SCHD Dividend Calculator
Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF — Project your returns with dividend reinvestment (DRIP). Pays quarterly.
Scenarios
Three paths based on historical CAGRs. Click any card to load it.
What is SCHD?
SCHD is Schwab's flagship dividend ETF and one of the most widely held dividend funds in the US, with roughly $70 billion in assets. It holds about 100 US dividend-paying companies, screened for long payment histories and financial quality, and passes their dividends through to shareholders as quarterly qualified distributions.
How SCHD generates dividends
SCHD is Schwab's flagship dividend ETF and one of the most widely held dividend funds in the US, with roughly $70 billion in assets. It holds about 100 US dividend-paying companies, screened for long payment histories and financial quality, and passes their dividends through to shareholders as quarterly qualified distributions.
The fund tracks the Dow Jones U.S. Dividend 100 Index, which screens for companies with at least 10 consecutive years of dividend payments, then ranks them by financial strength (cash flow to debt, return on equity, dividend yield, and 5-year dividend growth rate). The result is a portfolio of ~100 blue-chip companies — names like Pfizer, Coca-Cola, Home Depot, Cisco, and Broadcom.
What makes SCHD the most popular dividend ETF isn't the yield (typically 3.5-4.0%) — it's the dividend growth. Over the past decade, SCHD's dividend has grown at roughly 10-12% per year. That means if you bought SCHD 10 years ago, your yield-on-cost today would be 7-8%. This compounding dividend growth is the core of the SCHD thesis: income that grows every year without you adding a dollar.
The quarterly distributions are 100% qualified dividends (taxed at the lower capital gains rate, not as ordinary income). There's no return-of-capital component — every dollar comes from corporate earnings. For long-term investors, SCHD is often used as the dividend-growth benchmark: not the highest headline yield, but strong total return over decades with a steadily rising payout.
About the SCHD Dividend Calculator
This SCHD dividend calculator projects how your position grows with and without DRIP (Dividend Reinvestment). Every input is prefilled with live SCHD 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 SCHD DRIP calculator runs two parallel scenarios: one where every distribution is reinvested into more SCHD 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 SCHD 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 SCHD, dividend-growth mode is the default and matches how most investors think about this asset.
Yield on Cost — the metric that matters for SCHD 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 SCHD 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 SCHD position bought today might yield 3.3% 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 SCHD 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 SCHD dividend history page shows every past payment in detail, and the total return analyzer strips out NAV erosion to show your real yield.
SCHD DRIP calculator — frequently asked questions
How does the SCHD DRIP calculator work?▾
Why does the SCHD calculator prefill a yield that's different from the headline number I see elsewhere?▾
What dividend growth rate should I use for SCHD?▾
Does the SCHD calculator account for taxes?▾
Can I use the SCHD calculator for retirement account projections?▾
How is SCHD different from buying the underlying directly?▾
SCHD head-to-head comparisons
In-depth editorial analysis of SCHD versus popular alternatives.