10-year Treasury yield tops dividend yields at 118 large U.S. companies

S. Treasury bond now pays more income than 118 of America’s biggest companies. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL ), Nvidia Corp.

(NASDAQ: NVDA ), Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL ) and Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ: AVGO ) are all on that list. Nvidia makes the point fastest.

46%. 7%. That is more than ten times the cash return, from the federal government, with no earnings risk attached. Nvidia is not the outlier.

It is the norm. 85% Of The S&P 500 Still Beats A Government Bond A dividend yield is simply the annual cash a company pays out divided by its share price. If a $100 stock pays $2 a year, the yield is 2%. For most of modern market history, a meaningful slice of the S&P 500 paid more of that cash than a Treasury bond did.

4%, a record outside the COVID-19 crash, according to Ned Davis Research data circulated by Charles Schwab strategist Liz Ann Sonders. 85%. That is the lowest reading since May 2007. Put differently, roughly 96 out of every 100 companies in America’s benchmark index now hand shareholders less annual income than a piece of government paper.

S. companies with market values above $100 billion returned 118 tickers yielding less than the current 10-year Treasury. Company Dividend Yield Micron Technology Inc. 06% Quanta Services Inc.

07% Marvell Technology Inc. 10% Western Digital Corp. 13% Progressive Corp. 18% Howmet Aerospace Inc.

20% Alphabet Inc. 26% Lam Research Corp. 34% Apple Inc. 34% Meta Platforms Inc.

38% Applied Materials Inc. 43% Nvidia Corp. 46% KLA Corp. 49% Dell Technologies Inc.

58% Mastercard Inc. 61% Costco Wholesale Corp. 63% Amphenol Corp. 65% Broadcom Inc.

71% Visa Inc. 73% Pro Scanner, Aug. 20, 2026. 70% How The Gap Got This Wide The first is the bond side.

34% this week, its highest since 2007. 65% Thursday. Rising yields raise the bar that any dividend has to clear. The second is the equity side.

Mega-cap technology companies have returned capital through share buybacks rather than dividends, and their share prices have risen far faster than any payout has. Yield falls when the denominator runs. Neither force is new. What is new is both running hard at once.

There is a Federal Reserve fingerprint here too. Long-dated yields surged in part because Chair Kevin Warsh has declined to signal a rate hike as his answer to inflation, leaving the long end of the curve to do the tightening instead. The bond market is setting the hurdle the Fed will not. What It Means For Investors For anyone who needs cash from their capital, the arithmetic has flipped.

The safest asset in the world now outpays almost the entire large-cap universe. That is a reason bonds have been drawing money back. The iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (NASDAQ: TLT ) rallied this week after the Treasury doubled its long-end buyback operations. For anyone owning the AI complex, nothing about the thesis changes.

Those companies were never bought for income. The question is what happens to the 96% if the growth stops arriving. Image: Shutterstock