O Dividend Calculator
Realty Income Corporation — Project your returns with dividend reinvestment (DRIP). Pays monthly.
Scenarios
Three paths based on historical CAGRs. Click any card to load it.
What is O?
Realty Income has trademarked the phrase "The Monthly Dividend Company" — and they've earned it. The company is a REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) that owns over 13,000 commercial properties across the U.S. and Europe, leased to tenants like Walgreens, Dollar General, 7-Eleven, and FedEx under long-term triple-net leases.
How O generates dividends
Realty Income has trademarked the phrase "The Monthly Dividend Company" — and they've earned it. The company is a REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) that owns over 13,000 commercial properties across the U.S. and Europe, leased to tenants like Walgreens, Dollar General, 7-Eleven, and FedEx under long-term triple-net leases.
Triple-net means the tenants pay rent plus property taxes, insurance, and maintenance. Realty Income collects rent and passes most of it through to shareholders as monthly dividends. This structure makes the dividend exceptionally predictable — it's backed by contractual rent obligations from creditworthy tenants, not by volatile market conditions or options premiums.
REITs are required by law to distribute at least 90% of taxable income to shareholders, which is why REIT yields tend to be higher than regular stocks. Realty Income's yield typically runs 4.5-5.5%. The company has paid 650+ consecutive monthly dividends and increased the payout 120+ times since its 1994 NYSE listing.
One tax note: REIT dividends are generally taxed as ordinary income, not at the qualified dividend rate. This makes Realty Income particularly effective in tax-advantaged accounts (IRA, 401k) where the tax treatment doesn't matter.
About the O Dividend Calculator
This O dividend calculator projects how your position grows with and without DRIP (Dividend Reinvestment). Every input is prefilled with live O data — current price, latest per-share distribution, detected payment frequency, and historical CAGR — so you can hit calculate immediately, or override any field to model your own assumptions.
The O DRIP calculator runs two parallel scenarios: one where every distribution is reinvested into more O shares, and one where distributions are taken as cash and never compounded. The gap between the two curves is the compounding premium — the extra wealth you build by letting O dividends buy more shares over time. Extra monthly contributions, tax rates, and custom dividend growth rates are all supported, and every calculation runs in your browser with no additional API calls after page load.
Why this calculator is more accurate than most
Traditional DRIP calculators treat dividend-per-share and share-price as two independent quantities that grow at their own separate rates. That works fine for stocks like SCHD or KO, where management sets the payout and the stock price moves with the business. It breaks badly for option-income ETFs like MSTY, NVDY, or TSLY, where distributions are sourced from option premium on the underlying — meaning the dividend dollar is mechanically a fraction of NAV, not a separate variable. Let those two quantities compound independently and you get absurd outputs (trillion-dollar portfolios from $10K) because the implied yield silently grows to 400%+ as price collapses faster than the dollar dividend.
We solve this with two projection modes. Dividend Growth mode is the standard model — correct for dividend-growth stocks and traditional income ETFs. Yield-on-NAV mode (auto-selected when starting yield exceeds 20%) locks the forward yield and recomputes distributions each year asyield × current NAV, so as price falls, dividend-per-share falls proportionally. This matches the physics of option-income funds and produces realistic projections instead of fantasy numbers.
You can toggle between the two modes above the input form. For O, dividend-growth mode is the default and matches how most investors think about this asset.
Yield on Cost — the metric that matters for O long-term holders
The yearly projection table includes a YoC (Yield on Cost) column. Yield on cost is your annual dividend income divided by what you originally paid — not by what O is worth today. For a dividend-growth ETF, this is the single most important long-term number, because it reflects how the rising payout compounds against your fixed cost basis. A O position bought today might yield 5.2% up front, but at historical dividend growth rates it can compound to a 7-12% YoC over 15-20 years without you adding a dollar. That is the "snowball" effect long-term O holders are paying for, and it is invisible if you only look at headline yield.
The two levers that change results the most are the growth assumptions and the holding period. For a volatile, high-yield fund, a 0% or slightly negative growth assumption is usually more realistic than extrapolating a historical CAGR, because distribution levels often decay as implied volatility normalizes. For stable dividend ETFs and index funds, the 5Y CAGR is a reasonable baseline. The O dividend history page shows every past payment in detail, and the total return analyzer strips out NAV erosion to show your real yield.