Dividend Income – February 2026 Update

Welcome to another monthly dividend update! I enjoy writing these monthly updates and providing readers with insights into our dividend growth investing journey. The reason for writing these monthly dividend updates is to keep myself accountable and demonstrate that it is possible to build up a sizable portfolio that generates sufficient dividend income to live off.

Life-wise, February was a relatively quiet month. 

I had a quick three-day trip to San Francisco and San Jose for work. The trip came the day after the Super Bowl, and as it turned out, I happened to stay at the same hotel the New England Patriots stayed at (Marriott Santa Clara). Unfortunately, I didn’t run into any Patriot players and from what I heard, the mood after the game wasn’t all that great. Who can blame them, right?

With the Winter Olympics on in February, we also spent a lot of time watching the Games. Our cat was always keen to join and watch the games with us.

Outside of hockey and curling, I particularly enjoyed watching snowboard cross (so exciting!) and speed skating. I was blown away by how quickly the athletes were at cross-country skiing and mountaineering competitions. 

Both kids participated in a homeschoolers’ event, where they researched and presented on a country of their choice. Both kids decided to do Singapore and did a great job.

Dividend Income – February 2026 

Back to dividend income. In February, we received dividend paycheques from the following companies:

• Apple (AAPL)
• AbbVie (ABBV)
• Bank of Montreal (BMO.TO)
• Costco (COST)
• Emera (EMA.TO)
• Granite REIT (GRT.UN)
• National Bank (NA.TO)
• Royal Bank (RY.TO)
• SmartCentre REIT (SRU.UN)

These nine paycheques totalled $4,087.42.

Considering February is one of the low dividend income months for us, I was quite pleased that we collected more than $4,000 (we never reached this level in the weaker months last year).

Compared to February 2025, we saw a YoY growth of 21.43%! Wow, that’s fantastic growth and honestly surprised me a little bit. The YoY growth was mostly due to the large Royal Bank purchases we made in January (unfortunately, at the time of writing, these RY buys are down, but I’m not too worried about the short-term share price fluctuation). 

For those readers interested in our entire dividend income history, I recently created a dividend income history page. I linked all of our monthly dividend updates on this page and created some interesting looking charts and tables. Please take a look and let me know what you think. 

Dividend Hikes

It’s important to grow our dividend income organically. To do that, we rely on companies raising their dividend payouts. Since we have no control over whether a company raises dividend payout or not, we are always overjoyed whenever there’s a dividend hike announcement. 

The following companies announced dividend hikes in February:

• Brookfield Asset Management increased its dividend payout by 14.9% to $0.5025 per share
• Intact Financial increased its dividend payout by 10.5% to $1.47 per share
• Manulife Financial increased its dividend payout by 10.2% to $0.485 per share
• Brookfield Corporation increased its dividend payout by 16.7% to $0.07 per share
• TC Energy Corp increased its dividend payout by 3.2% to $0.8775 per share
• Walmart increased its dividend payout by 5.3% to $0.2475 per share

These six dividend hikes increased our forward annual dividend by $636.76. At a 4% dividend yield, that’s equivalent to adding $15,919.03 worth of new cash. This is why organic dividend growth is so important!

Dividend Reinvestment Plans 

We are currently enrolled in DRIP in all of our accounts. Thanks to fractional DRIP at Wealthsimple and TD, we are able to add fractional shares at each dividend payout. Questrade isn’t supporting fractional DRIP yet, so only full shares are dripped. We then let the remaining dividends accumulate and purchase more shares at a later date with our Questrade accounts. 

• Sign up for Wealthsimple using my referral code and get a $25 referral bonus. 
• Sign up for Questrade using my referral code and get a referral bonus up to $250. 

In February, we dripped the following shares:

• 0.3132 shares of AAPL
• 0.5758 shares of ABBV
• 3 shares of BMO.TO
• 0.0495 shares of COST
• 5.1761 shares of EMA.TO
• 0.4486 shares of GRT.UN
• 6.1643 shares of NA.TO
• 4.9384 shares of RY.TO
• 6 shares of SRU.UN

In total, 26.6659 shares were dripped and $3,632.57 out of the $4,087.42 was reinvested right away. In other words, we had a DRIP ratio of 88.9% for February.

By enrolling in DRIP and adding more shares automatically, we increased our forward annual dividend by $228.27. 

Stock Transactions

Despite a busy December and January when we added almost $200k worth of stock (note, not all of that money is new capital), we decided to continue buying in February to take advantage of the somewhat volatile market.

So throughout February, we purchased the following:

• 134.7867 shares of Brookfield Asset Management (BAM.TO)
• 16 shares of Brookfield Corporation (BN.TO)
• 6 shares of iShares MSCI World Ex-Canada ETF (XAW.TO)

Just over $10k was deployed and this increased our forward dividend income by $279.74

As you could see from purchases in the last few months, we have been busy adding BAM. We like the business and the management and believe the current share price and dividend yield are attractive. The purchases of BAM meant the stock has quickly risen in its weighting of our dividend portfolio. We may buy more of BAM later if the share price stays below $65 but we may start shifting our attention over to BN if BN’s share price stays below $60.   

As mentioned in the five dividend stocks we plan to purchase in 2026 post, we plan to buy more BN and XAW. We will also consider adding the other three stocks, Alphabet, Capital Power Corp, and Canadian Natural Resources. 

Dividend Scorecard – February 2026

Here’s our dividend scorecard for February 2026. Overall, a very solid month despite the weaker monthly dividend income. I was very pleased with how much forward annual dividends we added via dividend hikes.

Summary – Dividend Income February 2026

After two months in 2026, we have collected $13,560.23 in dividend income already. It’s pretty mindblowing considering we already exceeded the total annual dividend income we received ten years ago, back in 2016. We certainly have come a long way!

This just reinforces that the dividend growth investing strategy works – you just need to be patient about it and let your portfolio and dividend income compound and grow. 

At $13,560.23 in dividend income after two months, this is equivalent to:

• $229.83 per week or $9.58 per hour, regardless of what we are doing
• $1,506.69 per working week, or $37.67 hour wage that our dividend portfolio is generating for us

Having our money working hard for us so we don’t have to is simply amazing. We feel blessed and really appreciate that we are doing well financially. At the same time, this is why I truly believe in giving back – continue to write on this blog, continue to record DIY Wealth Canada Podcast episodes, volunteer my time, and donate to local charities.

Thank you for reading and I hope you had a great February dividend income too!