with the year before and checks it against the cash actually paid per share; special dividends are left out, and every cut — and every case where the two measures disagreed — was confirmed in the company's annual report. It covers 98% of the fund; Smurfit Westrock's prior year was its merger year and isn't compared. The check since each fiscal year compares the regular dividend per share declared in the company's latest quarter with the rate in force at its fiscal year end, rebuilt quarter by quarter from the year-to-date figures its quarterly reports carry. A raise declared in the last quarter of a fiscal year counts in that year rather than after it — Edison, Evergy and Omnicom declared theirs in the fourth quarter of 2025 — and special dividends are left out. A holding was classified from the tagged figures only when its quarters were regular on both sides of the comparison; 18 were not — no per-share figure tagged, a declaration falling in an unusual quarter, or a change smaller than rounding can rule out — and each was read in the company's own filing, as was the one cut. Raises against cuts: each holding's change is weighted by the dividend income it pays SPYD — the shares held on June 30, 2026 times its dividend per share — for the latest fiscal year against the year before (77 holdings, 98% of the fund; Smurfit Westrock's merger year isn't compared), and for the current rate against the rate at the fiscal year end (76 holdings, 97%). Both describe the June 30, 2026 holdings; SPYD's past payouts came from whatever it held at the time. The sector table uses the same weighting as the chart above. Each figure was tested by dropping every company in turn: in the four largest sectors no single company moves the five-year figure by more than 1.9 points, and in the two smaller sectors that still carry one — energy and health care — by no more than 3.8. The five that carry none are withheld for the reasons above: communication services moves 7.1 points on one company, consumer discretionary 13.7, materials 7.2, and information technology and industrials have too few companies with a five-year record to measure at all. Records: SPYD-dividend-since.json, SPYD-net-dividend-change.json, SPYD-sector-growth-table.json.

How we measured the income shares

Each company's share of the income is the shares SPYD held on June 30, 2026 times its latest fiscal-year dividend per share — every one of those dividend figures located in the company's own SEC filings. The total, $322.1 million a year, is within 0.5% of the $323.6 million SPYD reported as dividend income for the year ended June 30, 2026, which is the check that the shares below add up to the fund's real income. The eleven sectors aggregate the industries SPYD itself assigns each holding, read from the schedule of investments in its annual report for the year ended June 30, 2026 (accession 0001193125-26-383187): 32 industries, grouped into the eleven standard sectors, which carry their standard names here so the weights can be compared against any other fund or index. The chart above shows all eleven as a sorted bar rather than a pie: eleven is far past what colour can separate, and a bar carries any number of categories on one colour because length does the work. Risk Profile lists every sector with its industries beneath, from the same filing. Every industry's weight here reproduces the percentage that filing prints for it, and the fund follows the standard classification, so pipelines count as oil and gas rather than utilities. Cash and the fund's other non-stock holdings, 0.7% of net assets, pay no dividends and so have no slice. Coverage for REITs is measured on funds from operations, the rental-earnings figure the industry reports. The three REITs that cut their dividend in the past year are Alexandria Real Estate, BXP and Crown Castle; over their last three years Alexandria paid out 67% of its funds from operations and BXP 60%, both in the Comfortable band, while Crown Castle was Tight at 83% of operating cash flow. The two holdings that cut in 2020 are Kimco and Simon Property. Holdings are as of 6/30/2026 and the index is rebalanced every January and July, so these shares change twice a year. The years-owed figures are the weighted averages of the per-holding borrowings described under “How we measured what they owe” in the box above. Records: SPYD-sector-risk.json, SPYD-leverage-report.json.

This looks back at the companies SPYD held on June 30, 2026 — it isn't what SPYD's own investors received, which is the payout history shown below.

SPYD's Own Payout

What has SPYD paid, and why has it grown?

What SPYD Paid, and What It Yielded — Calendar Years

One figure, two rows on the same years. Above: everything SPYD distributed per share in each calendar year, January to December. Below: that same total as a percentage of the fund's net asset value per share at December 31 — a yield on net asset value, not on market price, which SEC filings don't carry. The lower scale starts at 3% rather than zero so the movement is visible · 2016 is the fund's first full year

Dividends

Capital gain

Yield on net asset value

The 2017 capital gain was paid that December, which is why the bar stands above 2018's without the dividend having fallen. Not all of it was taxed as a capital gain: $738,721 of that fiscal year's distributions was reported as long-term gain, and the rest — including the short-term part of the payment — as ordinary income, which is how short-term gains are taxed and the reason the filings give no separate figure for them. No year on record includes a return of capital. Per-share figures are rounded to cents and each calendar year is built from three of them, so a bar can differ by about a cent from the four payments actually made.

The payout is steadier than the yield — and the yield mostly isn't about the dividend. Across these ten years the total paid stayed in a $1.51–$1.99 band while the yield swung from 3.69% to 5.03%, because the denominator moves more than the numerator does. 2021 shows it plainly: the payout fell to its low of $1.55 in the same year net asset value climbed to $42.06, and the yield hit its floor. The year after, the record $1.99 payout landed while net asset value fell to $39.58, and the yield reached its peak. The two don't have to move together — in 2024 the payout rose and the yield still fell. A high yield here has usually meant a cheaper fund, not a more generous one.

The dip in 2021, and the rebound after it. Payouts fell through 2020 and 2021 — to $1.64 and then $1.55 — before recovering to $1.99 in 2022 and settling between $1.82 and $1.96 since. The second half of 2021 was the weak stretch: SPYD paid just $0.51 per share over those six months, against about $0.90 in the same period of neighbouring years. It came right after a fiscal year in which the fund paid out far more than it earned ($1.91 paid against $1.48 earned in the year to June 2021). From 2021 to 2025 the payout grew 6.0% a year, though it dipped in 2023 — and 2021 was the low point, which flatters the figure.

Measured on everything distributed, the same basis as the chart above.
Period ending 2025	From	To	Growth (CAGR)	What's behind it
1 year (2024→2025)	$1.86	$1.96	+5.4% a year	—
3 years (2022→2025)	$1.99	$1.96	−0.5% a year	Starts in 2022, the highest year on record — a high starting point. The payout has risen each year since 2023.
5 years (2020→2025)	$1.64	$1.96	+3.6% a year	—
9 years (2016→2025)	$1.51	$1.96	+2.9% a year	The fund's whole history. There is no ten-year figure — SPYD began operations on October 21, 2015 and its shares first traded the next day, so 2016 is its first full year.

A CAGR is the steady yearly rate that would carry the starting year's dividend to the ending year's. It reads only those two years, not the ones in between, so where a window starts shapes the answer — which is why the four are worth reading together. The one-year row is simply the change from 2024 to 2025; with a single year there is nothing to compound.

What raised the dividend income behind each SPYD share	Year to June 2025	Year to June 2026
Its companies raising or cutting their dividends	+0.6%	+0.9%
The index changing what SPYD owns	+4.6%	+4.5%
Total	+5.3%	+5.5%

Dividend income per SPYD share at each June 30: the shares SPYD held of each company, per fund share, times that company's dividends per share for its latest fiscal year. The rows are rounded, so they don't add exactly to the totals.

Over the last two years, the index did most of the work. Companies changing their dividends added less than a point a year to the income behind each SPYD share; the index changing what SPYD owns added about four and a half — 88% of the growth in the year to June 2025 and 83% in the year to June 2026. Across each year's two rebalances it replaced 12 to 15 holdings with higher-yielding companies (a median yield of about 4% for those joining, against 3.4–3.5% for those leaving) and reset every holding to an equal weight. That is why the 5.4% for 2025 above sits so far from the 0.8% in Holdings Dividend Growth, which keeps today's companies fixed. That 0.8% is also a recent low: measured the same way over five years, the dividends SPYD's holdings pay it grew 4.0% a year. Nor does it contradict the 76% of the fund that raised its dividend over those five years — most did, but these figures weight each company by the income it supplies, and the biggest payers are the ones that cut. It also means SPYD's recent payout growth depends on the index continuing to find higher yields to buy.

How we measured where the growth came from

The dividend income behind each SPYD share at a date is the sum, over its holdings that day, of the shares held per SPYD share times each company's dividends declared per share for its latest fiscal year ending by then, as first reported in its 10-K. Holdings are from SPYD's N-PORT filings for June 30 of 2024, 2025 and 2026; its shares outstanding are its net assets divided by its net asset value per share, both from its annual report. The change between two dates splits exactly into two parts: the earlier holdings with their dividends updated (its companies), and the change in holdings valued at the new dividends (the index). Special dividends are included, because the fund received them. Companies that tag no per-share dividend — among them Ford, Huntington, Principal and Omnicom — were read from their 10-Ks, and Amcor's 1-for-5 reverse stock split on January 14, 2026 is adjusted for. Walgreens, which left the fund in the first year, is valued at its fiscal-2023 dividend of $1.92 although it cut that dividend in January 2024; that makes its exit look larger, and the index's share smaller, than it was. Tested by dropping each company in turn, the index's share of the growth stays between 70% and 91%; leaving out every figure read by hand gives 68%. Over the same two years SPYD's own net investment income per share rose 6.4% and 7.6%. Record: SPYD-income-decomposition.json.

Sources

SPYD annual reports for the years ended June 30, 2025 and 2026 (per-share income and distributions; both reports show identical figures for the years they share), and all eleven of the fund's semiannual reports, 2016 through 2026, for the July–December figures. The calendar-year figures in the chart are built from the fund's own filings: SEC reports cover fiscal years ending June 30, and each semiannual report covers July to December, so a calendar year is the fiscal year minus the previous July–December plus the current one. The 2016 figure additionally nets out the fund's first partial period, October 22 to December 31, 2015, which is reported in the 2016 semiannual. Every fiscal year appears in several of these filings, and the repeated figures agree. The filings round per-share figures to the cent, so each calendar year can differ by about a cent from the exact total paid. Company coverage uses each company's own SEC filings, as described in “How we measured” above. Filing references are in the Update Log.

04Valuation3/5Pending Feed

SPYD's share price stays very close to the value of its holdings (see Liquidity →), so the useful valuation question is different: is today's yield high or low compared with SPYD's own history?

Answering that needs a daily price history, which isn't available yet. This section will show the comparison once it is.

One advantage doesn't depend on timing: a 0.07% annual fee, which lets nearly all of the dividends the fund collects flow through to shareholders.

05Risk Profile3/5Full Equity Beta

No borrowing and no credit risk, but it falls with the stock market and lags the S&P 500 when growth stocks lead

Monitor

Portfolio Composition & Holdings

Stocks Held

June 30, 2026

Largest Position

1.6%

Iron Mountain

Top 10 Holdings

15%

Of the fund, combined

Portfolio Turnover

29%

Share of holdings traded during the year

SPYD's 78 stocks are held in roughly equal amounts, so no single company dominates — the 10 largest together are about 15% of the fund. The concentration is by sector instead: real estate investment trusts (REITs) make up about 27% of the fund, and utilities about 12%; pipeline companies, which the fund counts under oil and gas, are part of a further 8%. REITs and utilities both tend to be sensitive to interest rates.

