Dogs of the Dow 2026: The List, Returns and 2027 Preview

Short answer: the 2026 Dogs of the Dow are Verizon, Chevron, Merck, Amgen, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, UnitedHealth, Home Depot, Nike and Johnson & Johnson, the ten highest-yielding Dow stocks at the close on December 31, 2025. From that close to the close on October 16, 2026, an equal-weighted basket of the ten returned +19.72% with dividends reinvested, against +9.22% for the SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF (DIA). That is a strong year so far, and it follows a 2025 in which the Dogs returned +18.88% against +14.71% for DIA. Two good years do not prove the strategy works, though, and the gap inside the basket is huge: Chevron is up 51.74% while Nike is down 40.18%. This guide walks through every number, how we calculated it, where the strategy usually goes wrong, and what the list for 2027 looks like if the year ended today.

Everything in the performance tables below was calculated by MarketsHQ from Yahoo Finance daily price, dividend and adjusted-close data. The lists themselves were checked against the published official 2025 and 2026 lists, and both matched our own ranking stock for stock. Where a number depends on a choice we made, such as how to annualise a dividend, we say so. None of this is a recommendation to buy any stock.

What the Dogs of the Dow strategy actually is

The Dogs of the Dow is one of the simplest stock-picking systems ever written down. On the last trading day of the year you take the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, rank them by dividend yield, and buy the ten with the highest yields in equal dollar amounts. You hold them for twelve months, ignore the news, and repeat the exercise on the last trading day of the next year. Stocks that drop out of the top ten are sold; new entrants are bought; everything is reset to equal weight.

The idea was popularised by money manager Michael O'Higgins in his 1991 book Beating the Dow. The logic is that dividend yield is a crude value signal. A yield is the annual dividend divided by the share price, so when a large, established company's share price falls while its board keeps paying the same dividend, the yield rises. A high yield among blue chips often means the market has turned pessimistic on a business that is still generating enough cash to pay shareholders. If that pessimism is overdone, the stock should recover, and the investor collects an above-average dividend while waiting.

The name comes from that framing. These are the out-of-favour members of an elite club, the “dogs” that nobody wants at the start of the year. The bet is that some of them will not stay unloved.

There is also a popular variant called the Small Dogs of the Dow, sometimes called the Puppies. You take the ten Dogs and keep only the five with the lowest share prices. Low share price on its own means nothing about value, since it depends on how many shares a company has issued, so this variant is best understood as a more concentrated bet rather than a cleverer one. We track it anyway, because readers ask about it and because the results are instructive.

The 2026 Dogs of the Dow: the official list and how it has done

Here is the 2026 list as ranked on December 31, 2025, with the yield and closing price used for the ranking. The yields match the official list published on dogsofthedow.com and the list reported by Investopedia. The last two columns are our calculations from Yahoo Finance data: price change and total return (price plus reinvested dividends) from the December 31, 2025 close to the October 16, 2026 close.

Rank	Stock	Price 12/31/25	Yield 12/31/25	Small Dog?	Price change to 10/16/26	Total return to 10/16/26
1	Verizon (VZ)	$40.73	6.78%	Yes	+9.97%	+17.29%
2	Chevron (CVX)	$152.41	4.49%	No	+47.62%	+51.74%
3	Merck (MRK)	$105.26	3.23%	Yes	+38.66%	+41.52%
4	Amgen (AMGN)	$327.31	3.08%	No	+32.13%	+34.84%
5	Procter & Gamble (PG)	$143.31	2.95%	Yes	+11.19%	+13.67%
6	Coca-Cola (KO)	$69.91	2.92%	Yes	+34.32%	+36.92%
7	UnitedHealth (UNH)	$330.11	2.68%	No	+21.60%	+24.01%
8	Home Depot (HD)	$344.10	2.67%	No	−10.02%	−8.06%
9	Nike (NKE)	$63.71	2.57%	Yes	−41.72%	−40.18%
10	Johnson & Johnson (JNJ)	$206.95	2.51%	No	+23.49%	+25.48%

Averaging the ten total returns gives the basket result. We also calculated two comparisons: DIA, which is the most direct way an ordinary investor would hold the Dow itself, and an equal-weighted average of all 30 Dow members at the start of the year, which removes the effect of the Dow's unusual price weighting.

