What Is Dividend Yield? How to Calculate It
Dividend yield tells you how much income a stock pays relative to its price. It turns a rupee dividend into a comparable percentage, so you can line up stocks of very different prices.
The formula
Dividend yield = annual dividend per share ÷ current share price × 100. A ₹8 annual dividend on a ₹200 share is a 4% yield. Because price is in the denominator, yield rises when the price falls (and vice versa) even if the dividend itself hasn't changed.
High vs low yield
There's no universal "good" yield — it varies by sector and company maturity. Steady, cash-generating businesses (utilities, some PSUs) tend to yield more; high-growth companies reinvest and yield little. A yield that looks unusually high is often a red flag: the price may have crashed because the market expects the dividend to be cut.
Yield vs total return
Dividend yield is only part of your return — the other part is capital appreciation (the price going up). A low-yield growth stock can still beat a high-yield stock on total return. Treat yield as one input, not the whole story.
Finding it
Dividend yield appears among the ratios on each stock page. The underlying payouts come from the corporate-actions history, and you can read the concept of a dividend itself in our dividend guide.