The Outlook for S&P 500 Dividends in February 2025

Several weeks have passed since our previous look at the expected future quarterly dividends of the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) in 2025.

Our last snapshot was taken on 21 January 2025, our new picture of the outlook for the index’ dividends in 2025 was snapped on 14 February 2025. In between, investor expectations for how many dividends per share will be paid out before the end of the current quarter of 2025-Q1 rose from $19.95 to $20.15, which is quite a bump. The outlook also improved for the upcoming second quarter of 2025, although to a lesser extent as the forecast rose from $19.04 per share to $19.15 per share.

Looking further out, the future prospects for the S&P 500′s quarterly dividend payouts were either slightly negative or slightly positive. Projected dividends in 2025-Q3 dipped from $19.41 per share to $19.38, while 2025-Q4′s dividends rose from $19.44 per share to $19.46.

The following animated chart shows these changes for current and future quarterly dividends along with the final recorded reading of the dividend futures for each previous quarter from 2022-Q4 through 2024-Q4. If you’re reading this article on a site that republishes our RSS news feed, you may need to click through to our site to see the animation.

How changes in the outlook for dividends at specific points of time in the future affects stock prices is described by this math.

More About Dividend Futures Data

For this series, we have been taking a snapshot of the CME Group’s S&P 500 quarterly dividend futures data shortly after the second or third week of each month.

Dividend futures indicate the amount of dividends per share to be paid out over the period covered by each quarter’s dividend futures contracts, which start on the day after the preceding quarter’s dividend futures contracts expire and end on the third Friday of the month ending the indicated quarter. So for example, as determined by dividend futures contracts, the now “current” quarter of 2025-Q1 began on Saturday, 21 December 2024 and will end on Friday, 21 March 2025.

That makes these figures different from the quarterly dividends per share figures reported by Standard and Poor. S&P reports the amount of dividends per share paid out during regular calendar quarters after the end of each quarter. This term mismatch accounts for the differences in dividends reported by both sources, with the biggest differences between the two typically seen in the first and fourth quarters of each year.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: “A crystal ball with the word ‘SP 500′ written inside it”. And ‘Dividends’ written above it, which we added.