Basket, Dec 31, 2025 to Oct 16, 2026	Total return
Dogs of the Dow (10 stocks, equal weight)	+19.72%
Small Dogs of the Dow (VZ, NKE, KO, MRK, PG)	+13.84%
All 30 Dow members, equal weight	+11.09%
SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF (DIA)	+9.22%

So far in 2026 the full Dogs basket is ahead of DIA by about 10.5 percentage points and ahead of the equal-weighted Dow by about 8.6 points. That is a large margin for a strategy whose whole selling point is that it is boring. The Small Dogs are ahead of the benchmarks too, but by much less, because the five-stock version contains Nike, the single worst stock of the 30 in 2026, and leaves out Chevron and Amgen, two of the best.

What drove the 2026 result

Look down the total-return column and the story is not “dividends.” At yields between 2.5% and 6.8%, dividends contributed only a few percentage points to any one stock over nine and a half months; for nine of the ten, the difference between the price-change column and the total-return column is between about 1.5 and 4.1 points, and only for Verizon is it larger, at a little over seven. The result was driven by price recovery in a handful of names.

Chevron was the biggest single contributor, up 51.74% including dividends and the best performer of all 30 Dow stocks over the period. Merck (+41.52%), Coca-Cola (+36.92%) and Amgen (+34.84%) were the next three best in the basket, and all three also rank in the top six of the whole index. Four of the ten Dogs finished the period among the six best-performing Dow stocks. That is exactly the mean-reversion outcome the strategy is designed to capture: companies that started the year unloved, in energy, pharmaceuticals and consumer staples, were the ones that rebounded.

The losers are just as instructive. Nike lost 40.18%, the worst result of the 30. Its share price fell from $63.71 to $37.13. Because the dividend was held at $0.41 a quarter, its yield on the October 16 price is now about 4.4%, far higher than when it entered the list. That is the mechanical trap inside every yield strategy: a falling price pushes the yield up, which keeps a deteriorating stock on the list. Home Depot also lost money, down 8.06%.

The basket survived Nike because of equal weighting and diversification. A 40% loss on one-tenth of the portfolio costs four percentage points. Chevron's gain alone added more than five. This is the strongest practical argument for the strategy: you do not have to pick which of the ten unloved names will recover, and you do not need a majority of winners. In 2026 so far, eight of the ten made money.

The Verizon complication

The 2026 list has an unusual wrinkle. Verizon, the highest-yielding Dog, is no longer in the Dow. S&P Dow Jones Indices announced on June 23, 2026 that Alphabet would replace Verizon in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, effective before the open of trading on June 29, 2026. It was the index's first structural change since Nvidia replaced Intel in November 2024.

For a Dogs investor this changes nothing until the next rebalance. The rules say you pick on December 31 and hold for the year, so Verizon stays in the 2026 basket and has returned 17.29% for it, more than the benchmarks. But it means Verizon cannot be a 2027 Dog. Unless it rejoins the index, which is not something anyone should assume, the 2027 list will be drawn from a different 30 stocks, with Alphabet in Verizon's place. Alphabet's yield is far below the top ten, so the effect is simply that the highest-yielding slot of the last two years disappears.

This matters more than it sounds. Verizon was the top-ranked Dog in both 2025 and 2026 with a yield of about 6.78% each time, far above the rest of the list. Without it, the 2027 basket's starting yield will be noticeably lower, which we look at below.

The 2025 Dogs of the Dow: a full year of results

A nine-and-a-half-month result can still change. For a complete year, here is the 2025 list, ranked at the December 31, 2024 close, with full-year 2025 results through the December 31, 2025 close. The Dow's membership did not change during 2025, so the comparison is clean.

