What is actually in a dividend announcement, field by field
Amount per security, the franked proportion, three dates, the reinvestment election deadline, and the one word that tells you whether this payment is coming back next year. Two pages, free, and almost nobody opens it.
Every piece of dividend writing, this site emphatically included, eventually tells you to go and read the announcement. Almost none of them says what is in one, which makes the advice the intellectual equivalent of pointing at a horizon.
A dividend announcement is a standard form. It is roughly two pages, most of it is fields rather than prose, and it takes about ninety seconds once you know which four lines matter. Here is the form.
| Field | Example | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Dividend type | Interim | Whether it is part of the schedule |
| Amount per security | 85 cents | The same for everyone. Yours needs the record date |
| Franked amount | 85 cents, 100% | A move to 70% changes the value, not the cash |
| Ex date | 17 February | The trading deadline |
| Record date | 18 February | Who is on the register |
| Payment date | 27 March | When the money moves |
| DRP | Applies, no discount, elect by 19 February | The whole window to change this payment |
| Conduit foreign income | Nil | The part carrying no franking |
The field that says whether this happens again
Near the top the company states what kind of dividend this is. Interim, final, or special. It is one word and it is the most useful thing on the page.
Interim and final are the two halves of an ordinary year and they are frequently different sizes, which is why comparing one against the other invents a great many cuts that never happened. Special means it is not part of the schedule and is not a commitment to anything. Read as a yield afterwards, a special quietly inflates the figure for twelve months and then falls out of it, looking like a cut.
One word, and it settles the question the entire yield column cannot answer.
Amount per security, which is not amount per you
The payment is stated per share, in cents, in the company's own currency. It is a fact about the security and it is the same number for everybody.
Turning it into a fact about you means multiplying by the shares you held on the record date, which is not always the number you hold today, and that gap is the most invisible reason a payment surprises people.
The franked proportion, which is a percentage and does move
The form states the franked amount per security, or the percentage franked, or both. This is the line people assume they already know, on the grounds that the company has been fully franked for years.
It is not a fixed attribute. Franking comes from an account with a balance, and a company earning more of its profit overseas generates fewer Australian credits. A move from 100% to 70% is announced here, in a field, with no headline, and it changes what the payment is worth to you without changing the payment.
Three dates, and only one of them is payday
Ex date, record date, payment date. The record date decides who is paid. The ex date is the trading deadline that determines who is on the register by then. The payment date is when the money actually moves, and on the ASX it can be six weeks later.
Calendars and screeners overwhelmingly publish the ex date, because it is the one that affects trading, which means the date most widely circulated is not the date anybody is waiting for. The four dates have their own piece.
The reinvestment plan, and the deadline nobody diarises
The form says whether a reinvestment plan applies to this dividend, whether it is being offered at a discount, and the date by which an election has to be in. That cutoff is usually only a few days after the record date, and plan rules differ, so it is worth checking rather than assuming.
If you want to change what happens to this particular payment, that deadline is the whole window, and it closes weeks before the money would have arrived. It is also the field that answers why no cash turned up, for anyone who joined a plan years ago and has been quietly accumulating shares since.
The line about foreign profit
Some announcements carry a conduit foreign income component, which is the part of the payment sourced from profit the company earned and was taxed on overseas.
For present purposes the useful implication is narrow: that portion carries no franking, because no Australian tax was paid on it. How it lands on your own return is a question for the ATO or your accountant rather than for this paragraph.
What the form does not contain
No yield. No payout ratio. No comparison with last year. No opinion about whether any of it is sustainable.
Every one of those is something a person constructs afterwards, which is worth remembering the next time two websites hand you two different numbers for the same company. The announcement is the part everybody agrees on. Everything downstream of it is interpretation, and interpretation is where the disagreements come from.
You can find it on the company's own investor relations page, filed under announcements, on the day it was released. It is free, it is short, and it is the only version nobody has summarised for you.
Per security is the announcement's job. Per you is arithmetic
Every figure above is stated per share, for one company, on one date. Dividend Guardian does the other half: what your holdings pay across a whole year, which months it lands in, and which of your bills that covers. Start free, with no account and no broker login.
For A$6 a month or A$60 a year, Guardian keeps watching: every payment recorded per share, your income by company and by sector, and a note when a company confirms a change to what it pays. There's a 30 day money-back guarantee.
Build my Dividend PaycheckDividend Guardian provides information and estimates from public data, not personal financial advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, hold or sell anything. Form layouts and plan rules differ between companies and change over time, so treat this as a guide to what to look for rather than a specification, and read the actual announcement for anything you hold. Tax treatment depends on your own circumstances and belongs with the ATO or a registered tax agent. Guardian reports confirmed changes; it does not predict them.