Today is exciting as we get to update our monthly list of the top dividend stocks in the S&P500. It’s always a great post not only because of the list itself but also because of the fact that we start from that list when looking for high quality dividend stocks that help us build a passive income portfolio. Every month, we do additional research on specific names both on the blog and in our free newsletter.

If you are interested in finding out what our top dividend stock picks are, simply join our mailing list… It’s free! Next week I will take a deeper look into the top picks from that analysis.

What to look for

Over the past few months, we have looked at quite a few criteria that have helped us find the best dividend stocks including current yield, dividend growth and also companies that produce solid enough earnings to keep up the dividend payments. We summed it all up when we discussed the 20 things that we look for in dividend stocks.

FTR remains once more at the top of our list although it continues to pay out much more than what it makes making its 9% dividend yield unsustainable for now. One change that we’ve added this month is that the names we have researched recently on the blog are now links in the table as you will be able to see. You will probably notice that most of the top names were not researched. That is usually for one off two reasons:

1-The stock’s fundamentals are not strong enough to come out of our filters
2-Stocks like FTR were researched in our newsletter instead

This month, we will be taking a deeper look into energy companies that seem to be forming many of the top dividend payers this month.

Hopefully this will help you when building your passive dividend portfolio.

We will be filtering out the top 100 list to find the ones that fit all of these criteria! In the meantime, here is the list!