Rank	Stock	Price 12/31/24	Yield 12/31/24	Small Dog?	2025 price change	2025 total return
1	Verizon (VZ)	$39.99	6.78%	Yes	+1.85%	+8.86%
2	Chevron (CVX)	$144.84	4.50%	No	+5.23%	+10.10%
3	Amgen (AMGN)	$260.64	3.65%	No	+25.58%	+29.67%
4	Johnson & Johnson (JNJ)	$144.62	3.43%	Yes	+43.10%	+47.48%
5	Merck (MRK)	$99.48	3.26%	Yes	+5.81%	+9.79%
6	Coca-Cola (KO)	$62.26	3.12%	Yes	+12.29%	+15.60%
7	IBM (IBM)	$219.83	3.04%	No	+34.75%	+38.23%
8	Cisco (CSCO)	$59.20	2.70%	Yes	+30.12%	+33.47%
9	McDonald's (MCD)	$289.89	2.44%	No	+5.43%	+7.89%
10	Procter & Gamble (PG)	$167.65	2.40%	No	−14.52%	−12.26%

Basket, full-year 2025	Total return
Small Dogs of the Dow (VZ, CSCO, KO, MRK, JNJ)	+23.04%
Dogs of the Dow (10 stocks, equal weight)	+18.88%
All 30 Dow members, equal weight	+15.40%
SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF (DIA)	+14.71%

In 2025 the Dogs beat DIA by about 4.2 points and the equal-weighted Dow by about 3.5 points. This time the Small Dogs did even better, at +23.04%, because their five stocks included the basket's best performer, Johnson & Johnson (+47.48%), and Cisco (+33.47%), while avoiding Procter & Gamble, the basket's only loser.

Notice that the Small Dogs won by a wide margin in 2025 and lagged the full basket by almost six points in 2026. Which five stocks happen to have low share prices is close to random with respect to future returns, so the variant behaves like a coin flip layered on top of the main strategy. Its results swing more, in both directions.

Also notice who carried 2025. Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Cisco and Amgen all returned more than 29%. Several of the higher-yielding names, Verizon, Chevron and Merck, returned around 9% to 10%, well below the benchmark. The very highest yields did not produce the best returns. In 2026 it was partly the other way around, with Chevron and Merck leading. Rank within the top ten tells you very little.

Two good years: what they do and do not prove

Put together, an investor who followed the rules from the end of 2024 has beaten the Dow in both of the last two years. Compounding the two periods, the Dogs basket turned $10,000 into about $14,232 (1.1888 × 1.1972), while DIA turned the same amount into about $12,529 (1.1471 × 1.0922). That is a gap of roughly $1,700 on $10,000 in under two years.

That is a real result, calculated from real prices. It is also a sample of two. Twenty months of outperformance tell you that the strategy worked in a period when the market rotated toward healthcare, energy and staples after years in which technology stocks dominated. They do not tell you the strategy has an edge you can count on.

The longer record is more mixed, and honest descriptions of it say so. Researchers and commentators have pointed out for decades that the Dogs' history includes long stretches of underperformance, particularly when the market is led by growth stocks that pay little or no dividend. The late 1990s, when technology led, and much of the 2010s, when large-cap growth names led, were tough periods for any high-yield strategy. Nvidia, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, which have driven a large share of US equity gains in recent years, almost never qualify as Dogs because their yields are tiny or, in Amazon's case, zero.

We have not reproduced a multi-decade backtest here, and we are deliberately not quoting one. Doing it properly requires the exact Dow membership on every December 31 back to the 1970s, adjustments for every spin-off and merger, and dividend data for companies that no longer exist. Many long-run figures circulating online do not explain how they handled those problems. Our two-year numbers are narrow but checkable; anyone with a spreadsheet and the same data can reproduce them.

If you want the bigger lesson about short samples, our study of time in the market versus timing the market shows how sharply one- and five-year outcomes can differ from twenty-year ones, even for a broad index.