The 29% turnover is the rule working, not a manager trading. SPYD's index takes the 80 highest-yielding stocks in the S&P 500, weights them equally and rebuilds itself every January and July — yield as of the rebalancing date is the only stated test, with no earnings, payout-ratio or dividend-history requirement. So roughly a third of the portfolio is replaced each year by formula, and a company is dropped when its yield falls — which happens when its share price rises as readily as when it cuts. What a buy-and-hold investor owns here is the rule, not the holdings list above; that list is a snapshot with a six-month shelf life.

What SPYD Owns, by Sector and Industry (% of fund)

Every holding, grouped two ways at once. Sectors are in bold; beneath each are the industries the fund itself prints beside its holdings. Industries under 1.5% of the fund are pooled as “other”, except where that would leave a sector with nothing named.

Real Estate27.2%

Residential REITs7.7%

Specialized REITs7.4%

Retail REITs6.9%

Health Care REITs2.5%

Hotel & Resort REITs1.5%

Other (1 smaller industry)1.2%

Consumer Staples14.6%

Food Products6.1%

Household Products2.4%

Beverages2.0%

Consumer Staples Distribution & Retail1.5%

Other (2 smaller industries)2.7%

Financials12.8%

Banks7.4%

Capital Markets2.8%

Insurance2.6%

Utilities11.7%

Electric Utilities9.1%

Other (2 smaller industries)2.5%

Energy8.2%

Oil, Gas & Consumable Fuels8.2%

Materials (chemicals, paper & packaging)6.0%

Containers & Packaging3.6%

Chemicals2.4%

Health Care5.3%

Pharmaceuticals3.8%

Health Care Providers & Services1.5%

Communication Services (telecom & media)4.5%

Diversified Telecommunication Services3.4%

Other (1 smaller industry)1.1%

Consumer Discretionary (retail, cars & leisure)3.7%

Specialty Retail1.4%

Other (2 smaller industries)2.3%

Information Technology2.7%

Semiconductors & Semiconductor Equipment1.4%

Other (1 smaller industry)1.3%

Industrials2.5%

Machinery1.4%

Other (1 smaller industry)1.2%

All stock holdings99.3%

The remaining 0.7% is cash and a small futures position. Sector weights are computed from the holdings; industry weights are as the fund prints them, rounded to a tenth, so a sector's parts can sit about a tenth of a point from its total. Record: SPYD-sector-industry-tree.json.

In a rally led by low-dividend growth and technology stocks, SPYD will own almost none of the winners. In the fund's own words from its latest annual report, it “did not capture the large returns of these low dividend paying stocks.”

Holding	Industry	% of Fund
Iron Mountain, Inc. REIT	Specialized REITs	1.6%
Franklin Resources, Inc.	Capital Markets	1.6%
CVS Health Corp.	Health Care Providers	1.5%
Host Hotels & Resorts, Inc. REIT	Hotel & Resort REITs	1.5%
Edison International	Electric Utilities	1.5%
Target Corp.	Consumer Staples Retail	1.5%
APA Corp.	Oil, Gas & Consumable Fuels	1.5%
Viatris, Inc.	Pharmaceuticals	1.5%
Kimco Realty Corp. REIT	Retail REITs	1.4%
Simon Property Group, Inc. REIT	Retail REITs	1.4%

The 10 largest of SPYD's 78 stock holdings on June 30, 2026. Cash and the small futures position are not included.

Stress History — Prior Drawdowns (period-end)

SPYD has been through one serious fall: in the first half of 2020 the value of a share dropped 29.4%, and it took eighteen months from the peak to get back. But the number that matters depends on what you do with the income, and the two answers are far apart.

Every Decline SPYD's Filings Show

Peak	Low	Fall in share value	Same window, reinvested	Back above the peak	Round trip
Dec 31, 2017	Dec 31, 2018	−8.9%	−4.8%	Jun 30, 2019	18 mo
Dec 31, 2019	Jun 30, 2020	−29.4%	−27.2%	Jun 30, 2021	18 mo
Dec 31, 2021	Jun 30, 2023	−11.8%	−5.1%	Dec 31, 2024	36 mo
Dec 31, 2024	Jun 30, 2025	−1.7%	+0.4%	Dec 31, 2025	12 mo

Twenty-one consecutive half-year periods from the fund's first day of operations, October 22, 2015, to June 30, 2026. Share value is net asset value per share, what one share was worth. Reinvested is the fund's own total-return figure over the same dates, which assumes every distribution was ploughed back at net asset value. Both rows come from SPYD's financial highlights. These are period ends six months apart, so a low falling between two of them is invisible here — every figure is a floor on what a holder lived through, not a measure of it. A daily price series would show more, and SEC filings do not contain one.

The gap between those two columns is the distributions. SPYD pays out 4–5% of its value a year and retains nothing, so that money leaves the share price the day it is paid. An investor who spends the income therefore sees a deeper fall and a longer wait than the total-return figure suggests. The 2022–23 decline is the clearest case: 11.8% off the value of a share and three years to recover it, against 5.1% and two years for someone reinvesting. Neither number is wrong; they answer different questions, and an income investor drawing on this fund is asking the first one.

The payout recovered later than the price did. SPYD's value was back above its pre-COVID level by June 30, 2021. Its distributions per share were $1.75 in 2019, then $1.64 in 2020 and $1.55 in 2021 — they did not pass the 2019 figure until 2022, at $1.99. An investor watching the share price would have seen a full recovery a year or more before the income followed. That ordering is what the Payout Tracks Its Holdings Directly risk below looks like in practice: dividend cuts are declared after the damage, and the fund passes them on when they arrive.

What Holds Up, and What Doesn't

✓

What Holds Up

Plain Stock Ownership

About 99% of the fund is in stocks, with no options and no borrowing. Its one derivative is a long position in 100 S&P 500 index futures — $37.7 million of notional exposure, 0.5% of the fund, and about that size all year. At half a percent it cannot meaningfully amplify a fall, but it is market exposure added to the stocks rather than a hedge against them, and the fund's filings say only that futures are used “to meet the Funds' objectives”.

Spread Across Companies

The largest single stock is 1.6% of the fund and the ten largest together are 15%. No one company failing would move the payout much — and size is not the same map as income here: those ten pay 11.9% of the dividends the fund collects, less than their 15% of its value, while the ten largest payers are a different ten companies, holding 12.3% of the fund and paying 19.9%. The concentration is by sector instead, which the interest-rate entry under What Doesn't covers.

Easy to Value

Every holding is priced at a quoted market price — fair-value level 1 in the fund's own holdings filing — and none is in default. Nothing here depends on an estimate.

What Doesn't

High

Full Downside Participation

SPYD owns stocks and has nothing to cushion a fall. In a broad market selloff, it drops with the market.

High

Value Tilt & Lagging the S&P 500

Picking stocks for high dividends means leaning toward utilities, real estate, energy and banks. Last year SPYD returned 17.5% versus 22.3% for the S&P 500 — a gap the fund attributes to not owning the low-dividend AI and semiconductor stocks that led the market. Over five years the gap is wider: 8.2% versus 13.4% a year.

Medium

Interest-Rate Sensitivity

REITs (about 27% of the fund) and utilities and pipelines (about 14%) tend to be more sensitive to interest rates than the broad market, so rising rates can hit SPYD harder than an S&P 500 fund.

Medium

The Payout Tracks Its Holdings Directly

As an ETF, SPYD distributes substantially all of what it collects and retains nothing — a reserve would be taxed. So if its companies cut their dividends, its payout falls with them, with nothing held back to smooth it. It has also paid out slightly more per share than it earned for three years running (see Distribution Sustainability).

Low

Securities Lending

SPYD lends some of its stocks to other institutions for a fee, backed by collateral ($102.6 million on loan at June 30, 2026). This is standard for large index ETFs but adds a small risk if a borrower defaults.

These two lists are not an even balance. One side names what the structure gets right; the other grades each risk by how much it can cost you, and this section scores 3/5 — read the grades, not the list lengths.

Sources: the fund's June 30, 2026 portfolio holdings filing (stock/cash split, position sizes, top 10, default status); SPYD annual report for the year ended June 30, 2026 (pricing of holdings, industry weights, securities lending, returns, fund commentary, and the open futures table — 100 long E-mini S&P 500 contracts, $37,732,780 notional, average $34,337,981 through the year). The drawdown table is built from two rows of SPYD's financial highlights — Net asset value, end of period for the share-value column and Total return for the reinvested column — across fifteen annual and semiannual reports, covering twenty-one consecutive half-years from October 22, 2015. July–December returns are printed in the semiannual reports; January–June returns are the residual of the printed fiscal year and the printed July–December half inside it, each re-checked against net asset value plus distributions (worst gap 0.19 points). Index rules from the fund's prospectus (records: SPYD-stress-history.json, SPYD-index-rules.json, SPYD-payout-drawdown.json; script: _val/spyd_stress_history.py). REIT, utility and pipeline weights are grouped using the industries the fund itself prints beside each holding in its schedule of investments, not SEC industry codes — those two disagree here, and the fund's own labelling is what the rest of this page uses (records: SPYD-holding-industries.json, SPYD-income-by-sector.json).

06Manager Quality4/5Solid

SPYD is an index fund, so manager quality means how closely it tracks its index and how little it costs — not stock picking. On both counts, State Street runs it well.

Judge it against its own index, not the S&P 500. Last year SPYD returned 17.5% against 17.7% for the S&P 500 High Dividend Index, a gap of about 0.1 point — roughly its fee plus trading costs. Over five years the gap is just 0.04 point a year (8.23% versus 8.27%).

Trailing the broader S&P 500 is a result of the strategy, not the manager: the index SPYD follows simply leaves out most of the market's growth leaders. But that is not the whole gap. Over calendar 2018–2025 SPYD returned 6.72% a year against 10.54% for SPYV — the same sponsor's plain S&P 500 value fund, which also owns none of the growth leaders and charges less. The difference between them is the yield screen itself, not the value tilt they share; see Comparable Funds below.

1 Year

17.5%

Year ended June 30, 2026

1 Year vs. Own Index

−0.1 pt

17.5% vs. 17.7% — tight tracking

5 Years

8.2% a year

S&P 500: 13.4% a year

10 Years

8.6% a year

S&P 500: 15.5% a year

Share value: SPYD's share value rose from $40.09 in June 2022 to $47.71 in June 2026, while paying out about 4% to 5% a year. Its lag behind the S&P 500 is the expected cost of a value/income tilt, not a sign the fund is shrinking.

Comparable Funds

Ticker	Fund	Yield	Return a Year	Expense Ratio	Strategy Note	Fund File
SPYDthis	SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 High Dividend ETF	4.64%	+6.72%	0.07%	Highest-yielding 80 S&P 500 names, ~equal weighted; heavy value/utility/REIT tilt
SPYV	SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 Value ETF	2.26%	+10.54%	0.04%	Same sponsor, broad S&P 500 value — no yield screen at all. Cheapest of the three, and the best return over these eight years.	—
SDY	SPDR S&P Dividend ETF	2.63%	+7.88%	0.35%	Same sponsor; dividend-growth (aristocrats) screen rather than raw yield. Five times SPYD's fee, and the mildest worst year of the three (−2.7% in 2018).	—
HDV	iShares Core High Dividend ETF	—	—	0.08%	Competing high-dividend screen (Morningstar-based). Its fiscal year ends April 30, so no filing of its reports a period ending December 31 and no calendar-year figure can be derived without inventing one. Its fee is comparable all the same — a ratio doesn't depend on which months it covers.	—
SCHD	Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF	—	—	0.06%	Quality + dividend-growth screen; a common alternative with a stronger quality tilt. Its fiscal year ends August 31 — same problem for returns, but note it is the second-cheapest of the five, undercutting SPYD.	—

Yield and return are calendar years 2018–2025, the eight years all three State Street funds can be measured over on one basis. Return is the annualised total return on net asset value with distributions reinvested; yield is the median of each year's distributions divided by net asset value at December 31 — a yield on net asset value, not on market price, because market prices are not in SEC filings. Expense ratio is each fund's latest fiscal year. SPYV's series starts in 2018 because a share split in the first half of 2017 breaks its per-share history.

