The fund is a wrapper. The engine is the companies inside.
SCHD — the Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF — holds roughly 100 U.S. dividend payers. When people share the fund's ever-rising per-share dividend, they're really watching one thing: the businesses inside SCHD raising their own dividends, year after year.
That's the whole engine. And it runs at very different speeds depending on which company you look at. This piece opens the hood.
First, the fund itself, at a glance.
Performance and yield figures are historical and may change. Total return includes price movement and distributions where available. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Yield is not the same as total return.
| Metric | SCHD |
| Price | $33.70 |
| 52-week range | $26.32 – $34.24 |
| Expense ratio | 0.06% |
| AUM | $105.7B |
| Trailing yield | 3.11% |
| Morningstar | 3 / 5 |
| Category | Large Value |
At 0.06%, SCHD is about as cheap as a strategy ETF gets — $6 a year on every $10,000. That's the low-cost foundation everything below sits on.
The income, in real numbers
SCHD's latest declared distribution was $0.2525 per share, paid quarterly (declared 2026-06-24). At four payouts a year against the current $33.70 price, that's an annualized run-rate of 3.00%.
Over the trailing twelve months, SCHD paid $1.0480 per share in total distributions — a TTM distribution yield of 3.11%. That's the headline income number: a little over $1 per share per year, roughly $1,048 on 1,000 shares.
Distributions vary quarter to quarter. SCHD pays out what its holdings pay it, so the exact per-share figure moves with the underlying dividends and the fund's rebalancing — the numbers above are the latest actuals, not a fixed contract.
Yield-on-cost: why the payout grows
Here's the mechanic that makes a dividend-growth fund different from a flat high-yielder. If a company raises its dividend 12% a year, an investor who bought years ago earns more each year on their original cost — even though the stated yield on today's price barely moves. That's yield-on-cost, and it's driven entirely by the companies compounding their payouts.
SCHD's blended per-share dividend has climbed for the same reason. But the growth rate is not uniform across the fund. Not close.
The growth stars: income that more than doubled
Three of SCHD's largest holdings grew their per-share dividends at double-digit annual rates from 2018 to 2025. An owner of these names saw the income per share more than double in seven years.
