Seven reasons your dividend was smaller than the number you calculated
You owned it on the wrong day, held fewer shares then than now, compared an interim with a final, or multiplied by a yield with a one-off inside it. Seven ordinary explanations before the one where it was actually cut.
The money arrives and it is not the money you were expecting. You did the multiplication. You know how many shares you own. The figure in the account is smaller, or late, or absent. This happens constantly and almost never because anything went wrong, which is the frustrating part: there is nobody to ring.
Seven ordinary explanations, in roughly the order they turn out to be the answer.
| What happened | Where to check |
|---|---|
| You bought after the ex-date | Your trade date against the ex-date |
| You held fewer shares then | Your holding on the record date |
| A DRP took it | The registry statement |
| You compared an interim with a final | The same half a year earlier |
| Your yield had a one-off in it | The ordinary dividend per share |
| You counted the franking credit | The cash line on the dividend statement |
| Tax was withheld overseas | Your broker's statement and W-8BEN date |
1. You owned it on the wrong day
Dividends are not paid to whoever holds the share when the money moves. They are paid to whoever held it on the record date, which is weeks earlier. Buy after the ex-dividend date and the payment goes to the person you bought from, who may well have sold to you precisely because they had already banked it.
The gap runs long enough on the ASX that people forget which side of it they were on. Four dates hang off every dividend and only one of them is payday.
2. You held fewer shares then than you hold now
The register counts what you held on the record date. If you have added to the position since, and most people add in pieces, then the payment was calculated on the smaller parcel and your multiplication used the larger one.
This is the most invisible item on the list, because the number you multiplied by is the number sitting in front of you in your broker account today, and it is correct. It is just not the number that was true on the day that mattered.
3. The reinvestment plan took it
No cash arrived because none was ever going to. The payment was converted into shares by a plan you joined once and have not thought about since.
Worth knowing rather than merely noticing: it is still assessable income in the year it was paid, even though no money reached you, and it has quietly changed your share count for every calculation you do from here on.
4. You compared an interim with a final
Australian companies typically pay twice a year and the two halves are frequently not the same size. A final is often the larger of the pair, because it is declared once the full year is known.
So comparing this year's interim against last year's final produces a fall that looks like a cut, when it is the same company doing the same thing on the same schedule. Compare interim with interim, and final with final, or you will discover a great many cuts that never happened.
5. You multiplied by a yield, and the yield had a one-off in it
A yield is built from the last twelve months of payments. If any of those was a special dividend, the percentage you multiplied by describes a year that included something not coming back.
Multiply your holding by the ordinary dividend per share instead, which is a fact about the next payment rather than an average of the last four. One-offs are also why two websites quote you two different yields.
6. Franking is not cash
This one catches people who have done more homework than average, which is a particular kind of unfair.
A A$100 fully franked dividend pays you A$100. The franking credit of about A$42.86 is settled against your tax when you lodge, and for many people it comes back later as a refund. So the grossed up figure of A$142.86 is real and it is genuinely worth having. It is simply not what lands in the account in March.
7. It came from overseas, and something was taken first
A foreign dividend has tax withheld before it leaves the country, and is then converted at whatever the rate happened to be on the day.
For a US payment that is 15% if the right form is lodged and 30% if it is not, so the arithmetic is out by a sixth or by a third before currency has had its turn. Both of those are worth checking once, properly.
And then there is the eighth
Sometimes it really was cut, and it is worth arriving at that possibility last rather than first, because seven mechanical explanations are more likely and they are all cheaper to check.
But if the first seven do not account for it, the reduction is real, and a real cut is a decision that was taken and disclosed somewhere before it reached you. Usually in the least quotable sentence available.
One of these is a limit we refuse to paper over
Dividend Guardian shows what a company actually paid per share on each date, and what that would come to on the holding you have recorded today. It deliberately stops short of telling you what you received, because it does not know how many shares you held on a payment date years ago, and inventing that number is exactly reason two on this list. What it does do is show what your holdings pay across a year and the months it lands in. 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. The franking figures are arithmetic on a round number rather than a real payment. Withholding rates, franking and how any of this lands on your return depend on your own circumstances, so confirm them with the ATO, a registered tax agent or your broker. Guardian reports confirmed changes; it does not predict them.