Over those eight years the highest-yield screen paid the most income and earned the least. SPYD's 4.64% median yield is roughly double SDY's 2.63% and SPYV's 2.26%, but it compounded at 6.72% a year against SPYV's 10.54% — plain S&P 500 value, from the same sponsor, at a lower fee and with no dividend screen at all. Cumulatively that is 68% against 123%. SPYD also had the worst single year of the three (−11.5% in 2020, against −8.9% and −2.7%). The income is real and it is large; it has been paid for out of total return.

Two peers cannot be put on the same clock. HDV and SCHD run fiscal years ending April 30 and August 31, so neither ever reports a period ending December 31, and a calendar-year return for them could only be interpolated across a window that straddles the boundary. Their fees are shown, because a ratio doesn't depend on which twelve months it covers; their yields and returns are left empty, and this is why. On cost the five rank SPYV 0.04%, SCHD 0.06%, SPYD 0.07%, HDV 0.08%, SDY 0.35% — so SPYD is mid-field, not cheap. An earlier version of this section called cost SPYD's "clearest, verifiable edge"; with the peers actually measured, it isn't one.

Sources: SPYD annual reports (returns versus the S&P 500 and the S&P 500 High Dividend Index; share values). The peer comparison is built from the Total return, Net asset value, end of period, distributions and Total expenses rows of each fund's financial highlights, across fifteen SPDR Series Trust annual and semiannual reports — all three funds print their tables in the same documents. July–December figures are printed; January–June figures are the residual of the printed fiscal year and the printed July–December half inside it. Gated three ways: periods printed in more than one filing must agree; the SPYD series produced here must reproduce SPYD-stress-history.json period for period and SPYD-calendar-distributions.json year for year; and every derived half is re-checked against net asset value plus distributions (worst gap 0.19 points). HDV's and SCHD's expense ratios come from the same Total expenses row in their own trusts' filings (iShares Trust and Schwab Strategic Trust), bound by exact fund name — both trusts print a near-identical neighbour, “iShares Core Dividend ETF” and “Schwab International Dividend Equity ETF”, that a loose match takes first — and the period read off each table is checked against the fiscal year EDGAR reports for that series. Fiscal year ends for HDV, DVY and SCHD read from EDGAR submission metadata (records: SPYD-peer-calendar.json, SPYD-peer-expenses.json; scripts: _val/trust_calendar_series.py, _val/peer_expense_ratios.py).

07Liquidity3/5Pending Feed

ETFs have a built-in way to keep their share price close to the value of what they own. When the two drift apart, large trading firms can create or redeem shares and profit from the gap, which pulls the price back in line — usually within minutes. SPYD holds only large, heavily traded U.S. stocks, so this works well.

At $7.4 billion in assets, SPYD is a large, established fund, which generally means it's easy to buy and sell. Exact figures for daily trading volume and trading costs need daily market data that isn't available yet; they'll be added when it is.

08Tax Treatment3/5Partly Qualified

Tax Form

1099-DIV · No K-1

The standard fund tax form; no partnership paperwork.

How Payouts Are Taxed

Dividends, Partly Qualified

All $330.5 million paid out in FY2026 was dividend income; none was a capital gain. Part of it qualifies for the lower rate.

Share Taxed at Lower Rates

Not Stated

The fund reports the maximum allowable amount as qualified but never gives the figure in its filings. Its REIT holdings, whose dividends don't qualify, hold the share down.

Return of Capital

None

No payout in the last three years handed investors back their own money.

Best Account

IRA First, Then Taxable

The part that doesn't qualify for the lower rate is what benefits from tax deferral.

What SPYD Paid Out, By Tax Type

Fiscal Year (ends June 30)	Ordinary Dividends	Capital Gains	Return of Capital	Share Taxed at Lower Rates
2026	$330.5M	$0	$0	Not disclosed
2025	$299.6M	$0	$0	Not disclosed
2024	$310.2M	$0	$0	Not disclosed

Every dollar SPYD paid out in these three years was a dividend — no capital gains, and nothing that returned investors their own money. “Ordinary dividends” is the whole dividend total (box 1a on a 1099-DIV), not a statement about the tax rate: the qualified portion taxed at the lower rate (box 1b) sits inside it. The fund's filings say a portion qualifies, and that it reports the maximum amount allowable as such, but never give the figure.

SPYD's annual report states that a portion of its dividends is qualified income eligible for reduced tax rates, and that the fund reports the maximum amount allowable as such — but it never gives the amount, so an after-tax yield can't be calculated here. What the filings do show is why the share is held down: SPYD's REIT holdings, about 27% of the fund, pay dividends that generally don't qualify for the lower rate. That leaves a smaller qualified share than a dividend fund without the REIT weight, though the filings don't quantify it. These figures also cover fiscal years (ending June 30), while your 1099-DIV covers the calendar year. Bottom line: a meaningful part of SPYD's income is taxed at ordinary rates, so an IRA is the better home — a taxable account is workable, just less efficient.

Sources: SPYD annual reports for the years ended June 30, 2025 and 2026, tax character of distributions footnote. Filing references are in the Update Log.

09Best For / Avoid If & AllocationIllustrative · Not personalized advice

✓

Best For

Cost-conscious income investors who want a simple, low-fee dividend stock fund
Investors who want a real value/income tilt that behaves differently from an S&P 500 index fund
IRAs and other tax-advantaged accounts, where the tax character of the payout doesn't matter
Investors who want payouts funded entirely by dividends, not by returning their own money

Avoid If

You want to keep pace with the broad market — SPYD trailed the S&P 500 by about 4.8 points last year and about 5.2 points a year over five years, by design
You're investing in a taxable account and taxes matter — the large REIT weight holds down the share taxed at the lower qualified rate, and the fund's filings never state the figure
You want a rapidly growing payout — SPYD's has grown about 3.6% a year over five years (6.0% since 2021); a dividend-growth fund may fit better

Allocation Guidance

Illustrative ranges only. These are general educational guidelines for different income investor profiles — not a recommendation for any individual's portfolio. Consider your own circumstances and consult a financial professional before investing.

Conservative

2–6%

Small dividend-stock holding

Can sit alongside a mostly-bond portfolio, but remember it's a stock fund that can fall sharply — it is not a bond substitute.

Balanced

5–10%

Value/income diversifier

A reasonable counterweight to growth-heavy stock holdings, for investors who accept trailing the broad market in growth-led years.

Growth Income

8–15%

Core dividend-stock holding

Income-focused investors comfortable with a value tilt and full stock-market risk may hold a larger position, knowing it will lag in strong bull markets by design.

10Corporate Actions & Update Log

ETFs don't face the rights offerings or merger issues that closed-end funds can. One change this year: on October 31, 2025, the fund was renamed from “SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 High Dividend ETF” to “State Street SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 High Dividend ETF.” Its objective, strategy, risks, index and fee did not change.

Update Log

Sep 2026

Added: the Comparable Funds table now carries real figures, on one basis

Every peer row read “N/A — not fetched” or “not sourced from EDGAR”. The second claim was simply wrong: all of these funds file with the SEC. Three of them can now be compared properly, and the reason is their reporting calendar. SPYD, SDY and SPYV all have June 30 fiscal year ends, so each one's semiannual report carries a column ending exactly on December 31 — which is what makes a calendar-year figure derivable rather than invented. All three also print their financial highlights in the same documents, so the figures come from filings already being read for this page.

Over calendar 2018–2025 the result is worth the work: SPYD paid roughly double the yield of either peer and returned the least — 4.64% median yield against 2.63% and 2.26%, but 6.72% a year against SDY's 7.88% and SPYV's 10.54%, or 68% against 123% cumulatively. SPYV is the same sponsor's plain S&P 500 value fund, charges 0.04% against SPYD's 0.07%, and applies no dividend screen at all. That also sharpens what the section had said about performance: the lag was attributed to not owning the market's growth leaders, but SPYV owns none of them either — the remaining difference is the yield screen itself, not the value tilt they share.

HDV and SCHD are deliberately left blank. Their fiscal years end April 30 and August 31, so neither ever reports a period ending December 31; a calendar-year figure for them could only come from interpolating across a window that straddles the boundary. The cells say that rather than carrying a number on a different basis. Two things the extraction caught on its own are worth recording: SDY and SPYV were being read two columns wide out of several older filings, because the parser took the first table whose shape matched rather than the real financial highlights — the check that the same fiscal year must be printed identically in every filing that shows it is what surfaced it. And SPYV's per-share history is broken by a share split in the first half of 2017 (net asset value falls from $109.55 to $28.38 across the split). Total return is unaffected by a split but net asset value and distributions per share are not, so SPYV's series starts in 2018 — the split is detected by rule, as a period-on-period move outside ±70%, not by assuming a date.

Withdrawn: the claim that cost is SPYD's clearest edge

The section used to end “SPYD's clearest, verifiable edge is cost: at 0.07% it is materially cheaper than SDY (0.35%).” That was true of the one peer whose fee had been looked up. With all five measured from their own filings, the ranking is SPYV 0.04%, SCHD 0.06%, SPYD 0.07%, HDV 0.08%, SDY 0.35% — SPYD is mid-field, and two of the four peers undercut it. The claim is gone rather than softened. An expense ratio is a rate, so it stays comparable even for HDV and SCHD, whose fiscal calendars keep them out of the return comparison; their fee cells are filled and their yield and return cells stay empty.

Added: an “In this section” contents list at the top of Risk Profile

Risk Profile had grown to four distinct pieces with no way to move between them. It now opens with the same contents strip Distribution Sustainability uses — Portfolio composition · Sectors and industries · Stress history · What holds up, and what doesn't — each linking to its part of the section. The anchors carry a 276px scroll offset, because the page's two sticky bars occupy the top 260px of the viewport (measured: the band is 81.8px at top 54, the section nav 122.1px at top 138) and a plain anchor jump would otherwise land each heading behind them.

Added: Stress History, which had been an empty placeholder

Risk Profile promised a drawdown record and delivered a note saying none had been compiled. It now carries one, built from the Total return row of SPYD's own financial highlights across fifteen filings — twenty-one consecutive half-year periods from the fund's first day of operations to June 30, 2026. Nothing here is modelled: the filing states the basis (net asset value, distributions reinvested, not annualized under a year), the July–December figures are printed, and the January–June figures are the residual of two printed figures, each re-checked against net asset value plus distributions. The worst gap across ten such checks was 0.19 points. The fund's one serious fall was 29.4% in the first half of 2020, back to its peak eighteen months later.