Why the strategy can work

There are three reasonable arguments for why buying the highest-yielding Dow stocks might beat the index over time, and one structural reason it has a fair chance of at least not being a disaster.

It is a value tilt. Dividend yield is closely related to valuation. A high yield usually comes with a low price relative to earnings or cash flow. Academic work on factor investing has documented a long-run value premium, cheap stocks outperforming expensive ones on average, although that premium has been weak or absent for long stretches, including much of the 2010s. Dogs of the Dow is a crude, concentrated version of that tilt applied to 30 very large companies.

It harvests overreaction. Big companies rarely disappear. When a Dow member's shares fall far enough to push its yield to the top of the index, the market is often pricing in a long period of trouble. Sometimes that is right. Often the business stabilises and the price recovers. The strategy does not need to know which; it only needs the recoveries to outweigh the further declines across ten stocks.

The dividend pays you to wait. A 3% to 4% yield is not the main driver of returns, as the 2026 tables show, but it cushions the bad years and it compounds when reinvested.

The universe is pre-filtered. The Dow's index committee selects large, established, reputable companies. That screen removes most of the weakest high-yielders, the small, indebted firms whose yields are high because the market expects the dividend to be cut. A high-yield screen across the whole stock market would be far more dangerous than one applied to the Dow.

Why it can fail

Yield traps. A yield is calculated from the last dividend, not the next one. If a company is about to cut its payout, its trailing or indicated yield will look attractive right before the cut. Nike in 2026 illustrates the slower version: no dividend cut, but a share price that kept falling. A pure yield ranking cannot tell the difference between “cheap and recovering” and “cheap for a reason.”

Sector concentration. High yields cluster in particular industries. The 2026 Dogs include four healthcare companies (Merck, Amgen, UnitedHealth, Johnson & Johnson), three consumer companies with very different businesses (Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Nike), plus Home Depot, Chevron and Verizon. There is no technology stock and no bank. In a year led by those sectors, the Dogs will lag almost by construction. This is not diversification in the way a broad index fund provides it; our guide to ETFs and index funds covers what genuinely broad exposure looks like.

Ten stocks is a small portfolio. A single collapse costs a tenth of your money. In the Small Dogs version, it costs a fifth. Nike's 40% fall cost the full basket about four points in 2026 and the Small Dogs about eight.

The Dow is a strange universe. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is price-weighted, so its own returns depend on share prices rather than company size, and its 30 members are chosen by a committee, not by a mechanical rule. The Dogs strategy ignores the price weighting, because it buys in equal amounts, but it inherits the committee's choices, including when the committee replaces a member, as with Verizon in 2026.

Popularity can erode the edge. Any simple, widely published rule invites investors to front-run it in late December. Whether that has a meaningful effect on these very large, liquid stocks is debated, but it is a reason to be sceptical of anyone claiming the historical edge is guaranteed to persist.

How yield is measured, and why it changes the list

One technical choice decides which stocks make the list: what dividend do you use? There are two common answers, and they sometimes give different results.

Trailing yield adds up the dividends actually paid over the last 12 months and divides by today's price. Indicated or forward yield takes the most recent regular dividend, annualises it, and divides by today's price. The published Dogs lists use the indicated method, and so did we.

The difference matters when a dividend has just changed. 3M is the clearest recent example. After spinning off its healthcare business, Solventum, in April 2024, 3M reset its quarterly dividend to $0.70. On December 31, 2024, the dividends 3M had paid over the prior 12 months still included higher payments made before the reset, and Yahoo Finance's split-adjusted history shows trailing dividends of about $3.36 per share. On a $129.09 share price, that is a trailing yield of about 2.60%, enough to put 3M ninth on a trailing ranking. On an indicated basis, $0.70 × 4 = $2.80, a 2.17% yield, and 3M drops to twelfth. Using indicated yields, McDonald's at 2.44% and Procter & Gamble at 2.40% take the last two places instead.

