Ex-dividend date

How it works

A cash dividend carries four dates, and data vendors, brokers and trackers each key it to a different one.

• Declaration — the board announces the amount and the other dates.
• Record date — the date you must be on the company's books as a shareholder to be paid. The company sets it.
• Ex-dividend date — the first trading day on which a buyer does not get that dividend. The company does not set it; per the SEC's Investor.gov, it is set from the record date under stock exchange rules, and for over-the-counter trading FINRA Rule 11140 is that rule.
• Payment date — when the cash is paid, usually some weeks later.

The ex-date follows from settlement. To be on the books on the record date a trade must have settled by then. The SEC adopted T+1 on 15 February 2023 with a compliance date of 28 May 2024, and FINRA amended Rule 11140 for the same day: for distributions under 25% of the security's value, received in time, the ex-dividend date is the record date when that is a business day, or the business day before when the record date is a non-delivery date. A buyer on the record date settles the next day, too late. Under the two-day cycle the same arithmetic put the ex-date one business day before the record date, which is the relationship most older explanations still describe.

Large distributions run the other way. For cash dividends, stock dividends and splits of 25% or more of the security's value, the rule sets the ex-date at the first business day after the payable date. Investor.gov's own example has a record date of Monday 16 March 2026 and payment on the 17th, which puts the ex-date for a 25% distribution on Wednesday the 18th. It also explains the mechanism: anyone selling in the gap is paid the distribution but owes it to the buyer through a due bill from their broker.

The price moves on the ex-date. Investor.gov puts it plainly: with a significant dividend the price of a stock may fall by that amount on the ex-dividend date. That drop is in every raw price series and is not a loss to a holder, who is owed the cash. An adjusted series removes it by scaling every price before the ex-date — the dividend factor, conventionally 1 − D/P with P the previous close, covered in why two providers give different returns. Splits are adjusted the same way and on the same kind of date, which is why a corporate action table is keyed by ex-date.

Why it matters here

The ex-date is the date prices react to and the date every vendor's adjustment is applied at; the payment date is when a broker's ledger moves. Mixing the two is the commonest source of a dividend that looks wrong.

In market data APIs, what changes is whether the series in front of you has already been adjusted at each ex-date. Per the free tiers comparison, yfinance adjusts for dividends by default and Massive's aggregates adjust only for splits, so every bar before an ex-date sits lower in one than the other; stitching the two together puts that gap into the history. If you want the events themselves, with ex, record and pay dates as separate columns, that is how to get split and dividend history as data.

In portfolio trackers, the question is which date income is booked on. Delta adds dividends on their ex-dividend dates, switchable per portfolio, while a broker records the cash when it is paid, so a month or quarter that ends between the two dates will not reconcile — the mechanism is in why your tracker and broker disagree. Stock Events is picked for a calendar that carries upcoming ex-dates and payments side by side.

In options analytics, the expected drop on the ex-date is part of what an option's price reflects. OptionStrat shows scheduled ex-dividend dates on its chart but, per its card, does not include them in its pricing calculation; Option Samurai offers them among its screening filters. Which of the two a tool does is worth knowing before reading a theoretical price for an expiry that straddles one.