Here’s a question worth asking before you buy any dividend stock: Will this payout be bigger three years from now, or will it be gone?
It’s tempting to sort a list of dividend payers by yield and grab whatever sits at the top. A 9% yield looks a lot more exciting than a 3% yield. But a yield that high is often a warning sign.
Remember how yield works. It’s the annual dividend divided by the share price, so when a stock falls, its yield rises. A double-digit yield can mean investors have already sold the stock down because they expect a dividend cut.
The better approach is to look for payouts that are growing, backed by businesses that are growing too. That’s what the screen below was built to find.
It turned up a few dozen stocks, and we’ll highlight five of them: Keurig Dr Pepper (KDP), Lockheed Martin (LMT), PACCAR (PCAR), MSC Industrial Direct (MSM), and AbbVie (ABBV). Each has a forward yield between 2.5% and 3%, expected dividend growth of roughly 4% to 11% a year, and earnings that analysts expect to grow even faster.
Here’s how we found them, and why the yield is the least interesting thing about them.
How we built the screen
We ran this screen on TIKR, where you can filter across more than 400 screening factors covering nearly 70,000 stocks from around the world. That’s a big haystack, so every filter needed a specific job.
We limited the search to U.S. and Canadian companies, then layered on eight more conditions. A stock had to pass every one of them to make the list.
Most of the filters use analysts’ consensus estimates for fiscal 2025 through fiscal 2028. That means the screen looks at where these businesses are headed, in addition to where they’ve been. Here’s the full setup:
Here’s what’s behind the run.
Why each filter matters
Each condition answers a basic question about a dividend: Is it big enough, is it safe, and will it grow?
A forward yield between 2% and 6%
We screened on the next-12-months (NTM) dividend yield, based on analysts’ average estimate. A forward yield reflects the dividend investors expect to receive going forward, which matters if a company is about to cut.
The 2% floor makes sure the income is meaningful. The 6% ceiling is just as important: It trims out stocks whose yields have climbed high enough to suggest the market doubts the payout.
Dividend growth of more than 3% a year
Analysts expect each company to raise its dividend per share by more than 3% a year, on average, from FY 2025 to FY 2028. That’s roughly the pace of long-run U.S. inflation, so the income at least holds its purchasing power.
Dividend growth also signals management’s confidence. Companies hate cutting dividends, so most boards only raise the payout when they believe they can sustain it.
Revenue growth above 5% and earnings growth above 7%
Dividends come out of profits, and profits come from sales. If a dividend grows faster than earnings for years, the payout eats a bigger and bigger share of profits until something has to give.
Requiring normalized EPS growth above 7%, more than double the dividend growth floor, leaves room for the payout to keep rising without straining the business. Normalized EPS strips out one-time items, so a single big gain or charge doesn’t distort the picture.
The revenue filter keeps us honest. A company can grow EPS for a while by cutting costs or buying back stock, but lasting earnings growth usually needs sales growth behind it.
Leaving out five sectors
We excluded energy, materials, financials, real estate, and utilities. Plenty of excellent dividend stocks live in those sectors, so this is no knock on them.
Energy and materials companies are tied to commodity prices, and their dividends often rise and fall with those prices. Banks, REITs, and utilities are usually judged by their own yardsticks, such as book value, funds from operations, and regulated rate base growth. They deserve a screen of their own.
A market cap above $2 billion
Larger companies tend to have more analysts following them, which makes the consensus estimates in this screen more reliable. They also tend to have the scale and financial flexibility to keep paying through a rough patch.
5 standouts from the screen
Out of nearly 70,000 stocks, a few dozen passed every filter, and we’re highlighting five of them here. All five are U.S. companies, and three are industrials. Here they are, sorted by forward yield:
We won’t go deep on each one, but a quick look shows why a screen is where your research starts.
The group covers a lot of ground: Lockheed Martin’s defense contracts, PACCAR’s heavy-duty trucks, MSC Industrial’s factory supplies, AbbVie’s immunology drugs, and Keurig Dr Pepper’s coffee and soda brands. AbbVie has the lowest yield of the five but the fastest expected earnings growth, while PACCAR leads on expected dividend growth at more than 11% a year. Keurig Dr Pepper’s 23% expected revenue growth comes mostly from its acquisition of JDE Peet’s, which closed in April 2026, a reminder to always check where growth is coming from. In every case, analysts expect earnings to grow faster than the dividend, which leaves room for more raises down the road.
None of these five stocks is a sure thing, and this screen doesn’t tell you whether any of them is fairly priced. What it does is point you toward companies where the dividend, the revenue, and the earnings are all expected to move in the right direction.
The best dividend stocks tend to pair a reasonable yield with a payout that’s growing and a business strong enough to fund it. Yield is the easy number to find. Sustainability takes a little more digging, and that’s usually where the long-term rewards are.
Start dividend-hunting today
Want to build your own version? Run this screen on TIKR to see every stock that passed, then adjust it to fit your goals. Raise the yield floor if you need more income today, add a valuation or free cash flow filter, or drop the sector exclusions to see what else turns up.
