VOO Dividend Yield: Current Rate, History and Pay Dates

The VOO dividend yield sits at about 1.07% on a trailing twelve-month basis as of early July 2026: $7.35 per share paid out over the past year against a share price of around $685. Distributions arrive quarterly, going ex-dividend in the final days of March, June, September and December. Every figure on this page was verified against Vanguard and StockAnalysis data in early July 2026, and the yield itself moves daily with the share price, so treat it as a dated snapshot rather than a fixed rate.

That 1.07% is low by almost any historical standard, and the fund is not malfunctioning. The S&P 500 itself yielded about 1.05% on 2 July 2026, near the lowest reading in a series stretching back to 1871, against a long-run mean of 4.21%. For most of the past two decades the index has sat between roughly 1% and 2.5%. Two forces did the compressing: prices have risen far faster than payouts, and US companies now return a large share of cash through buybacks, which lift the share price instead of the dividend cheque. A fund tracking that index inherits that yield; there is nothing Vanguard can do about it, and at a 0.03% expense ratio it skims less off the income than almost any rival.

Which is why judging VOO by its yield misreads what the fund is for. An S&P 500 fund is a claim on the total return of the 500 largest US companies: price growth plus dividends, with the dividend as the small residual. On Vanguard's own data the fund returned about 15.5% a year over the decade to 30 June 2026, and past performance does not guarantee future results, but the dividend contributed only around a percentage point of that in recent years. Anyone picking VOO for the income is holding the right fund for the wrong reason, and anyone rejecting it because 1.07% looks stingy is measuring a growth engine with an income ruler. Our dividend investing explainer covers the income-first approach properly, and is yield on cost useful? tackles the metric people reach for when a low starting yield starts to grate.

If you are weighing S&P 500 funds against each other, VOO vs SPY covers why the yields differ slightly on the same index, and VTI vs VOO covers the total-market alternative. For the vocabulary underneath it all, index funds vs mutual funds vs ETFs untangles strategy from wrapper. The rest of our US-focused coverage lives at /us/articles. This page is general information, not personal investment advice: distributions are not guaranteed and the value of the fund can fall as well as rise.