Corrected within a day of publishing: the table first showed only the reinvested total return, which made the 2022–23 decline look like −5.1% recovered in 24 months. A reader checking it against share prices got about −12% and was right — on the value of a share that decline was −11.8% and took 36 months to recover. The two bases differ because SPYD pays out 4–5% a year and retains nothing, so the distributions leave the share price as they are paid; a holder who spends them sees a deeper fall and a longer wait than a reinvested figure shows. The table now carries both columns for every episode, keyed on share-value windows, and the verification script asserts both numbers in every row so neither basis can drift in alone. A fourth, trivial episode (−1.7% across the first half of 2025) appears now too, because it is a decline in share value even though the reinvested return over the same window was positive — which is the clearest small illustration of what the gap between the columns is.

The finding worth the section is that the payout recovered a year later than the price did — SPYD was above its pre-COVID level by June 2021, but its distributions per share did not pass their 2019 figure until 2022. One figure was deliberately left out: the payout's worst half-year looks like a 41% collapse in the second half of 2021, but H1/H2 runs 1.04 and 0.51 in 2021 against 1.06 and 0.93 in 2022, inverting the H2-above-H1 pattern of every other year — the signature of a payment shifting between halves, not of a collapse. Only multi-year comparisons, which survive a payment moving across a boundary, are published. The table's own note states what a period-end series cannot see: any low falling between two period ends is invisible, so every figure is a floor on what a holder lived through.

Corrected: the fund's derivative position was described as not existing

The strengths box said there was “no derivative exposure to unwind”. SPYD's holdings filing and its annual report both show a long position in 100 E-mini S&P 500 index futures, $37.7 million of notional — 0.5% of the fund, and about that size all year. It is far too small to amplify a fall, which is what the strength was reaching for, but it is market exposure added to the stocks rather than a hedge against them, and the entry now says so. No purpose is claimed for it: the filings say only that futures are used “to meet the Funds' objectives”, and the first draft of this correction asserted a cash-management rationale that no filing states.

Added: what the 29% turnover figure means, and what the top ten really pay

Portfolio turnover sat in the statistics strip as a bare number. The index takes the 80 highest-yielding S&P 500 stocks, equally weighted, and rebuilds every January and July on yield alone — so roughly a third of the portfolio changes each year by formula, and a holding is dropped when its price rises as readily as when it cuts. Separately, the “spread across companies” strength was measured only in dollars, and size turns out not to be the same map as income: the ten largest holdings are 15% of the fund but pay 11.9% of its dividends, while the ten largest payers are a different ten companies — no overlap at all — holding 12.3% of the fund and paying 19.9%. A first draft of this line had it backwards, claiming the ten largest holdings paid closer to a fifth; that came from comparing one ranking's asset share against the other ranking's income share, and the section's verification script now asserts both rankings separately so the two cannot be read as one again. The per-company income ranking itself stays in Distribution Sustainability, where it is kept current — on fiscal year-end dividend rates the largest payer is a company that has since halved its dividend.

Changed: Risk Profile's strengths and risks now read as one assessment

Portfolio Strengths sat at the top of Risk Profile and Risk Factors at the bottom, separated by the whole composition analysis, the sector breakdown and the stress history — so a reader met three strengths, scrolled past several screens of evidence, and only then reached the risks. The two are now a single list, “What Holds Up, and What Doesn't”, placed after the evidence rather than around it and framed as a single titled box, the same card the sector-and-industry breakdown uses: three strengths on the left, five risks graded High to Low on the right, so they can be read against each other at a glance. The three strengths gained the detail the one-line versions lacked — the ten largest holdings are 15% of the fund as well as the largest being 1.6%; every holding is priced at fair-value level 1; there is no leverage to amplify a fall.

Two columns carry a risk of their own: they suggest an even balance, and here there isn't one. Three strengths sit against five graded risks, and the High/Medium/Low grades have no counterpart on the strengths side — so a note attached beneath the box says plainly that the list lengths are not the measure and the grades are. Nothing in either list refers to a column by position, because on a phone the two stack, strengths first.

Changed: every sector shown individually, and the income pie replaced by a bar chart

Six of the eleven sectors had been hidden behind a single row reading “the six smaller sectors”, and the income chart pooled four more as “other sectors”. Both are gone: all eleven now appear by name, each with its own latest-year figure. The reason for pooling was real — in a sector of three or four companies, one company decides the five-year growth figure — but the honest answer to an unreliable figure is to withhold that figure, not the whole sector. So the five-year column is now withheld by rule: fewer than three holdings with a clean five-year record, or a figure that moves more than five points when any single company is dropped. That withholds materials, communication services, consumer discretionary, information technology and industrials, and the note says which test each failed. It also replaces a hardcoded exception for chemicals, paper and packaging, which the rule catches on its own.

The income chart is no longer a pie. Eleven categories are far past what colour can separate — the version before this drew ten slices from a gradient, two of which sat at ΔE 5.5 to normal vision, the same colour to every reader. A sorted bar chart carries any number of categories on a single colour, because length and position do the work colour was being asked to do, and each bar is labelled directly so identity never depends on matching a swatch. The swatch legend below it is gone as redundant. Rendering the rebuilt growth chart also caught six of its twelve row labels being silently dropped for want of height; the canvas is taller and label skipping is off.

Changed: the standard eleven sectors, one vocabulary, and a pie two of whose slices were the same colour

Eleven sectors instead of ten. Nine of the page's sector groups were already the standard ones; the tenth merged industrials with information technology, because each holds only two companies. Split, and renamed to their standard titles, they are exactly the eleven standard sectors — and the merge turned out to buy nothing, because the growth table pools every sector that small anyway. Splitting left that table numerically identical: the same 21 holdings, the same 26.7% of income, the same +4.8% and +3.0%. It just reads “six smaller sectors” now. The gain is that a reader can compare SPYD's sector weights against any other fund without first learning a scheme of ours.

One vocabulary for three things. The page had been using “sector”, “industry” and “group” interchangeably for three different levels — the sector growth figure carried a title saying “Sector” above a note saying “group”, the coverage table's column header read “Group” while “group” elsewhere meant a sector, and the top-ten holdings table had a column headed “Sector” that listed industries. Now: industry is only ever a label the fund itself prints beside a holding, sector is only ever one of the eleven, and the coverage classifications are bands. Section 01 says so where a reader first meets the words. Risk Profile's flat list of largest industries is replaced by every sector with its industries nested beneath it, so the REIT industries visibly roll up into the 27% that the interest-rate sentence refers to.

The income pie was redrawn, and not for the sectors. Checking its colours turned up a defect that had nothing to do with this change: two of its ten slices — energy and pipelines against industry and technology — sat at ΔE 5.5 to normal vision, far under the floor of 15. They were the same colour to every reader, not only to colourblind ones. The cause was structural: the chart drew identities from a navy-to-rust gradient, and a gradient's neighbours are close by design. Six alternative arrangements at six, seven and eight slices all failed the same way. It now shows the seven largest sectors by income and pools the remaining four, in eight categorical hues that pass every check — worst adjacent pair ΔE 19.6 to normal vision and 9.1 under protanopia. Hovering the pooled slice names what is in it.

Risk Profile verified at source · corrected: a sector method the page had stopped using

Every figure in Risk Profile was checked against SPYD's own filings and all of them hold: 78 stock holdings and 99.3% of the fund in stocks; Iron Mountain the largest at 1.61%; the ten largest 14.95% combined, each name and weight matching the holdings filing; portfolio turnover 29%; REITs 27.2% of the fund, utilities 11.7%, energy and pipelines 8.2%; and $102,589,622 of securities out on loan at June 30, 2026 — that last one read from the third of three columns in the statement of assets and liabilities, identified by SPYD's net assets of $7,374,173,273, since the Dow Jones REIT and Nasdaq 100 funds sit beside it.

One correction, to a method note rather than a number. The section said REIT and utility weights were "calculated from the holdings using the SEC's industry codes". That describes an approach this page abandoned: section 03 was re-based during its own audit onto the industries the fund prints beside each holding in its schedule of investments, because the two disagree materially — on SEC codes, utilities come out at 14.4% of the fund and energy at 5.5%; on the fund's own labelling, 11.7% and 8.2%, because the codes file pipelines with utilities while the fund files them under oil and gas. The weights printed in this section were already the fund's own; only the note describing where they came from was stale. It now says so, and names the records.

Details

Three checks in the verification script failed before the page did, and all three were faults in the checking rather than in what was published. A search for the securities-lending figure first matched 102,661,767 — which is a holding of Exelixis, Inc. inside an unrelated fund's schedule of investments, not SPYD's loan balance. Rewritten to read the statement by column, it then stopped at the em dash standing in for the middle fund's nil balance and reported the row unparsed. And the top-ten test looked for a rigid table shape, found nothing, and passed silently over the entire table — a check that cannot fail being worse than no check at all. All three are fixed and now assert their own preconditions. Record: SPYD-s05-verification.json.

Sep 2026

Corrected: a normal feature of every ETF had been written up as a weakness · the verdict now leads with what the analysis actually found

“No cushion” came out. The lede, the verdict, the Distribution Sustainability signal, the Earned vs. Paid Out callout, the prose above it and a Risk Profile entry all treated SPYD's lack of retained income as something holding it back. It isn't. SPYD's prospectus says the fund “intends to distribute substantially all of its net investment income and its capital gains for each taxable year”, and a regulated investment company that keeps a buffer pays a 4% excise tax on it. Having no cushion is the structure working as designed, not a shortcoming — and this page's own scoring rules list undistributed income as an input for closed-end funds only. What is true, and what those four places now say instead, is that the payout is a straight passthrough: the fund retains nothing, so its distribution tracks whatever its holdings pay and falls with them in the same quarter, with nothing held back to smooth it. The Risk Profile entry keeps its Medium rating on that basis and is retitled “The Payout Tracks Its Holdings Directly”. The separate, factual observation that SPYD paid out slightly more per share than it earned in each of the last three years is unchanged and still stated.

The coverage table now says how to read itself. Six ratios sat in a column with nothing to tell a reader which of them mattered — so 0.95× and 0.77× looked like the same kind of observation. They are not. Because the fund must distribute essentially all it collects, the ratio sits near 1.0× by construction and a few cents either way is timing rather than a decision; every year from 2022 to 2026 falls in that range. 2021 does not: the fund paid out 43 cents more per share than it earned, and the payout fell sharply in the half-year that followed, to $0.51 against about $0.90 in neighbouring years. The note now states the normal band and points at that year. The ratios themselves are unchanged.

The verdict was burying the lede. Its summary of what holds the fund back read “slow payout growth”, while the page's most distinctive finding — that 83–88% of the growth in dividend income behind each share came from the index replacing holdings rather than from its companies raising dividends — sat about 70% of the way down the page, with nothing in the opening quarter pointing to it. The verdict and the scorecard note now carry it. “Slow” also went because it was a comparative measured against nothing: the payout rose 5.4% in the latest year and about 3.6% a year over five, and this page never benchmarked that. The same sweep removed “grown only about 3.6%” and “the payout has grown slowly” for the same reason.

Sep 2026

Corrected: the distribution chart now shows everything SPYD paid — and a capital gain it never paid has been removed

The bars were headed “what SPYD paid” but plotted only the part of each distribution the fund books as investment income, leaving out the rest. A shareholder in 2017 received $1.73 per share, not $1.42. The bars are now the total distributed in each calendar year. The exclusion had been disclosed in a note underneath, but a note doesn't repair a bar that under-reports its own heading.