Two other details trip up home-made lists:

• Declared but unpaid increases. Amgen announced a higher quarterly dividend of $2.52 in December 2025, payable in 2026. The official list used that new rate: $2.52 × 4 / $327.31 = 3.08%. Using the last dividend actually paid, $2.38, gives 2.91%. In this case Amgen stays in the top ten either way, but its rank moves from fourth to sixth.
• Payment frequency. Most Dow members pay quarterly, but Disney pays twice a year. Multiplying Disney's $0.75 payment by four, as a careless spreadsheet would, makes its yield look like 2.64% on December 31, 2025, enough to sneak into the top ten. The correct indicated yield, $1.50 a year on a $113.77 price, is 1.32%.

Our first pass at the 2026 list actually made the Disney mistake, which is how we know it is easy to make. Once the payment frequency was corrected, our list matched the official one exactly. If you build your own list, check each company's dividend announcements rather than trusting a formula.

An early look at the 2027 Dogs of the Dow

The 2027 list will be set by prices on December 31, 2026, and a lot can change in ten weeks. Still, it is useful to see where things stand. We ranked the current 30 Dow members, now including Alphabet instead of Verizon, by indicated yield using the most recent dividend each company had paid by October 16, 2026, and the October 16 closing price. This is a snapshot, not a forecast.

Rank today	Stock	Close 10/16/26	Latest quarterly dividend	Indicated yield
1	Nike (NKE)	$37.13	$0.41	4.42%
2	Chevron (CVX)	$224.99	$1.78	3.16%
3	McDonald's (MCD)	$242.97	$1.86	3.06%
4	Home Depot (HD)	$309.63	$2.33	3.01%
5	IBM (IBM)	$232.14	$1.69	2.91%
6	Procter & Gamble (PG)	$159.35	$1.089	2.73%
7	Amgen (AMGN)	$432.49	$2.52	2.33%
8	Merck (MRK)	$145.95	$0.85	2.33%
9	UnitedHealth (UNH)	$401.43	$2.32	2.31%
10	Goldman Sachs (GS)	$881.26	$5.00	2.27%
11	Coca-Cola (KO)	$93.90	$0.53	2.26%
12	Johnson & Johnson (JNJ)	$255.56	$1.34	2.10%

Several things stand out.

The basket's starting yield has collapsed. On December 31, 2025, the ten Dogs had an average yield of about 3.39%. Today's top ten average about 2.85%, and that figure is flattered by Nike. The 2026 winners did what winners do: their prices rose, so their yields fell. Coca-Cola's yield dropped from 2.92% to 2.26% even after a dividend increase, because the share price rose by about a third. Verizon's departure from the index removes the one stock that was paying close to 7%.

Nike would be the top Dog. After its 2026 collapse, Nike now has the highest yield in the Dow. A rules-based investor would buy it again in 2027, at a much larger weight in the yield ranking than before. That is the strategy working as designed, betting on a rebound in the most beaten-down name, and also the purest example of the yield-trap risk. Whether Nike's dividend is secure is a question the yield ranking cannot answer.

Goldman Sachs could become a Dog. A bank yielding 2.27% at an $881 share price would be an unusual Dog. Its place in the ranking is fragile: positions eight through eleven are separated by just 0.07 percentage points, so ordinary price moves between now and December 31 will decide who makes the final list.

McDonald's and IBM are back. Both were 2025 Dogs that fell out for 2026 and have since lost ground. McDonald's is down 18.94% including dividends so far in 2026 and IBM is down 20.03%, which has pushed their yields back toward the top.

We will not know the actual 2027 list until the closing prices on December 31, 2026. Companies also raise dividends late in the year; any increase announced before then would move a stock up the ranking.

