Best Free Dividend Stock Screeners

Why Use a Screener for Stocks?

Using a screener to find stocks can make it easier for an investor to narrow down prospective investments. In this post, I list some of the best free dividend stock screeners I could find online with useful features. Screeners can filter out stocks or ETFs that don’t align with specific ratios or other benchmarks.

Using a screener can help make finding new investments faster and more efficient. I can use a stock screener to filter companies in a specific industry or sector. Other filters include market cap, dividend yield percentage, and many more, depending on the website. Below lists the ones I found on the web that offer dividend-focused filters.

Some websites on the list only have one or two screening filters for dividend investing, but they are still good tools for finding prospective investments. It could be helpful to narrow down which industry and ratios to target before screening stocks.

MarkBeat

The first one on the list is MarketBeat, one of the online stock screener tools I found that is specific to dividend investing. Let’s begin with which filters the screener has included on the website.

Market Cap

Market cap stands for market capitalization and can be used for filtering stocks at a specific market cap size. For example, this filter can be used for an investor who wants to find a company with a market cap of more than $200B.

Dividend Yield

One of the more popular ratios in dividend investing is the dividend yield, and this screener has the feature of narrowing down by yield percentage (1%, 2%, 3%, and so on).

Sector

An effective way to narrow down a list of stocks or ETFs is to pick a specific sector that has potential or is one that an investor wants to target. This dividend screener has dozens of sectors to go through and find.

Industry

The website also has plenty of industries to go through. For example, on the list, there were “Broadcasting,” “Educational Services,” and “Computer Systems.” So I could narrow down to particular niches to find companies trading on the market.

3-year dividend growth

The 3-year dividend growth was another great filter I could use to find companies with high dividend growth. The filter allows you to go up to 10%, but I was able to put “Any Growth” also. 

Consecutive Years of Dividend Growth

This filter is one of my favorites because it shows the consistency of dividend growth for specific countries filtered by years. The list goes up to “at least 50 years” of consecutive dividend growth.

And many more.

There are a few more filters to check out on this dividend screener, and for someone like me who likes dividend growth investing, this was a great website to use. 

Check out MarkBeat’s Screener

Yahoo Finance Screener

The next on the list is Yahoo Finance’s screener, which is helpful, but it just has a few dividend-focused filters. This screener is great because I can screen stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, and more. Let’s go through some of the helpful filters in the screener.

Region

You can filter stocks by one country or multiple countries.

Market Cap

Like above, investors can filter by market cap, and Yahoo Finance has it broken down from small-cap up to mega-cap.

Sector and Industry

Same as above, I was able to filter by sector and industry.

Forward Dividend Yield and Forward Dividend Rate 

Two other dividend-focused filters on the screener could be helpful.

Consecutive Years of Dividend Growth 

Once again, one of my favorite features of stock screeners is to have the ability to find companies that grow dividends. 

There are also many more filters to use on this screener; some require a Yahoo Finance Plus membership, but the ones listed above are free as of now. One of the beneficial features that stood out to me was the ability to save the screener list to refer back to later. 

Side Note: I wanted to mention that Yahoo Finance’s screener has an excellent user interface and is very easy to use on the desktop. I was also able to add multiple filters in the same section, which can help avoid having to make another list.

Check out Yahoo Finance’s Screener

finviz

The last one on this list is finviz which has numerous features on the website for investors, and it has a helpful stock screener that is different from the others. Another side note: You can also see news from all over the web on the website about the stock market and economy.

This screener has dozens of filters, but I noticed two that stood out for dividend investing. One was Dividend Yield, and the other was payout ratio. There were other filters on the list broken down into sections like “Fundamental,” “Technical,” and “Descriptive.”

I won’t list all the other filters because most aren’t dividend investing focused, but it could be more efficient for finding companies that fit specific criteria. Some of the custom features require the elite membership on finviz, but the free features are still very effective for screening stocks.

Check out finviz’s Screener

Conclusion

All three screeners have different features, some of which are the same, like sector, industry, and market cap. The user interface on Yahoo Finance’s screener is easy to use, while MarketBeat has the most dividend filters on this list. Checking out all three can be valuable to help find that specific stock or (ETF, which can be filtered on Yahoo Finance). 

Using stock screeners can be very helpful and make the process of finding new stocks to invest in go much faster. Some stock screeners can be very expensive on the market and hard to find. The ones on this list are free as of 2022, so it is easier to find stocks at a lower cost, leaving more money that can be used for investing. They have options to buy memberships for more custom features, but the free versions can help narrow down a huge list to something much smaller.

Check out this article if you want to read more about Dividend Investing and passive income.