SGOV Dividend Calculator
iShares 0-3 Month Treasury Bond ETF — Project your returns with dividend reinvestment (DRIP). Pays monthly.
Projection exceeds realistic bounds
These results assume dividends and price growth continue at the same rate for 25 years, which is unlikely for high-yield ETFs. In practice, funds restructure, yields normalize, and NAV erosion limits compounding. Try a shorter time horizon or lower growth rates.
No DRIP vs DRIP
Scenarios
Three paths based on historical CAGRs. Click any card to load it.
What is SGOV?
SGOV is as boring as investing gets — and that's the point. The fund holds U.S. Treasury bills with 0-3 months to maturity and distributes the interest they earn. There are no stocks, no options, no credit risk, and virtually no price volatility. The NAV barely moves because the underlying bonds are so short-term they're essentially cash equivalents.
How SGOV generates income
SGOV is as boring as investing gets — and that's the point. The fund holds U.S. Treasury bills with 0-3 months to maturity and distributes the interest they earn. There are no stocks, no options, no credit risk, and virtually no price volatility. The NAV barely moves because the underlying bonds are so short-term they're essentially cash equivalents.
The yield tracks the federal funds rate almost exactly. When the Fed's rate is 5%, SGOV yields roughly 5%. When it drops to 3%, SGOV follows. This makes SGOV a direct bet on Fed policy — not a bet on any company, market, or options strategy. The distributions are monthly.
Most SGOV investors use it as a cash management tool: a place to park money that needs to be safe and liquid while earning more than a savings account. It's commonly used for emergency funds, down payment savings, or money waiting to be deployed into the market.
A tax advantage: Treasury interest is exempt from state and local income tax in all 50 states. If you live in a high-tax state like California or New York, SGOV's after-tax yield can be meaningfully better than a savings account or money market fund that pays similar gross yields but is fully taxable at the state level.
About the SGOV Dividend Calculator
This SGOV dividend calculator projects how your position grows with and without DRIP (Dividend Reinvestment). Every input is prefilled with live SGOV 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 SGOV DRIP calculator runs two parallel scenarios: one where every distribution is reinvested into more SGOV 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 SGOV 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 SGOV, dividend-growth mode is the default and matches how most investors think about this asset.
Yield on Cost — the metric that matters for SGOV 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 SGOV 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 SGOV position bought today might yield 3.9% 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 SGOV 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 SGOV dividend history page shows every past payment in detail, and the total return analyzer strips out NAV erosion to show your real yield.