The first version of this fix then invented a distribution that never happened. It split the bars into “investment income” and “capital gains” using the financial highlights row “Distributions to shareholders from: Net realized gains”, and drew $0.16 a share of capital gains in 2016. That row is a GAAP allocation of the total between book buckets, not a record of what was declared: in the half-year to December 2016 the fund distributed $0.91 a share against book investment income of $0.75, so $0.16 was booked against realised gains. The annual report's tax footnote for the year to June 30, 2017 settles it — ordinary income of $4,572,092, long-term capital gains “—”, return of capital “—”. No capital gain was paid, and that segment is gone. The 2017 one stays: the same row reads $0.31 for the half-year to December 2017, and the tax footnote for the year to June 30, 2018 confirms a real capital gain distribution behind it ($738,721 of long-term gain). The method that separates the two is now the rule — the highlights row supplies the amount, the tax footnote decides whether it happened. Dividends are shown as the total less only a tax-confirmed capital gain, rather than as the highlights' “net investment income” row, which for 2016 would understate the dividend by that same mis-allocated $0.16.

The yield row uses the same numerator as the bars, or the two would measure different things under one heading: 2016 becomes 4.34% (was 3.88%) and 2017 4.63% (was 3.80%), the other eight years unchanged. The nine-year growth rate now runs from $1.51 to $1.96, +2.9% a year rather than +4.2%; one-, three- and five-year windows are untouched.

Details

The calendar-year totals were also checked against the sponsor's published distribution history — as a check only, and its figures are not reproduced here or anywhere on this page. Our 2016 and 2017 totals of $1.51 and $1.73 agreed with it, and it showed no capital gain in 2016 either, which is the same answer the filings give. The check also bounds the rounding this series carries: our figures for 2020, 2022 and 2023 each sit about a cent from the payments actually made, because the filings round per-share figures to cents and each calendar year is built from three of them. Every published figure is the filings-derived one. On capital gains, the tax footnotes read: year to June 30, 2016, ordinary income $436,351 with $3,377 of long-term gain; to June 30, 2017, $4,572,092 ordinary and none; to June 30, 2018, $16,666,017 ordinary and $738,721 long-term. Records: SPYD-tax-character-early.json, SPYD-yield-verification.json.

Sep 2026

Added: what SPYD's payout was worth each year, beside what it paid

The distribution history showed dollars per share and nothing else, which left the obvious question unanswered: was a bigger payout a better deal? A line over the bars now shows each year's payout as a percentage of the fund's net asset value per share at that December 31. It is a yield on net asset value, and it is labelled that way rather than “dividend yield”, because a market price is not in SEC filings — the same reason this page says the premium or discount SPYD traded at can't be measured here. It is the basis the page's headline 4.3% already uses ($2.03 ÷ $47.71). The two sit as rows of one figure — shared years, shared legend, year labels drawn once — rather than overlaid on a single plot. Overlaid was tried and rejected: dollars and percentages have no common scale, and on one plot the line ran along the tops of the bars, which reads as “these move together” when the finding is that they don't. Split, the steady bar row against the jagged line row is the finding. The lower scale starts at 3% rather than zero, which the subtitle states; anchoring it at zero squeezed the whole range into a fifth of the height and flattened the very swing the row exists to show. Hovering a bar also gives that year's change on the one before it, in both dollars and per cent — a 5.4% raise from $1.86 to $1.96 is invisible at bar height, and the growth table below reports multi-year rates, never the year-by-year step. It is computed from the plotted figures themselves, so it cannot drift from them.

What it shows is that the payout is the steadier of the two, and that the yield is mostly not about the dividend: distributions stayed in a $1.51–$1.99 band while the yield ranged 3.69% to 5.03%, moving with net asset value. In 2021 the payout hit its low and net asset value its high, and the yield hit bottom; the next year the record payout met a falling net asset value and the yield peaked. In 2024 the payout rose while the yield fell.

Details

Net asset value per share at each December 31 comes from the “Net asset value, end of period” line of SPYD's financial highlights in its own semiannual reports, whose half-year column ends on that date: $34.83 (2016), $37.39, $34.05, $39.48, $32.97, $42.06, $39.58, $39.19, $43.21, $43.24 (2025). Those filings run to about 120MB and cover the whole trust, so each figure is bound to SPYD by the fund heading above its table, and the reader is gated: the fiscal-year columns printed in the same tables must match the annual report's own net asset values to the cent, which they do for FY2022–FY2025 ($39.89, $37.11, $40.22, $42.46). The oldest report has no “Year Ended” column at all — SPYD launched in October 2015, so its first period reads “For the Period 10/22/15* - 6/30/16” — and the reader was extended to accept it rather than leave 2016 blank. Numerators are the same calendar-year figures the bars use. Records: SPYD-yield-on-nav.json, _val/spyd_nav_by_calendar_year.py.

Sep 2026

Corrected: the tax score, from 2 to 3 · an unmeasured tracking claim · Research & Scores verified at source

Tax Efficiency scored 2/5 on a claim the filing contradicts. The page said all of SPYD's payouts are “taxed as ordinary dividends” and that the fund doesn't disclose any qualified portion. That misread the tax-character table: “Ordinary Income” there is the whole dividend total — box 1a on a 1099-DIV — and the qualified portion taxed at the lower rate is box 1b, a subset sitting inside it. SPYD's own annual report says so directly: “A portion of dividends distributed by the Funds during the fiscal year ended June 30, 2026 are considered qualified dividend income and are eligible for reduced tax rates,” and each fund “reports the maximum amount allowable” as such. What the filings don't give is the amount. The page now says that, and explains that the REIT holdings — about 27% of the fund, paying dividends that generally don't qualify — hold the share down. The score moves to 3, the overall from 3.0 to 3.2, and the account guidance from “best held in an IRA” to “IRA first, taxable workable”. Research View is unchanged at Hold.

Later the same day, a ceiling published here was withdrawn. This entry first put the qualified share at “at most about 72%”, derived by taking the REIT share of SPYD's gross dividend income (27.7%) as a cap on the qualified share of its ordinary dividends. That was not a valid inference: the two have different denominators, because part of what a REIT distributes is return of capital or capital gain and never enters the ordinary-dividend total at all. The figure has been removed rather than replaced, since the filings do not support a number here. The page now claims only what they show — that a portion qualifies, that the fund doesn't say how much, and that the REIT weight holds it down.

Separately, Research & Scores said the price “tracks closely” to the value of SPYD's holdings and that its structure “keeps” it there. Neither was measured: a fund's premium or discount to net asset value is published on the sponsor's website under the ETF rule, not in its SEC filings, and this page uses filings only. The tile now reads “By design”, and both places say the mechanism is meant to hold price near value while the premium or discount it actually traded at isn't in the filings — the same footing as the yield and trading-cost lines that already say they need market data. The “value tilt has trailed the S&P 500” claim was verified and now carries the figures. The scoring note no longer refers readers to “published rules”, since the methodology document isn't yet reachable from this page; it now says only what is true — that the inputs and thresholds are fixed in advance and applied the same way to every fund.

Details

From SPYD's own average annual total returns in the annual report, the table directly under its $10,000 chart: SPYD 17.54% over one year, 8.23% a year over five and 8.57% over ten, against the S&P 500's 22.32%, 13.41% and 15.51% — trailing over all three, as the page said. Also checked: the overall score of 3.2 is the average of its six dimension scores (3, 3, 4, 3, 3, 3); all 78 holdings are priced at quoted market prices (fair-value level 1 in the N-PORT); and the year to June 2026 distributed $330,491,604, all of it dividend income with no capital gains and no return of capital, on the tax table row naming this fund. Source for the tax correction: N-CSR accession 0001193125-26-383187, “Qualified Dividend Income” and “Dividends Received Deduction” notes. Records: SPYD-s02-verification.json.

Sep 2026

Corrected: the fund's launch date · Fund Overview verified at source

Fund Overview said SPYD launched on October 22, 2015, and the growth table said it “commenced operations” that day. Its 2017 annual report puts inception a day earlier: “For the period October 21, 2015 to June 30, 2017. Since shares of the Fund did not trade in the secondary market until the day after the Fund's inception … (10/21/15, 10/22/15, respectively)”. The fund began operations on October 21 and its shares first traded on October 22; both places now say so.

Details

Every figure in Fund Overview was checked against SPYD's own filings, with each one bound to this fund rather than to a neighbour in the combined report: expense ratio 0.07% and one-year return 17.54% from the financial highlights under SPYD's heading; net assets $7,374,173,000 there and $7,374,172,068 in its N-PORT, $1,205 apart; the 4.3% yield is $2.03 of distributions over the $47.71 net asset value, both from the same table; 99% in stocks and the futures position from the N-PORT (99.28% of net assets, asset categories EC, DE and STIV), which also shows no borrowings; the S&P 500 High Dividend Index named in the fund's own performance table. Quarterly payouts rest on the trust-wide policy — “Dividends from net investment income, if any, are generally declared and paid quarterly by each Fund” — whose exception list names two other funds, not this one. The 1099-DIV row is an inference from the fund's election to be a regulated investment company, not a statement in the filings. Records: SPYD-s01-verification.json, SPYD-s01-prospectus-facts.json.

Sep 2026

Changed: Distribution History and SPYD Dividend Growth are one box

The payout chart, the growth rates over one, three, five and nine years, and the breakdown of what drove the last two years are three views of the same series, so they now sit together as “SPYD's Own Payout”. Nothing measured changed; one sentence was dropped from the 2021 callout because it pointed at a table that is now directly below it. Distribution Sustainability is four boxes: what SPYD earned and paid, whether its companies cover their dividends, what those companies pay and whether it is growing, and SPYD's own payout.

Sep 2026

Changed: the sector groups now come from SPYD's own filing

The ten groups were built from the industry code each company files with the SEC. They are now aggregated from the industries SPYD itself assigns each holding, read from the schedule of investments in its annual report for the year ended June 30, 2026 — the same filing Risk Profile's industry list comes from. Two holdings move, both because the fund follows the standard classification: ONEOK and Kinder Morgan count as oil and gas rather than utilities, and Target as a consumer staples retailer. Utilities are now 11.7% of the fund and 10% of its income, not 14.4% and 13%; energy and pipelines 8.2% and 7%; consumer staples 14.6% and 16%. REITs, banks and insurers, chemicals, healthcare, telecom and media, and industry and technology are unchanged.

Details

Source: schedule of investments, N-CSR 0001193125-26-383187, which lists every holding under an industry heading with its percentage of net assets. Gates: all 78 holdings matched to exactly one industry; the weight we hold in each industry reproduces the percentage the filing prints for it, to a tenth; the industries sum to the schedule's own 99.3% for common stocks; and the ten largest match the report's own Top Ten Industries table. Three parsing faults were caught by those gates before any figure was used — a neighbouring fund's schedule (its AES position is 16,459 shares against SPYD's 6,184,590), continuation pages whose repeated headers truncated the block at 61.5% of the fund, and an uppercase-only pattern that silently dropped every REIT industry because “REITs” carries a lowercase s. Figures that moved with the regrouping: utilities' dividends to the fund grew 2.4% a year over five years and 3.4% in the latest year, consumer staples 5.0% and 2.6%; all nine utilities sit in “covered before investment”, two-thirds of that group, and owe about 7.0 years of cash flow, the same as REITs, while chemicals, paper and packaging owes 7.7. Records: SPYD-holding-industries.json, SPYD-industries-from-filing.json, SPYD-income-by-sector.json, SPYD-sector-facts.json, SPYD-sector-growth-table.json.