How to follow the strategy in practice

If you want to run the Dogs of the Dow yourself, the mechanics are straightforward:

1. Get the current Dow membership from S&P Dow Jones Indices or a reliable financial data provider. Membership changes, as 2026 showed.
2. Rank by indicated yield at the close on the last trading day of the year. Use each company's most recently declared regular dividend, annualised by its actual payment frequency. Exclude special one-off dividends.
3. Buy the top ten in equal dollar amounts, either at the close or at the open on the first trading day of the new year. Our figures use December 31 closing prices.
4. Reinvest dividends through the year, or hold them as cash, but be consistent. Our total-return figures assume reinvestment on each ex-dividend date, which is how Yahoo Finance's adjusted close is constructed.
5. Do nothing until the next December 31. Then rerank, sell the stocks that dropped out, buy the new entrants, and rebalance all ten to equal weight.

Commission-free trading has removed most of the cost of doing this with ten stocks. The remaining costs are the bid-ask spread, which is tiny for Dow stocks, and taxes.

Taxes are the real cost in a taxable account. The annual turnover realises capital gains each year on stocks that leave the list, and most of those gains are held for roughly a year, so the holding period matters for whether they qualify for lower long-term rates in the US. A strategy like this also generates relatively high dividend income, which is taxable every year. In a tax-advantaged account, such as an IRA, those frictions largely disappear. Tax rules differ by country, and you should check how dividends and short holding periods are treated where you live.

Discipline is the hard part. The strategy asks you to buy Nike after it has lost 40% and to sell Coca-Cola after a strong year because its yield fell. It is psychologically uncomfortable by design. Investors who override the rules when they feel uneasy are no longer running the Dogs; they are running their own judgement with extra steps.

Dogs of the Dow versus other dividend approaches

The Dogs are one way to tilt a portfolio toward dividends. It helps to compare them with the alternatives.

Dividend growth strategies select companies with long records of raising their dividends rather than the highest current yield. They tend to hold higher-quality, more expensive stocks and to avoid yield traps, at the cost of a lower starting yield. They are almost the opposite philosophy: the Dogs buy what is unloved; dividend growers buy what is reliable.

High-dividend ETFs apply yield screens to hundreds of stocks with quality filters and sector caps. They are far more diversified than ten stocks and do the rebalancing for you, but they do not replicate the Dogs' concentrated contrarian bet.

Stock-by-stock dividend investing means analysing payout ratios, free cash flow and balance sheets to judge whether a dividend is safe. That is more work and more judgement, but it addresses the Dogs' biggest weakness directly. Our list of the best dividend stocks for 2026 takes that approach, and some of the same companies appear in both.

A plain index fund remains the baseline. In 2025 and 2026, the Dogs beat it. Over the decade before that, much of the market's return came from low-yielding growth stocks that the Dogs would never have owned. Anyone considering the strategy should be comfortable with the possibility of several years of lagging the index in exchange for the chance of outperforming it.

Who the strategy suits, and who it does not

The Dogs of the Dow fits an investor who wants a rules-based, low-maintenance way to own a slice of large US companies with an income and value tilt, who is happy to make one set of trades a year, and who can live with a concentrated portfolio that looks very different from the index. It works best as a portion of a broader portfolio rather than the whole thing.

It suits investors badly if they need the portfolio to track the market closely, if they will be tempted to abandon the rules after a bad year, or if they depend on the income in a way that would make a dividend cut painful. Retirees drawing an income should be particularly careful about concentration; our article on sequence of returns risk explains why a bad run early in retirement does lasting damage, and a ten-stock portfolio can have very bad years.

It also does not suit traders. The Dogs is a once-a-year system with nothing to do in between. Short-term traders looking for actionable setups on these names should treat the Dogs list as a watchlist of out-of-favour stocks, not a trading signal. If that is your style, our trading signals are built around shorter horizons, and the earnings calendar shows when each of these companies next reports, which is when the biggest single-day moves usually happen.

