We are working on improvements and expanding our dividends data, recently we added several new fields for major US companies that are traded on NYSE and NASDAQ exchanges. In addition to ‘ex-dividend date’ we also added ‘declaration date’, ‘payment date’ and ‘record date’ data.

And today we also expanded our coverage to London Stock Exchange tickers and added the ‘payment date’ field for more than 500 tickers traded on LSE.

Sometimes very easy to get confused with all these dates for dividends, and we wrote a brief summary here:

  • The ex-dividend date (or just date in our API) is the trading date on (and after) which the dividend is not owed to a new buyer of the stock. The ex-dividend date is one business day before the date of the record.
  • The declaration date is the day on which the board of directors announces (or declares) the dividend.
  • The record date is the day on which the company checks its records to identify shareholders of the company. An investor must be listed on that date to be eligible for a dividend payout.
  • The payment date is the day the company pays the dividend to all holders. This may be a week or more after the date of the record date.

More information you can read in our documentation page with API for dividends and splits.