Sep 2026

Changed: the two growth tables are now charts

Sector growth is a bar chart — five years against the latest year, with a zero line — and what the companies did with their dividends is two stacked bars, one per window. No figure changed. Each chart keeps its table underneath, under “See the figures”, so every number is still readable without hovering, and the five-year raises by size (slowly, moderately, strongly) live there rather than in the stacked bars, which show cut, flat and raised.

Details

The two series use the first two categorical slots, checked rather than eyeballed: adjacent colour-vision separation ΔE 24.7 and normal-vision 33.6 (both well above the 8 and 15 floors), each above 3:1 against white. The stacked bands use the status palette, where the colour means cut or raised, with neutrals for what is not measured; the neutral sits below 3:1, which is why every band is also labelled and tabulated. Values are labelled on the latest-year bars only — not on every mark — and a label that would not fit beside its bar is drawn inside it instead, which is what the −6.6% chemicals bar does at phone width. Bars are 10px and 24px thick with 4px rounded ends and a surface gap between neighbours; gridlines are hairlines, with the zero line one step darker.

Sep 2026

Changed: the four holdings measured from a 2020 cut are counted with the rest

Over five years Ford, Kimco, Molson Coors and Simon Property did raise their dividends, so they are no longer held on a separate “Recovering from a 2020 cut” row; they are counted in the growth bands, the median and the weighted average like every other holding. “Raised it strongly” is 24% of the fund rather than 19%, the median 4.1% a year rather than 4.0%, and the weighted average 5.4% rather than 4.5% — the average is lifted by Ford (+38% a year) and Molson Coors (+27%), whose rates start at their 2020 cuts. The note under the table names all four and says that Kimco and Molson Coors still pay less than they did in 2019. This reverses the separation made earlier this month. Also changed: the table now carries a second column for the latest fiscal year — cut 4%, held flat 19%, raised 74% — which replaces the “In the latest year” callout; the cuts it named, their sizes and their effect on the income now sit in the note under the table.

Details

The same set now feeds the sector table, which is computed on every holding with a five-year record (67, 85% of the fund) rather than 63: the whole fund reads +4.0% a year rather than +3.4%, REITs +4.5% rather than +3.8% (Kimco and Simon Property), consumer staples +4.6% rather than +3.6% (Molson Coors), and the five smaller groups +5.5% rather than +4.3% (Ford). The latest-year column is unchanged, so the REIT turn is wider than before: +4.5% a year over five years against −1.6% in the latest year. Drop-one swings rise accordingly — at most 2.0 points in the four largest sectors and 3.2 in the pooled five. Records: SPYD-growth-bands.json, SPYD-sector-growth-table.json.

Sep 2026

Changed: sector material merged into Holdings Dividend Growth

“What Pays the Dividend” and “Holdings Dividend Growth” overlapped — both reported each sector's share of the income and the cuts in REITs and chemicals — so they are now one box, “Holdings Dividend Growth”, asking where SPYD's income comes from and whether it is growing. Nothing measured was dropped: the sector chart, the five-year and latest-year tables, the utilities discussion and both method notes carry over unchanged. Two overlapping callouts on the cuts became one, “Where the cuts came from”, and a repeated sentence on chemicals' share of the fund and income now appears once. The sector growth table now sits directly under the sector chart and no longer repeats each sector's share of the income, which the chart gives; the pooled row keeps its combined 25%. Corrected: the five-year growth table labelled every company from 0% to 3% a year “Raised it slowly”, including Kraft Heinz, whose dividend was $1.60 a share in both 2020 and 2025. It now has its own row, “Held it flat (no change)” (1% of the fund), defined as the same dividend per share at both ends of the five years; “Raised it slowly” is 21%, not 22%. The median and average are unchanged. The rows are also worded alike (“Cut it”, “Held it flat”, “Raised it …”). Record: SPYD-growth-bands.json.

Sep 2026

Added: where SPYD's dividend growth came from

SPYD Dividend Growth now shows what raised the dividend income behind each SPYD share over the last two years. It rose 5.3% in the year to June 2025 and 5.5% in the year to June 2026; companies changing their dividends contributed 0.6 and 0.9 points, and the index changing what SPYD owns contributed 4.6 and 4.5 — 88% and 83% of the growth. This reconciles SPYD's 5.4% payout growth for 2025 with the 0.8% its current companies' dividends grew in their latest year.

Details

Holdings from SPYD's N-PORT filings for June 30, 2024 (0001752724-24-196658), 2025 (0001752724-25-211126) and 2026 (0001410368-26-089316), each confirmed by its reporting-period date; fund shares from net assets and NAV per share in the annual report ($5,921.9M / $40.22, $6,839.9M / $42.46, $7,374.2M / $47.71). Each company's dividend is for its latest fiscal year ending by the date, as first reported, so later split restatements don't mix with earlier share counts; a yield check on every holding caught Amcor's 1-for-5 reverse split (effective January 14, 2026, 10-K 0001748790-26-000022), now adjusted, and flagged Walgreens' genuine 15.9% trailing yield. Five holdings no longer filing under their names (Williams, Walgreens, Kellanova, Interpublic, and BXP as Boston Properties) were matched by CIK and confirmed against EDGAR's registered names. Entrants' median yield 3.9% and 4.1% against leavers' 3.5% and 3.4%. The decomposition is exact: its parts reproduce the change in each run-rate to the cent. Drop-one range for the index's share: 70–91%; without hand-read figures, 68%. A trailing-twelve-month version was tried first and abandoned: too many holdings failed a contiguous four-quarter test. Record: SPYD-income-decomposition.json.

Sep 2026

Added: dividend income growth by sector

Holdings Dividend Growth now shows how the dividend income each sector pays SPYD has grown — over five years and in the latest fiscal year — against a whole-fund row on the same basis (+3.4% a year; +0.8% in the latest year). REIT dividends to the fund grew 3.8% a year over five years, then fell 1.6% in the latest year; chemicals, paper and packaging fell 6.6%; every other group grew. These are income-weighted totals, labelled as such; the box's 4.0% median describes the typical company.

Details

Shares held on June 30, 2026 times dividends per share, summed by group. Five years covers the 67 holdings with a five-year record (the page's median set). Company medians and simple averages by sector were tested first and rejected: six of the ten groups have three or four companies with a record, and dropping one company moved their figure 2 to 8 points either way (energy's average was +11.0% against a +5.8% median, on one company growing 21.6% a year). Pooling the five smallest groups brings that to 2.6 points; the four largest groups move 1.0 to 1.5. Chemicals, paper and packaging (3 of 5 with a record, 7.2-point swing) shows the latest year only. Gate: the whole-fund latest-year figure reproduces the published +0.8%. Record: SPYD-sector-growth-table.json.

Sep 2026

Added: what has changed in the dividends since the fiscal-year figures · Corrected: the debt statement

The company figures rest on each holding's latest completed fiscal year — for 67 of 78, the year ended December 2025. Every holding's quarterly reports since were checked: companies making up 40% of SPYD have raised their dividends again, 56% kept them unchanged, and LyondellBasell (1.2%) halved its quarterly dividend to $0.69 from $1.37 in March 2026, removing about 1.4% of SPYD's income; the five recent cuts together remove about 3.3%. Corrected: Holdings Dividend Growth said "No holding owing less than six years cut." LyondellBasell owes 5.6 years (32nd of 67) and has since cut, so the sentence is withdrawn. It is replaced by what holds for all five cuts: each came from the 16 holdings named by either the coverage watch list or the ten most indebted (21% of the fund) — LyondellBasell from the watch list, where it was already listed. Added: why the cuts don't yet show in SPYD's rising payout — weighted by income, raises in the holdings' latest fiscal year added about 2.8% against 2.0% lost to cuts (net +0.8%), and the cuts came late in 2025; since then, raises of about $3.2 million a year have not offset LyondellBasell's $4.6 million. Clarified: the four cuts' "about 2%" is what remains to come at their new rates, on top of what 2025 already absorbed.

Details

Method: the regular dividend per share declared in each company's latest quarter is compared with the rate at its fiscal year end, with quarters rebuilt from the year-to-date figures tagged in its 10-Qs and 10-Ks. Raises declared in a fiscal year's final quarter count in that year; specials are excluded. 60 holdings were classified from the tagged figures; 18 were read in the filings, each recorded with its passage and accession — among them LyondellBasell (10-Q 0001489393-26-000061: "Dividend Per Ordinary Share … March 2026 $0.69 … June 2026 0.69", comparative "Dividends - common stock ($1.37 per share)"), Host Hotels (regular $0.20 unchanged; a $0.72 special excluded), Realty Income (monthly $0.2700 declared December 2025, $0.2710 by June 2026), MAA ("$1.530 per share" each 2026 quarter against $1.515 in 2025) and Omnicom (Q4 2025 = $2.90 for the year less $2.10 for nine months = $0.80, unchanged since). LyondellBasell's lost income: 1,699,499 shares held on June 30, 2026 × ($1.37 − $0.69) × 4 = $4.6 million a year, 1.4% of $322.1 million. Also found while checking: American Tower tags dividends declared in its 10-K but only dividends paid in its 10-Qs, and MAA states its rate to three decimals ("$1.530"). Found and disclosed: Clorox's company figures are for its year ended June 2025; its annual report for the year ended June 2026 (filed August 7, 2026) is not yet reflected in the coverage, debt, growth or income figures. Records: SPYD-dividend-since.json, SPYD-dividend-since.jsonl.

Sep 2026

Added: what the companies owe

Holdings Dividend Coverage now also reports borrowings as years of operating cash flow: 17% of the fund owes under three years, 33% three to six, 32% six to nine and 4% nine or more, with 15% not measured. All four holdings that cut their dividend in the past year rank in the ten most indebted of the 67 measured — median 13.3 years against 5.4 for the typical holding — and nothing owing less than six years cut (withdrawn — LyondellBasell, owing 5.6 years, has since cut; see the entry above). Stated with it: Iron Mountain is the third most indebted and raised its dividend, so this is where the cuts came from, not a forecast.

Details

Total borrowings at each fiscal year end against that year's cash from operations, for the 67 holdings where the measure means something — 85.2% of the fund. Banks and insurers are excluded (deposits and policy reserves are not borrowing in this sense) and so is Ford, whose balance sheet carries $141.4 billion of Ford Credit debt against $21.9 billion at the car business. Every figure is checked against the interest actually paid: interest over average borrowings must fall between 1.5% and 10% a year or the debt figure is read from the balance sheet instead; all 67 pass. That check caught tagged data understating Host Hotels by $3.8 billion, Realty Income by $3.8 billion, BXP by $1.8 billion and Kimco by $0.5 billion, and found no single tagged figure covering American Tower's, Extra Space Storage's or AES's borrowings — 21 company-years read from the statements, each recorded with its component lines and accession. Where debt and finance leases share one line, as at American Tower, the leases are included. Interest paid is net of capitalised interest, which understates the burden for developers: Alexandria shows 13% of cash flow going to interest and still cut. Sector averages: REITs 7.0 years, utilities 6.7. Records: SPYD-leverage.jsonl, SPYD-leverage-report.json, SPYD-reit-leverage.json.

