DEGIRO dividend overview: your dividend forecast (PADI) explained

DEGIRO only shows dividends received, not a forecast; PADI (Projected Annual Dividend Income) is the run-rate of your current positions at the last known dividend rate over a full year, and differs from Yield on Cost (dividend ÷ your purchase price) versus Current Yield (dividend ÷ current price) — 4.0% versus 2.9% in this article's worked example.

What DEGIRO does and doesn’t show

DEGIRO shows, per position and per year, how much dividend you’ve received. That’s useful as a look back, but it doesn’t answer the question most dividend investors actually care about: how much dividend can I expect over the next 12 months, given my current portfolio? For that you need a projection, not a historical overview.

What is PADI (Projected Annual Dividend Income)?

PADI is the sum of the dividend you’d receive if you held your current positions, at the last known dividend rate per share, for a full year. So it’s not a prediction of the future in the sense of “how much will this company pay out” — it’s a run rate: what your portfolio as it stands today yields, extrapolated to 12 months.

Two things affect that number that a simple sum of “dividend this year” misses:

• Purchase and sale timing. Buy a stock in March that pays a quarterly dividend, and you’ve only received 2-3 payouts this calendar year — but your PADI counts all 4, because that’s what you can expect over the coming year if your positions stay unchanged.
• Dividend changes. If a company raises or cuts its dividend, PADI counts the newest known amount, not the average of past payouts. The same goes for a one-off “special dividend”: that kind of payout artificially inflates your run-rate for the coming year, even though the company has no structural intention of repeating it.

Note: PADI is usually calculated on the gross dividend per share. For US stocks, the US withholds 15% withholding tax by default, so your net receipt in your DEGIRO account is structurally lower than your gross forecast suggests.

Yield on Cost vs. Current Yield: two very different numbers

We often see investors proudly share their Yield on Cost as if it were an achievement — mostly it just says something about how long ago you got in, not about how good the stock is now. Alongside PADI, there are two dividend yield percentages that are often used interchangeably, even though they say different things:

• Current Yield = annual dividend per share ÷ current price. This tells you how attractive the dividend yield is at today’s price — relevant if you were buying in now.
• Yield on Cost (YoC) = annual dividend per share ÷ your original purchase price. This tells you the return on what you originally paid.

An example: you bought a stock three years ago for €40. The dividend has since grown from €1.00 to €1.60 per year, and the price now stands at €55.

• Current Yield: 1.60 ÷ 55 = 2.9%
• Yield on Cost: 1.60 ÷ 40 = 4.0%

Both are correct — they just answer different questions. YoC shows that dividend growth can significantly boost your effective return on your own contribution; Current Yield is the fair benchmark if you’d buy (more) today. Yield on Cost is a nice number to show off, but it says nothing about whether it’s still smart to keep holding — for that you look at Current Yield and what you could get elsewhere.

Why this is more than bookkeeping

The difference between “dividend received” and a true PADI projection is exactly why loose spreadsheets and CSV overviews are often misleading here: they add up what has happened, not what you can structurally expect. Bookkeeping looks backward. Planning looks forward. For anyone living off or planning around dividend income — for example as a supplement to a pension — that’s a meaningful difference.

Which portfolio trackers have a dividend forecast, and in which plan, is shown in the comparison of DEGIRO portfolio trackers.

How ClearAnalyser calculates this for you

ClearAnalyser calculates your PADI live from your actual DEGIRO positions, and shows both Yield on Cost and Current Yield side by side per position — including the historical dividend growth (1-, 3- and 5-year) needed to see whether a dividend is structurally growing or standing still.

Sources: DEGIRO · IRS — withholding tax on US dividends