There is no one number that represents the correct number of days to your question.
- Dividend payouts are based upon stock ownership as of the ‘record’ date.
- While dividends are usually paid quarterly, this may not always be the case.
- Some companies pay no dividends
With that said, let’s take a look at Apple. They pay dividends on a quarterly basis.
I’ve highlighted the record date in the table below.
So, if we take a look at the first record date, you’ll see February 13, 2017. That basically means if you owned the stock (i.e. were a holder of record) on that date, you’d receive a dividend of $.57 per share on the ‘payable’ date (which happens to be February 16, 2017, in this particular case). Assuming you bought the stock the day before the ex-dividend date, the answer to your question is that you’d probably be waiting only a few days.
However, let’s say you bought the stock on November 8, 2016. You would have ‘just missed’ the last quarterly dividend record date by one day and would have had to wait 97 days to receive that same February dividend.
As you can see, if it is dividends you’re interested in, the pattern for determining the record date is pretty easy to predict. With this knowledge, you can determine how long you’ll have to wait to receive your next dividend.