Common mistakes when copying the Dogs

• Using a screener's yield without checking it. Screeners mix trailing and forward yields, sometimes include special dividends, and can mishandle semiannual payers. As the 3M and Disney examples show, this changes the list.
• Using the wrong 30 stocks. Financial websites sometimes lag index changes. In 2027, any list that still includes Verizon is out of date unless Verizon has been added back.
• Weighting by conviction. Putting more money into the Dogs you like best defeats the point. Equal weighting is what protected the 2026 basket from Nike.
• Selling mid-year. Cutting a loser in June turns a rules-based strategy into a discretionary one. Some investors deliberately add a stop-loss rule; that is a different strategy, and it needs to be judged on its own results.
• Judging it on one year. A 10-point win, like 2026 so far, or a 10-point loss, which the strategy has also produced in growth-led years, is mostly noise. Judge it over full market cycles.
• Ignoring taxes. In a taxable account, annual turnover and high dividend income can absorb a meaningful part of any excess return.

Does the strategy work outside the Dow?

The same idea has been applied to other blue-chip indices, often called “Dogs of the FTSE” in the UK or similar names elsewhere, and to wider universes. The broader the universe and the lower its quality, the more dangerous a pure yield ranking becomes, because more of the high yields belong to companies whose dividends are genuinely at risk. Part of the Dow version's appeal is the quality filter provided by the index committee. Transplanting the rule onto, say, small caps or emerging markets without a quality screen is a different, riskier strategy.

It does not translate to crypto at all. Most cryptocurrencies pay no dividend, and staking yields are not comparable to company dividends: they are paid in the same volatile token, they often come from new issuance rather than profits, and they carry protocol and custody risks. A ranking of coins by staking yield would be a ranking of risk, not of value.

How we calculated these numbers

For transparency, here is exactly what we did.

• Universe. The 30 Dow Jones Industrial Average members on December 31, 2024 and December 31, 2025. Membership was unchanged through 2025; the last change before that added Nvidia and Sherwin-Williams in November 2024. For the 2027 snapshot, we used the current 30 members, with Alphabet replacing Verizon from June 29, 2026.
• Prices and dividends. Yahoo Finance daily closing prices, dividend events and adjusted closes, downloaded on October 19, 2026. The latest data point is the October 16, 2026 close.
• Yield ranking. Most recent regular dividend before the ranking date, annualised by payment frequency (four for quarterly payers, two for Disney), divided by the closing price. Our rankings matched the published official lists for 2025 and 2026 exactly. In the tables we quote the official yields; they differ from our own only for Amgen in both years, because the official list used the newly declared rate.
• Returns. Total return is the change in Yahoo Finance's adjusted close, which assumes dividends are reinvested on each ex-dividend date. Price change uses the unadjusted close, which is still adjusted for stock splits. Baskets are simple averages of the member stocks' returns, which equals an equal-weighted portfolio bought at the start and not rebalanced during the period.
• Not included. Taxes, commissions, bid-ask spreads and withholding taxes. Corporate actions such as Honeywell's 2025 and 2026 spin-offs are only as accurate as Yahoo's adjustments; neither affected the Dogs lists, since Honeywell was not a Dog in either year.

If you check these figures yourself and find a discrepancy, the most likely causes are using trailing rather than indicated yields, using the January 2 opening price instead of the December 31 close, or using a data source that adjusts dividends differently.

The bottom line

The Dogs of the Dow is a simple, transparent way to make a contrarian, income-tilted bet on 30 of America's largest companies. Its recent record is good: +18.88% in 2025 against +14.71% for DIA, and +19.72% so far in 2026 against +9.22%. Its long-run record is more mixed, and two good years are not proof of an edge.

What the last two years really show is how the strategy behaves. Returns came from a few out-of-favour names recovering sharply, not from dividends. One stock collapsed and the basket survived because no single holding was large. And the winners' yields have fallen so far that the 2027 list will look quite different, likely with Nike at the top and possibly Goldman Sachs at the bottom.

If you use the strategy, follow the rules mechanically, measure yields correctly, keep it to a part of your portfolio, and judge it over years rather than months. If you would rather trade these companies actively, MarketsHQ readers can open a trading account with our partner broker. Trading individual stocks involves the risk of loss, and past performance, including everything in this article, does not predict future returns.