Sep 2026

Added: what pays the dividend — income by sector

A new box in Distribution Sustainability sets out what share of SPYD's income each sector supplies, as a chart of ten groups: REITs 28%, consumer staples 15%, utilities and pipelines 13%, banks and insurers 11%, chemicals, paper and packaging 9%, and six percent or less each for industry and technology, telecom and media, retail and consumer goods, healthcare and energy. It records that all three holdings that cut their dividend in the past year are REITs (Alexandria Real Estate, BXP, Crown Castle — 3.3% of the fund; the fourth cutter, Dow, is a chemicals company), that two of them were in the “Comfortable” coverage band when they cut, and that two of the four holdings still rebuilding after a 2020 cut are also REITs. The coverage box now says what its test covers: whether a dividend was affordable, which is not the same as whether it was kept.

Details

Income shares are the shares SPYD held on June 30, 2026 times each company's latest fiscal-year dividend per share, on the same verified figures as the coverage box; the run totals $322.1 million and stops unless it matches the published run-rate income, which is itself within 0.5% of the $323.6 million SPYD reported for FY2026. Coverage at the time of the cuts: Alexandria 67% of three-year FFO and BXP 60%, both “Comfortable”; Crown Castle 83% of operating cash flow, “Tight”. Cuts by sector weight: REITs 12% of the sector cut, utilities, banks, consumer staples, energy, healthcare and telecom none. Utilities: 11.66 of the 17.48 points in “covered before investment” (two-thirds of the group, about four-fifths of the fund's utility weight), and 91% of that weight raised its dividend in the latest year. Sectors are grouped from the industry code each company files with the SEC, which is broader than the sub-industry list in Risk Profile. Records: SPYD-sector-risk.json, SPYD-income-by-sector.json.

Sep 2026

Added: how firm the coverage figures are

The coverage groups were re-run under alternatives to each method choice. The covered share ranges from 76% to 80% (published: 79%); judging on the latest year alone gives 76%, on two years 78%. Where the line between “comfortable” and “tight” sits changes nothing in the total. The small “not covered” band ranges from 1.6% to 4.4%, and three holdings sit on a single judgment — Truist on the goodwill add-back, Iron Mountain on which FFO measure is used, KeyCorp on the merger threshold. All of this is now stated on the page in a fold under “How we measured.” The five-year growth median is unaffected by where the cut-start line is drawn (4.0% a year at 5%, 10% or 20%). Record: SPYD-sensitivity-v2.json; the baseline run must reproduce the published groups exactly or the analysis stops.

Sep 2026

Changed: five-year growth now separates companies rebuilding after a 2020 cut

Four holdings — Ford, Kimco, Molson Coors and Simon Property — cut their dividends in 2020, so a five-year rate for them starts at a trough and measures recovery, not growth. All four had been counted as raising their dividends strongly. They now have their own row (5% of the fund) and are left out of the median, the average and the growth bands, which cover the 80% of the fund with a clean five-year record. The median moves from 4.1% to 4.0% a year, the weighted average from 5.4% to 4.5%, and “raised it strongly” from 24% to 19% of the fund. Kimco and Molson Coors are still paying less than they did in 2019.

Details

Rule: a holding is separated when its starting-year dividend per share is more than 10% below the year before it. Found while verifying the growth figures at source: Kimco's 2020 dividend of $0.54 was confirmed in its FY2020 10-K (“Cash dividends declared per common share $0.540 $1.120 $1.120”), which also showed the cut from $1.12. Pre-cut dividends for all four are verified (Simon $8.30, Ford $0.60, Molson Coors $1.96, Kimco $1.12). Also verified in this pass: every one of the 154 dividend-per-share figures behind the latest-year view and the income shares, and all 134 endpoints behind the five-year rates; the nine REITs whose 2023 FFO rested on one filing now agree with a second filing; and SPYD's June 30, 2026 holdings are its latest public list. Corrected: the income shares had used Amcor's FY2025 dividend rather than its latest (FY2026) year; the totals are unchanged at this rounding. Records: SPYD-growth-bands.json, SPYD-dps-verification.json, SPYD-growth-endpoints-verification.json, SPYD-precut-verification.json, SPYD-reit-ffo-2023-second.json.

Sep 2026

Corrected: statements in Distribution Sustainability that went beyond the filings

A line-by-line review of this section against its sources corrected one error and removed statements that the filings don't support. The error: the payout was described as growing “steadily” since 2021; it fell 8.5% in 2023 before rising again. Removed as unsupported: that the utilities' capital spending was for building out power grids; that SPYD's payout grew more slowly than its companies' dividends “because” of how its index is rebuilt; that the smaller payments in late 2021 were made to bring the payout back in line with income; that the 2020–21 dip was COVID-related; that 2022 was a “catch-up” year; and that some companies excluded from the five-year growth figures had cut and restored their dividends (the recorded reason is a data inconsistency). The method note now also lists the five holdings measured differently (Iron Mountain, Crown Castle, Simon, Public Storage, American Tower). Also corrected after re-reading SPYD's annual reports: the $4.0 million of FY2026 payouts beyond net investment income and equalization had been described as income left over from earlier years and “now used up.” The reports show no undistributed income at the end of FY2025 or FY2026 (nor FY2024 or FY2022), so that explanation is withdrawn; the reports don't itemize the $4.0 million. Confirmed at source: every figure in the earned-versus-paid table; that all FY2021–FY2026 distributions were ordinary income for tax purposes, with no return of capital; and that the FY2022, FY2024, FY2025 and FY2026 reports agree on every year they share.

Sep 2026

Added: what the announced cuts cost SPYD; corrected: income shares and the index schedule

The four dividend cuts (Dow, Alexandria, Crown Castle, BXP) are estimated to remove about 2% of the income SPYD collects. Corrected: the watch list is about 11% of SPYD's income, not 12% — BXP had been left out of the fund's total income because its structured data carries no dividend per share. Corrected: SPYD's index is rebalanced every January and July; the page had said annually. The holdings-based figures now say they change with each rebalance.

Details

Cut cost: SPYD's June 30, 2026 shares in each company (N-PORT) times the drop from its 2025 dividend to its new regular rate — Dow $2.10 to $1.40, Alexandria $4.68 to $2.88, Crown Castle $4.75 to $4.25, BXP $3.36 to $2.80 — about $6.1 million a year, 1.9% of $322.0 million. That total is the dividend income SPYD's June 30 holdings would produce at each company's latest dividend; it is within 0.5% of the $323.6 million SPYD actually received in FY2026 (annual report, Statement of Operations, “Dividend income — unaffiliated issuers”). The cut's own effect cannot be read from SPYD's reported income, which is a single fund-wide total; it is verified input by input. BXP's 2025 dividend ($3.36) is from its Q3 2025 10-Q, which records the reset to $0.70 from $0.98 for the third quarter. Index schedule: SPYD prospectus (485BPOS, October 2025): “Index constituents are equally weighted and the Index is rebalanced semi-annually, in January and July.” Record: SPYD-income-share.json.

Sep 2026

Added: SPYD's worst payout decline

A new figure shows the largest peak-to-trough fall in SPYD's payout per share: −11%, from $1.75 in 2019 to $1.55 in 2021 by calendar year, back above the 2019 level in 2022. Over the worst six months, July–December 2021, SPYD paid $0.51 a share against $0.87 a year earlier (−41%). Both come from the calendar-year and half-year series already derived from SPYD's own annual and semiannual reports. Record: SPYD-payout-drawdown.json.

Sep 2026

Added: which way the companies' dividends moved in the latest year

The five-year growth figures are unchanged. Alongside them: in the latest fiscal year, companies making up 74% of SPYD raised their dividends, 19% held them flat and 4% cut them (Dow, Alexandria Real Estate, Crown Castle, BXP). Corrected: the note on what couldn't be measured said about 12%; it is about 15%, because UPS and Principal Financial were also missing a year of per-share data.

Details

Each company gets two readings of its latest-year change: declared dividends per share (the five-year basis) and cash dividends paid per average share (immune to declaration timing). Where they agree in direction and within 3 points, the company is classified; otherwise — and for every apparent cut — the company's 10-K was read. That caught three false signals: Invitation Homes and Hasbro looked like a cut and a 33% raise only because of how many declarations fell in each year, and Ford and Host changed only their special or supplemental dividends, not their regular ones. Seventeen companies were classified by reading, each recorded with the passage it rests on. Gate: every latest-year dividend per share matches the five-year analysis's own figure. Records: SPYD-growth-latest.json.

Sep 2026

Changed: dividend coverage now judged over three years

Holdings are now grouped on their last three fiscal years added together, with the latest year shown alongside: 79% of the fund covered its dividends over three years (76% in the latest year). The middle group is renamed “Covered before investment” and now means what its description says — operations covered the dividend but capital spending did not; the earlier label, “Borrowing to invest”, asserted borrowing that was never checked. “Not covered” now means operations (for banks, profits) did not cover the dividend. The watch list is rebuilt on these rules: seven companies, about 9% of the fund and 12% of its income; this supersedes the eight-company list below.

Details

Three-year totals, not an average of yearly ratios. Years before a merger or spin-off are excluded, by rule: an earlier year is dropped if the share count changed 20% or more into the next year, or if its dividends were under 60% of the next year's (a partial first year); eight holdings have a shorter record (Amcor, International Paper, Smurfit Westrock: one year; Extra Space, Healthpeak, Realty Income, ONEOK, Kenvue: two). Non-cash goodwill write-downs are added back for the banks' earnings test (Truist 2023, $6.1 billion; Prudential 2023, $177 million). REIT FFO for 2023–2024 was read from the 10-Ks with a stricter year check than the original extractor: a column is accepted only if its net income matches that year better than any other year, which corrected four readings the looser check had bound to a neighbouring year (Iron Mountain, Extra Space and Host 2023; VICI 2024); every year that two filings both report agrees across them. Gate: the assembled inputs reproduce every published one-year verdict exactly for all 78 holdings. All 339 earlier-year inputs were located in the companies' 10-Ks: 296 automatically, 39 by reading the statement row, and 4 derived as before (Public Storage, Simon). American Tower's 2023–2024 dividends are cash paid from its cash flow statement, not the declared amounts its tag carries. Records: SPYD-coverage-v2.json, SPYD-reit-ffo-3y.json, SPYD-v2-verification*.json, SPYD-watchlist-v2.json, SPYD-income-share.json.

Sep 2026

Added: how much of SPYD's income the dividend watch list represents

The eight companies that paid out more than they earned are about 10% of the fund but about 14% of its income. If the four that also fell short in one of the two prior years halved their dividends, SPYD's income would fall by about 3.5%; about 7% if all eight did. Each company's three-year record is available in a fold under the summary. The coverage groups and every other figure in the section are unchanged.

