# How to track foreign-currency dividends and the tax withheld from them

Every foreign dividend is three numbers and an exchange rate. Which trackers record withholding per holding, and why the rate you set is not the rate you paid.

*https://stockmarketstack.com/how-to/track-foreign-dividends-and-withholding · next to Dividend Trackers & Research*

**Answer:** Record each foreign dividend as three numbers and a rate — gross in the payer's currency, tax withheld at source, net received — and the exchange rate the broker actually used. Sharesight and Portfolio Performance store withholding per holding or per payment; Dividend Watch sets a rate per holding; DivvyDiary and Snowball Analytics apply one rate to estimate. What breaks is the rate: a lapsed W-8BEN means 30%, not the treaty 15%, and a reinvested dividend buys with the net.

## The tools that do this

*In the order this page recommends trying them. Paid placement does not affect this order.*

1. [Sharesight](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/sharesight.md) — Withholding rate set per holding, recalculated on every dividend; enter the home-currency amount received and it back-calculates the exchange rate.
2. [Portfolio Performance](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/portfolio-performance.md) — Free. Each dividend stores gross, tax, fees and the exchange rate itself, read from your bank's PDF statement or typed in.
3. [Dividend Watch](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/dividend-watch.md) — Withholding set per holding or per portfolio, currency return per transaction across 11 currencies. Reinvested dividends are Pro only.
4. [Digrin](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/digrin.md) — Marks each dividend as reinvested, or sets a rule for all future ones, and adds the shares. Tax figures are an estimate by currency.
5. [Snowball Analytics](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/snowball-analytics.md) — Withholding rates feed an after-tax yield and income forecast across 25-plus currencies. A forecast setting, not a record of tax paid.
6. [DivvyDiary](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/divvy-diary.md) — Net dividends from one personal rate plus an allowance, the German shape. Reclaims of foreign withholding go to a partner, not the app.

## The short way

A dividend from a company in another country is not one number. It is four, and a tracker that
keeps fewer than four will eventually disagree with your statement:

- **Gross** — what the company declared per share, times your shares, in its own currency.
- **Withholding** — tax deducted at source by the payer's side before anything reaches you.
- **Net** — what arrived, which is the only figure your cash balance knows about.
- **Exchange rate** — the rate your broker converted at, if it converted at all, with any margin
  inside it.

The broker's statement is the record of all four. A tracker's withholding *setting* is a forecast;
the statement's withholding *row* is the history. What the two kinds of figure mean, and why
yields computed from them differ, is under [withholding](https://stockmarketstack.com/glossary/dividend-withholding).

So:

1. **Set the rate per holding, not per portfolio**, in whatever tracker you use, because the rate
   depends on the issuer's country as well as yours, and one portfolio-wide percentage is wrong for
   every holding outside the country it was chosen for.
2. **Check one payment per country against the statement** each year. If the tracker's withholding
   differs from the statement's, the statement wins, and the setting needs changing.
3. **Record the amount received in your currency**, so the exchange rate in the tracker is the one
   your broker dealt at rather than a reference rate.

The general job of keeping one dividend ledger across brokers is
[tracking dividends across several brokers](https://stockmarketstack.com/how-to/track-dividends-across-brokers); this page is
the foreign half of it.

## What the options are

**Withholding as a per-holding rate, applied to each payment.** [Sharesight](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/sharesight)
applies a withholding rate per holding, overridable under the holding's settings, and recalculates
the tax withheld on its generated dividends when the rate changes. Its help notes that in an
Australian portfolio the default for US holdings is 15% on the assumption that a W-8BEN has been
completed, and 30% if not. It also warns that the dividend it shows for a foreign holding may be the
gross declared amount, higher than what reached your account; entering the exact home-currency
amount received makes it back-calculate the exchange rate. [Dividend Watch](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/dividend-watch)
sets withholding per holding or per portfolio, so a forward income figure can be net, and computes
currency return per transaction across 11 currencies.

**Withholding as a field on each payment.** [Portfolio Performance](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/portfolio-performance)
stores gross, tax, fees and the exchange rate on the dividend transaction itself, and its PDF
importer fills them from the statements of the banks it supports. Nothing is assumed; each payment
holds what the statement said. It is free, desktop only, and the import list is weighted to
German-speaking banks.

**Withholding as one assumption for the forecast.**
[Snowball Analytics](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/snowball-analytics) uses withholding rates to produce an after-tax
yield and income projection. [DivvyDiary](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/divvy-diary) computes net dividends from one
personal tax rate plus an annual allowance — the German shape — on its paid plan, and passes
reclaims of foreign withholding to a partner service rather than handling them in the app. Both are
honest about being estimates. Neither is a record of tax you paid.

**Reinvested dividends.** [Digrin](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/digrin) marks a dividend as reinvested, one at a time or
as a rule for all future payments, and adds the shares. Dividend Watch has the same marking on its
Pro plan only.

## Where this breaks

**The rate is a property of you, not of the stock.** For a non-US investor holding US shares, the
IRS starting point is that most US-source income paid to a foreign person is taxed at 30%, with a
reduced rate where a treaty between your country and the US provides one. The reduced rate is
claimed on Form W-8BEN, held by your broker. Two holders of the same stock can therefore have
different net dividends, and no shared database can store the right net figure for you.

