DRIP calculator

Currency

Amount invested

Dividend yield

Dividend growth a year

Share price growth a year

Years

years

Worth after 25 years

$447,901

$169,318 if the dividends were taken as cash

Shares2.65x

Income by then$19,868

Reinvesting adds$176,810

The same holding with dividends reinvested, against the dashed line where they are taken as cash. The gap widens because the share count is compounding as well as the price.

Reinvesting the dividends on $50,000 at a 3.50% yield for 25 years ends at $447,901, holding 2.65 times the shares you started with. Taking the dividends as cash instead leaves $169,318 invested plus $101,774 collected, so reinvestment is worth $176,810.

How to use this, and the parts people get wrong

DRIP means each payout buys more shares automatically, so the share count climbs every period.
The gap between the two lines is reinvestment alone - same holding, same yield, no extra cash added.
Reinvested dividends are still taxed in most countries. Reinvesting defers nothing.

Where the extra comes from

After 25 years the holding is 2.65 times the shares it started with, each worth 3.39 times the original price. The income is $19,868 a year, against $7,511 if nothing had been reinvested.

2.65xthe shares you started with

$19,868of income a year by then

$176,810more than taking the cash

Year by year

What the holding is worth, how many shares it owns, and what it pays by then.

Year	Value	Shares	Income
1	$54,355	1.04x	$1,921
5	$76,163	1.19x	$2,795
10	$116,997	1.44x	$4,502
15	$181,317	1.74x	$7,316
20	$283,604	2.14x	$11,998
25	$447,901	2.65x	$19,868
30	$714,570	3.31x	$33,236
40	$1,878,319	5.34x	$96,051

Questions people ask

What is a DRIP?

A dividend reinvestment plan: instead of paying the dividend out as cash, it buys more shares of the same holding. Those shares then pay dividends of their own, so the share count compounds alongside the price.

How much difference does reinvesting make?

On these figures, $447,901 over 25 years against $169,318 if the dividends were taken as cash and spent - and $101,774 of that cash would have been collected along the way, so reinvesting is worth $176,810 net.

Why does income grow faster than the dividend?

Because two things are growing at once. The dividend per share rises with the company, and the number of shares rises with every reinvestment. After 25 years the holding owns 2.65 times the shares it started with, each paying a larger dividend than it did.

Are reinvested dividends taxed?

In most places yes, in the year they are paid, even though no cash reached you. That is the practical catch with a DRIP in a taxable account and the reason to hold one inside a tax-sheltered wrapper where the option exists. Tax rules are national and are not applied on this page.

What price growth should I assume?

A modest one. The projection multiplies price growth by dividend growth by the reinvestment, so an optimistic price assumption compounds three ways and the ending figure moves a great deal. Try a low number and a high one rather than trusting a single decimal.

Method and sources

Standard compound-growth arithmeticShare count and price compounded separately, year by year

The calculation

Each year the share price grows by your price rate and the dividend per share by your dividend rate. The income that year is the share count times the dividend per share, and reinvesting buys income divided by price in new shares. Share count is tracked as a multiple of the starting count, so no share price is needed - it cancels out of every ratio the page prints. The cash comparison runs the identical projection with the reinvestment step removed.

What these figures do not cover

Dividends are assumed paid and reinvested once a year at the year-end price. Quarterly reinvestment at varying prices ends slightly higher.
Growth rates are held constant, which no real holding does.
Tax is not applied. Reinvested dividends are still taxable in most places in the year they are paid.
Dealing costs and fractional-share rules are ignored; both eat a little of each reinvestment in a real plan.

Last updated August 2026.

Tesseract Stock Agent is a professional-grade AI research agent built to analyze stocks the way an equity desk does: deep fundamentals, real filings, evidence over noise. Whether a dividend survives twenty-five years of reinvestment is exactly its kind of question.

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