Highest realized shareholder yield stocks (2026)

Methodology#

Universe: active US-listed stocks with market cap above $5B. Realized shareholder yield = the fall in share count over the trailing year + dividends paid over that same year, measured against the market cap at the start of the year. Share counts are point-in-time counts from the company's own SEC filings (the cover-page count, or its per-class sum, or the balance-sheet count — the same one at both ends of the year, never a weighted average), normalized to today's terms so a split can't fake a change. Both legs use start-of-year value on purpose: dividing by today's cap lets the payout shrink its own denominator, so a company distributing itself away reads an ever-higher “yield” — the failure mode of the conventional metric this page exists to correct. The dividend leg is trailing dividends paid from the cash-flow statement rather than the current indicated rate — the standalone dividend-yield column still shows the indicated rate, so the two can differ. A negative realized yield means the company issued net new shares and diluted holders.

Shareholder yield (the cash column) = trailing repurchases net of issuance + dividends paid, ÷ current market cap — the conventional definition, kept for comparison. Buyback figures behind it are gross of shares issued for compensation. Fundamental return = realized yield + earnings growth, roughly the annual return the business delivered before any change in valuation multiple. Both horizons are in the column picker: the 1Y version adds the trailing-year legs, the 5Y version adds two CAGRs. It uses earnings growth rather than EPS growth on purpose: EPS growth already contains the buyback, so adding it to a buyback yield would count the same share retirement twice.

Known limits: for about 40 multi-class filers (Charter, Visa, UPS, Comcast, Berkshire and similar) the SEC bulk dataset drops the per-share-class cover count, so the share count falls back to the weighted-average diluted figure — an average, which lags a sudden buyback by up to a quarter. Growth and Fundamental return are blank for companies that were loss-making at either endpoint, since a CAGR through zero is meaningless. See also the highest dividend stocks list. Past performance does not predict future returns; not investment advice.