Weekly Series · Dividend Growth
Dividend Increases This Week: November 2-6, 2026
Seven companies with at least ten consecutive years of dividend growth raised their payouts this week. No cuts.
Waste Connections raised its quarterly dividend 10 percent to $0.385 per share, the largest percentage increase among the dividend increases this week for companies with at least ten consecutive years of growth. Brown and Brown pushed past three decades. Lithia Motors kept raising through the auto cycle. Two western utilities barely kept pace with inflation.
Seven raises, seven different industries. Here is every one of them.
| Company | Ticker | Old | New | % Chg | Streak |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Waste Connections | WCN | $0.350 | $0.385 | +10.0% | 15 yr |
| Brown & Brown | BRO | $0.165 | $0.180 | +9.1% | 33 yr |
| Lithia Motors | LAD | $0.700 | $0.750 | +7.1% | 15 yr |
| Standex Intl | SXI | $0.340 | $0.360 | +5.9% | 16 yr |
| Tompkins Financial | TMP | $0.700 | $0.740 | +5.7% | 20 yr |
| IDACORP | IDA | $0.880 | $0.900 | +2.3% | 14 yr |
| Pinnacle West Capital | PNW | $0.910 | $0.930 | +1.7% | 14 yr |
The Featured Raise
Waste Connections
Waste Connections declared a quarterly dividend of $0.385 per share, up from $0.35 for a 10 percent increase, payable November 19 to shareholders of record November 5. The board reviews the dividend each October, and this year the raise came alongside a Q3 earnings beat that led the company to raise its full-year outlook. Market cap sits around $47 billion.
My take
A 10 percent raise from a $47 billion waste hauler is the kind of increase that does not get enough attention because the business is boring. Waste collection has local monopoly characteristics. Once a hauler has the municipal contract and the route density, switching costs are enormous and competitors rarely bother trying. That is exactly the economic structure you want behind a dividend check.
What I watch with Waste Connections specifically is the acquisition pipeline. The company grows by buying smaller regional haulers and folding them into its route network, which means the dividend is funded partly by organic pricing power and partly by deal flow. Fifteen consecutive years of raises tells you management has kept those acquisitions accretive long enough to matter. The raised full-year guidance after Q3 tells you the current batch is working too.
The Streak
Brown and Brown
Brown and Brown's board declared a quarterly dividend of $0.18 per share, up from $0.165 for a 9.1 percent raise. This is the company's 33rd consecutive annual dividend increase, a streak that started in 1994 and runs through the dot-com crash, the financial crisis, and a global pandemic without a single interruption. The announcement also included authorization for up to $1.5 billion in share repurchases.
My take
Insurance brokerage is one of those businesses that compounds quietly because nobody writes headlines about it. Brown and Brown does not underwrite risk. It sells policies on behalf of carriers and collects a commission, which means it has the recurring revenue of insurance without the catastrophe exposure. That is a genuinely different risk profile from the insurers themselves, and the 33-year streak reflects it.
The $1.5 billion buyback paired with the dividend raise is the real signal here. Boards that authorize both at the same time are telling you the capital position has slack, not that one is being funded at the expense of the other. For a company this size, that combination is a stronger statement about balance sheet health than either move alone.
The Cyclical Survivor
Lithia Motors
Lithia Motors raised its quarterly dividend to $0.75 per share from $0.70, a 7.1 percent increase and the company's 15th consecutive annual raise. Lithia is the second largest auto dealership group in the United States by revenue, operating more than 300 locations across the country.
My take
Fifteen consecutive years of dividend growth from an auto dealership is genuinely unusual. The auto retail cycle is brutal. New vehicle sales swing with consumer credit conditions, used car prices are volatile, and the industry went through a period during COVID where inventory disappeared entirely. Raising the dividend through all of that for a decade and a half tells you something about how the company manages its capital structure.
The part I find interesting about Lithia is the acquisition strategy. The company has been buying dealerships aggressively, consolidating a fragmented industry the way Waste Connections consolidated waste hauling. The parallel is worth noting because both companies fund their dividends partly through acquired cash flows, and both have maintained long raise streaks while doing it. That model works until the deals stop being accretive, and so far neither company has hit that wall.