**A W-8BEN expires on a calendar, not on an event.** The IRS instructions say the form generally
stays in effect until the last day of the third calendar year after the one in which it was signed,
unless something on it becomes incorrect first. When it lapses, the withholding agent may have to
withhold at 30% until a new one is filed. Your tracker, still set to the treaty rate, keeps
reporting the lower figure. The first symptom is a statement that disagrees with the tracker on
every US payment from the same date — which is why step 2 is a yearly check rather than a one-off.

**Withheld is not the same as owed.** In the other direction — a US filer holding shares of
companies abroad — IRS Publication 514 notes that some treaty countries withhold at their full
rate and expect you to claim the treaty reduction back as a refund. For the US foreign tax credit,
the qualifying amount is the tax at the lower treaty rate, not what was taken, because the excess
is refundable. A tracker that books the whole deduction as tax paid is recording the deduction
correctly and the creditable amount wrongly. Reclaiming the excess is a filing in the other
country, which is why DivvyDiary hands it to a partner.

**A reinvested foreign dividend buys with the net.** In a dividend reinvestment plan the shares are
bought with what is left after withholding, at the share price in the stock's currency on the
reinvestment date. A tracker that sizes the reinvestment from the gross buys too many shares, and
every later dividend generated from that share count is too large by the same fraction. And if
the reinvested shares are not recorded at all, Sharesight's own help points out, the share count
is understated and every later dividend looks wrong. The reinvestment is also a purchase, at its
own price and exchange rate, so it adds a lot with a cost of its own.

**Exchange rates disagree by small amounts, every time.** A dividend converted by your broker was
converted at the broker's rate, margin included. A tracker valuing it at a reference rate for the
day — Portfolio Performance loads the European Central Bank's, for instance — will be a little off
on every payment, which totals to a visible gap over a year. Record the rate the statement shows on
the income, and let the reference rate value the holdings.

**Withholding often arrives as its own row.** Some brokers' statements put withholding in a
separate section with its own date. An importer that reads only the dividend lines records the
gross as cash received; one that reads the tax rows as fees puts them in the wrong total. Check one
imported payment against the statement before trusting the year.

## If you outgrow this

**When the figure goes on a return**, the broker's year-end tax documents are the record the tax
authority compares against, not the tracker's income total. Among the cards here only Sharesight
produces filing-shaped reports, and only for Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

**When the question is forward income rather than past income**, the per-holding rate is a fine
assumption; that is what Dividend Watch and Snowball Analytics are built around.

This page describes how withholding is recorded, not what rate applies to you. That is a question
for the tax authority's own material, or for somebody paid to answer it.

The rest of the category is [dividend trackers](https://stockmarketstack.com/categories/dividend-trackers).

## FAQ

### My tracker says 15% was withheld on a US dividend, but my broker took 30%. Which is right?

The broker's statement is the record of what was taken. A tracker applies the rate you or it set; the broker applies the rate its paperwork supports. The usual gap is a Form W-8BEN that has expired or was never filed — the IRS says one generally lapses at the end of the third calendar year after it was signed, and without it the withholding agent may have to withhold at 30%.

### Should I record dividends in the stock's currency or in my own?

Both, in the same row. The gross and the tax are set in the payer's currency; what reached your account is in whichever currency your broker credited, at the rate it dealt at. A tracker that stores only a home-currency figure converted at its own reference rate will disagree with your statement slightly on every payment. Sharesight lets you enter the amount actually received and back-calculates the rate; Portfolio Performance stores the rate on the transaction.

### Is everything withheld abroad tax I have paid?

Not necessarily, and the difference matters if you claim a credit for it. IRS Publication 514 says that where a treaty country withholds at its full rate and makes you claim the treaty reduction back as a refund, the creditable foreign tax for a US filer is the amount at the lower treaty rate, not the amount actually withheld, because the excess is refundable. A tracker records what was deducted; it does not split that into creditable and reclaimable.

## Sources

1. [NRA withholding](https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/nra-withholding) — Internal Revenue Service, read 2026-10-07
2. [Instructions for Form W-8BEN (Rev. October 2021)](https://www.irs.gov/instructions/iw8ben) — Internal Revenue Service, 2021-10-01. The October 2021 revision was still the one the IRS published as current on 7 October 2026.
3. [Publication 514 (2025), Foreign Tax Credit for Individuals](https://www.irs.gov/publications/p514) — Internal Revenue Service, read 2026-10-07
4. [Foreign withholding tax — Sharesight Help](https://help.sharesight.com/foreign-withholding-tax/) — Sharesight, 2026-08-25
5. [Why does my dividend look incorrect? — Sharesight Help](https://help.sharesight.com/why-does-my-dividend-look-incorrect/) — Sharesight, 2026-06-29
6. [Dividend — Portfolio Performance Manual](https://help.portfolio-performance.info/en/reference/transaction/dividend/) — Portfolio Performance, 2026-03-21

*Last updated 2026-10-07. A reference page, corrected in place — not a dated post.*