Details

Income share: shares held on June 30, 2026 (N-PORT balance, units confirmed as shares) times each company's latest fiscal-year dividend per share. Summed across 77 of 78 holdings this gives $317.5 million a year, within 2.2% of what SPYD actually earned in FY2026 before fees; the calculation stops if that gap exceeds 5%. The eight companies' dividends per share were located in their 10-Ks (Dow and UPS automatically; the other six on equity-statement rows read directly). Dow's $2.80 for 2024 is from its 10-K row “Dividends paid, per common share.” Three-year record: the earlier years use the same code as the published coverage map and were only written after the latest year reproduced every published ratio exactly; all 46 new figures were located on the companies' 10-K statement rows (42 automatically, 4 read directly). Records: SPYD-income-share.json, SPYD-watchlist-history.json, SPYD-watchlist-verification*.json.

Sep 2026

Added: dividend growth over 1, 3, 5 and 9 years; history extended to 2016

The chart began in 2018 because the July–December figure for 2017 was the earliest then extracted. Re-reading all eleven semiannual filings adds 2016 ($1.35) and 2017 ($1.42) and takes the series back to the fund's first full calendar year. Calendar 2016 required the inception stub, October 22 to December 31, 2015 ($0.33 per share), which sits in a three-fund combined table in the 2016 semiannual (accession 0001193125-16-496132) with SPYX and RSCO; its column was identified by the $30.00 launch NAV, the $29.19 period-end NAV and $4,379 thousand of period-end net assets, all three confirmed before the figure was used. No ten-year rate is shown or computable: the fund began trading on October 22, 2015, so calendar 2015 is a ten-week stub. Growth windows to 2025: 1 year +5.4%, 3 years −0.5%, 5 years +3.6%, 9 years +4.2% a year. Correction: the earlier extraction read only the net-investment-income row of the financial highlights and so dropped capital-gain distributions. SPYD paid them in the six months to December 31, 2016 ($0.16) and to December 31, 2017 ($0.31), and none in any period since; the 2018–2025 figures are therefore unchanged, and the new 2016 and 2017 bars are stated on the dividend basis with the capital gains disclosed separately. Every fiscal year is restated in several filings and the repeated figures agree, which is the cross-check behind the series.

Sep 2026

Changed: distribution history now shown by calendar year

The chart previously showed fiscal years ending June 30, which is how SEC filings report the fund but not what a shareholder receives in a tax year. Calendar years are derived from the filings alone: a calendar year equals the fiscal year, minus the prior July–December half-year, plus the current one, with the July–December figures taken from the fund's semiannual reports (accessions 0001193125-18-074955 through 0001193125-26-095572). Derived per share: 2018 $1.62, 2019 $1.75, 2020 $1.64, 2021 $1.55, 2022 $1.99, 2023 $1.82, 2024 $1.86, 2025 $1.96. The filings round per-share figures to cents and each calendar year is built from three of them, so a derived year carries up to about a cent of rounding error. Five-year payout growth is therefore restated from 1.2%/yr (fiscal 2021–2026, measured off an inflated base) to 3.6%/yr (calendar 2020–2025), with 6.0%/yr from 2021 shown alongside. Coverage figures remain on the fiscal-year basis, since the fund reports earnings that way and the two must be compared like for like. Note for the record: fiscal 2017 per the filings ($1.41) is below the sum of that year's payments ($1.57), consistent with capital-gain distributions excluded from the "net investment income" line; years from 2018 onward reconcile.

Sep 2026

Added: dividend growth of the underlying companies, and why FY2022 fell

Distribution Sustainability now separates the fund's payout growth from the dividend growth of the companies it holds. Method: per-share dividends from each holding's own 10-K filings, latest full fiscal year vs. the year five years earlier, cross-checked against growth in total dividend dollars paid. Covered 67 of 78 holdings, 84.78% of net assets: weighted average 5.4% a year, median 4.1%. Bands by weight: cut 7.07%, 0–3% 22.00%, 3–7% 31.36%, 7%+ 24.35%. A four-year window starting after the COVID-era dividend cuts gives 5.5% weighted / 4.3% median, so the result is not an artifact of the start date. Excluded (11.91%): Kenvue, Viatris and Smurfit Westrock (no five-year record); APA, Host Hotels, American Tower, Equity Residential and Amcor (per-share series contains a step of more than 3x that total dividends paid do not corroborate — for Amcor the per-share figure jumps $0.4875 to $2.4875 in FY2024 while dollars grew about 10%/yr, and dropping the check would have ranked it among the fund's fastest growers at 40.8%/yr); BXP (latest per-share fact dated 2017). Four REITs are flagged where dollars grew much faster than per-share amounts (Realty Income, Public Storage, VICI, Extra Space) — expected, since they issue shares to fund acquisitions. FY2022 explanation added from the Financial Highlights: FY2021 net investment income $1.48/share and equalization +$0.16 against a $1.91 distribution; FY2022 $1.60 earned against $1.57 paid. The five-year payout growth figure (1.2%/yr) is therefore measured from an inflated base; from FY2022 the rate is 6.6%/yr, now shown alongside it.

Sep 2026

Added: where the payout gap is funded from — the “carryover” explanation below was withdrawn in September 2026; see “Corrected: statements … that went beyond the filings” above

Distribution Sustainability now explains the shortfall between what SPYD earns and what it pays. FY2026 per the Statement of Operations and Statement of Changes in Net Assets: net investment income $319,594,092, equalization credits $6,872,283, distributions $330,491,604 — leaving about $4.0M funded from income carried over from prior years. The notes to financial statements describe equalization as crediting or charging undistributed net investment income when shares are sold or reacquired, so that undistributed income per share is unaffected by share creations and redemptions. The components of distributable earnings table shows $0 undistributed ordinary income at 6/30/2026, meaning that carryover is exhausted. For contrast, FY2025: net investment income $282,841,402 less an equalization charge of $3,339,021, against distributions of $299,609,190. Not funded by return of capital (tax character shows 100% ordinary income) and not by realized gains: the year's $384.8M of in-kind redemption gains are not distributable, and the fund carries $1.5B of capital loss carryforwards.

Sep 2026

Readability edit, with corrections

Page rewritten in plain language: sourcing moved from the body into one note per section and this log; repeated figures consolidated so each fact is explained once; placeholders for unavailable daily-market data removed from view (listed under Data gaps below); Distribution Composition moved out of Distribution Sustainability into Tax Treatment, as a three-year table of what was paid by tax type (the single-value 100%/0% bar chart was dropped as uninformative); figures rounded for display. Comparable Funds left unchanged. Corrections made while re-reading the page: (1) Holdings count stated as 78 stocks, per the June 30, 2026 portfolio holdings filing; the annual report's Key Fund Statistics lists 81 holdings, a difference not reconciled from the filings. (2) Top-10 share corrected from about 14.5% to about 15% (14.96% from the holdings filing). (3) Rate-sensitive weight corrected from "~24%" (industries in the annual report's top-ten list only) to REITs about 27% plus utilities and pipelines about 14%, calculated from the holdings using SEC industry codes. (4) Removed the unsupported statement that dividend income "comfortably funds the payout at the total-dollar level." (5) Removed March 2020 drawdown figures from Risk Profile and the scorecard; crisis-period history appears only in the dedicated Stress History block, not yet compiled for SPYD. (6) Corrected "a 4%+ yield throughout" since June 2022: fiscal 2022 was 3.9% ($1.57 ÷ $39.89). (7) Removed unsupported claims that the fee is "among the lowest in the equity-income segment" and that securities lending is "fully collateralized" ($92.5M cash collateral against $102.6M on loan; other collateral not confirmed). (8) Removed "trails a cheaper broad-market fund over 5 and 10 years," which was not sourced. All six years of distributions (FY2021–FY2026) confirmed as paid from net investment income in the Financial Highlights of the FY2025 and FY2026 annual reports.

Sep 2026

Verified: underlying-holdings dividend coverage

Every input for all 78 holdings (171 figures: dividends, operating cash flow, capital spending, and per-share dividends and earnings) was checked against the companies' own 10-K financial statements for the fiscal year used. All matched except two, both corrected. (1) Amcor had been assessed on its fiscal year ended 6/30/2025 (104.3%, not covered) although its fiscal year ended 6/30/2026 was complete and filed; on that year it is 97.2% (dividends $1,195M / (operating cash flow $2,151M − capex $922M)), now tight. The analysis now uses each company's latest full fiscal year ending on or before the 6/30/2026 holdings date; no other holding changed. (2) American Tower now uses dividends paid per its cash flow statement ($3,157.2M) rather than the declared total ($3,180.8M); 75.9%, group unchanged. A full rebuild from the filings reproduced every result. Sensitivity: if every payout ratio were 5% higher or lower, the dividend-covering share would range 74.1%–77.8% and the comfortable share 56.4%–67.9%.

Sep 2026

Added: dividend coverage of the underlying holdings

New block in Distribution Sustainability. All 78 stock holdings (N-PORT-P, 6/30/2026) assessed on each company's latest full fiscal year ending by that date, from its own SEC filings: dividends vs. free cash flow for operating companies, vs. company-reported Nareit FFO for REITs (10-K MD&A, cross-checked to XBRL net income), vs. diluted EPS for financials. Shares of net assets (after verification): comfortable 59.17%, tight 17.27%, borrowing to invest 12.72%, not covered 10.11%. Headline stat "Dividend-Covering Holdings" = comfortable + tight = 76.44%, shown as 76%; borrowing-to-invest holdings are excluded because their free cash flow was negative (including them would give 89.16%). Exceptions: Iron Mountain assessed on its reported Normalized FFO; Crown Castle and Phillips 66 on operating cash flow (FFO and capex, respectively, not available in their filings); Simon Property's dividend total estimated from per-share dividends. Derived analysis — not a figure reported by the fund.

Sep 2026

Initial Fund File published — FY2026 annual report

Built from the FY2026 N-CSR (accession 0001193125-26-383187, filed 2026-09-04), the prior-year N-CSR for a six-year per-share series (accession 0001193125-25-197943), N-PORT-P (accession 0001410368-26-089316, holdings as of 6/30/2026), and the filing's inline-XBRL instance. Key sourced figures: net assets $7.374B; 81 holdings; 0.07% expense ratio; FY2026 distribution $2.03/sh (100% ordinary income, $0 cap gain, $0 ROC); NII coverage 0.98× (FY2026); NAV $47.71; 1-/5-/10-yr NAV total returns 17.54% / 8.23% / 8.57%. Five-year distribution CAGR (~1.2%/yr, six data points FY2021–FY2026) computed across two filings; FY2022–FY2025 overlap years matched exactly, confirming a common (unsplit) basis.

Oct 31, 2025

Material change — fund name changed

Per the FY2026 annual report's Material Fund Changes section: name changed to "State Street SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 High Dividend ETF." No change to investment objective, principal strategies, or principal risks.

Data gaps logged

Items marked N/A pending non-EDGAR sources

Qualified-dividend share of ordinary distributions (not disclosed in the fetched N-CSR; no Section 19(a) notice found on SEC EDGAR). Quarter-by-quarter distribution amounts and pay dates (the annual reports give yearly totals only). Live premium/discount to NAV, 52-week price range, daily bid-ask spread, average daily volume, 3-yr beta, and yield-vs-trailing-average (all require a licensed daily NAV/price feed — not SEC-disclosed fields). Peer yields and 1-yr returns for comparable funds (not sourced from EDGAR). These will populate when the relevant sources are connected.