The Quiet Compounder
Tompkins Financial
Tompkins Financial declared a quarterly dividend of $0.74 per share, up from $0.70 for a 5.7 percent raise. This is the company's 20th consecutive annual increase. Tompkins is a community banking and financial services company headquartered in Ithaca, New York, with roughly $8 billion in total assets across banking, insurance, and wealth management.
My take
Twenty years of consecutive increases from a community bank is worth pausing on. Regional and community banks operate in a part of the financial system where a single bad loan book can end the streak overnight. The 2023 regional banking panic proved that. Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic all disappeared within weeks. The banks that survived that episode with their dividends intact are a fundamentally different category, and Tompkins is in that category.
A 5.7 percent raise is not going to make anyone's highlight reel. But this is a company that has been making raises like this every year since 2007, which means it started this streak right before the financial crisis and never stopped. The consistency matters more than the percentage. If you held Tompkins for the full 20 years and reinvested every dividend, you compounded through two banking panics without a single interruption. That is what a community bank streak actually means in practice.
The Industrial
Standex International
Standex International raised its quarterly dividend to $0.36 from $0.34, a 5.9 percent increase and the company's 16th consecutive annual raise. Standex is a diversified industrial manufacturer with operations in electronics, engraving, scientific equipment, and specialty solutions across North America, Europe, and Asia.
My take
Diversified industrials are hard to get excited about because the business description reads like a list of random divisions stitched together. Standex makes everything from magnetic reed switches to hydraulic cylinders to cooking equipment. The lack of a clean narrative is actually the point. Revenue diversification across unrelated end markets is what lets a company like this raise through industrial downturns that would flatten a pure-play manufacturer.
Sixteen years covers the post-financial-crisis recovery, the 2015-2016 industrial recession, the pandemic shutdown of manufacturing, and the 2022 supply chain chaos. Raising through all of those tells you the portfolio approach is working as intended. The 5.9 percent is a solid mid-single-digit raise that signals confidence without overreaching, which is exactly what you want from an industrial that ships into cyclical end markets.
The Utility Pair
Dividend Increases This Week from IDACORP and Pinnacle West
IDACORP raised its quarterly dividend to $0.90 from $0.88, a 2.3 percent increase and its 14th consecutive annual raise. Pinnacle West Capital went to $0.93 from $0.91, a 1.7 percent increase, also for year 14. IDACORP is the parent company of Idaho Power, serving southern Idaho and eastern Oregon. Pinnacle West is the parent of Arizona Public Service, the largest electric utility in Arizona.
My take
These two raises belong together because they tell the same story. Both are western U.S. electric utilities. Both have 14-year streaks. Both raised below the current inflation rate. And both operate in states where utility rate cases have been actively contested by regulators.
Utilities grow their dividends at the speed their regulators allow them to increase prices. A 1.7 percent raise from Pinnacle West and a 2.3 percent raise from IDACORP are not management being conservative. They are management working within the math that the most recent rate case approved. Arizona and Idaho are both fast-growing states with significant infrastructure spending needs, which means the utilities are constantly asking for rate relief while regulators push back on behalf of ratepayers.
For dividend growth investors, below-inflation raises from utilities are a reminder of what regulated growth actually looks like. The streak stays intact, but the purchasing power of the dividend erodes a little each year unless the next rate case lands more favorably. These are still reliable income names. They are not growth names this year, and calling that out honestly is what this series is for.
The Pattern
What a Seven-Sector Week Tells You
Seven raises across waste services, insurance brokerage, auto retail, industrial manufacturing, community banking, and two regulated utilities. The sector diversity is the story this week. When raises come from one industry, the industry is telling you something about its own cycle. When raises come from six different industries in the same five-day stretch, the economy is telling you something broader about corporate cash flow and board confidence.
The spread between the top and bottom raise is also worth noting. Waste Connections at 10 percent and Pinnacle West at 1.7 percent are both extending long streaks, but the gap between them reflects the difference between a business with pricing power and a business that prices by permission. Over a 10-year holding period, that gap compounds into a meaningfully different income stream, and recognizing which type you own is half the work of building a dividend growth portfolio.
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