S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats List: Sorted By Analyst Ratings

Ramish Cheema

Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 5:55 AM 7 min read

Dividends are one of the most stable ways that you can make money from the stock market. While most attention is often focused on stock share price appreciations and the potential to cash in at the right time, dividends mostly stay in the background. However, they provide investors the option to earn bond like payments for their stock ownership. Dividends are generally paid by larger and established companies with budgets that are capable of supporting investing in growth or by others that are structured to pay out most of their earnings from investment or other entities as dividends.

Since there are thousands of stocks on the market, picking out only those that have consistently paid dividends for decades despite the prevailing economic environment is quite difficult. This becomes ever more important given the current economic environment. Inflation and the stock market have roiled decision making and created a tough environment for those that seek stability. Meteoric gains made by the big technology and mega-cap firms almost seemed to reverse and start a downward trend in August, and economists and analysts as a whole are now starting to favor a cautious approach towards the stock market. The simple reason behind this is that the rapid interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve to curtail historic inflation are historic themselves. The bank rate in the U.S. is now at a two decade high, and the fact that the economy has managed to weather the storm so far has surprised a lot of professionals.

Dividends can prove to be crucial if they can provide stable income in a tough environment. At the same time, reinvesting dividends into the stock that pays it (after consulting certified professionals) can also enable one to grow wealth over the decades and have a nice nest egg waiting for retirement. There are multiple lists that track dividend companies, and one of the more popular ones is the S&P500 Dividend Aristocrats. The list sets a rather high bar for entry, since not only does it include only those stocks that are part of the S&P 500 index, but further narrows down the selection criteria to include only those firms that have grown their dividends consecutively for the past 25 years. The total returns of these stocks are naturally higher than the S&P500, and except for some rare exceptions, lead and lag the index during periods of upturns and downturns, respectively.

Nearly half of the S&P500 Dividend Aristocrats are firms operating in the consumer staples and industrial sectors. This is unsurprising since these firms are either less prone to the negative effects of economic shocks or are large and established companies that generate stable revenue simply due to their scale and expensive long term capital investments. We've covered this elite list of stocks quite frequently as well. Check out 25 S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats To Avoid, Dividend Aristocrats Ranked: Top 15 According to Analysts, and S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats List: Sorted By Hedge Fund Popularity.

This time around, we'll look at the dividend aristocrats with the best analyst ratings and some notable stocks are Linde plc (NYSE:LIN), Walmart Inc. (NYSE:WMT), and S&P Global Inc. (NYSE:SPGI).

S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats List: Sorted By Analyst Ratings

Photo by Vitaly Taranov on Unsplash

Our Methodology

To compile our list of the S&P500 Dividend Aristocrats sorted by analyst ratings, we used a list of the dividend aristocrats courtesy of Sure Dividend. The stocks were then ranked based on their average analyst ratings data-based scores courtesy of Yahoo Finance. A lower score indicates a better rating. Out of these, the stocks with scores of 2 or less were chosen