Top 5 ASX Gold Stocks That Pay Dividends (Updated 2024)

What is a gold dividend stock?

A dividend is essentially a reward that is paid to shareholders for their investment in a company’s equity. Dividends generally comes from a company’s net profits — while the majority of a company’s net profits stay within the company as retained earnings, an outstanding portion can be divided up and distributed to shareholders.

Dividends are generally a sign that a company is flourishing, but there are times when a firm may still make dividend payments even when it's not achieving suitable profits. This tends to happen when a company wants to maintain confidence by keeping up with its established track record of regular dividend payments.

In the past, investors didn’t always look to gold stocks as a way to obtain a dividend. However, a rising number of gold miners now pay — and often raise — dividends. If investors select the right ones, they can set themselves up to profit handsomely from both a steady stream of dividend income and the strong capital gains available in resource investing.

A dividend is especially attractive in the sometimes volatile gold sector because it gives investors a degree of security — put simply, if a company pays a dividend, it generally feels that it has the cash to do so, and will have the ongoing profits it needs to keep those payments coming. On the whole, dividend-paying companies tend to outperform the market when it’s rising, and perhaps more importantly, decline less than average in a falling market.

When it comes to ASX-listed gold stocks, dividends also have tax advantages — thanks to Australia's dividend tax credit, dividends from eligible Australian corporations have an advantage over interest income.

How to pick a dividend-paying gold stock?

So how can investors pick the right dividend-paying gold stocks? A key indicator to consider is dividend yield, which you can figure out when you take the miner’s total yearly dividend payments and divide them by its share price. This allows investors to glean how much they will get back in dividends based on each dollar they have invested.

That said, it's important to keep in mind that simply picking stocks with high dividend yields may not be entirely beneficial. This is due to the fact that a company’s dividend yield can be high because its share price has dropped, which is an obvious indicator of serious risk — not only to the dividend, but to the investment as a whole.

To get a true measure of the stability of a company’s dividend, you have to look deeper. Here are three other factors to consider before putting money into a gold dividend stock:

• A history of paying a dividend (and ideally raising it) — The more established the company’s dividend is, the less likely it is to cut or eliminate it in the near future.

• A healthy balance sheet — Look for a company with a significant cash balance and low debt.

• A reasonable payout ratio — The payout ratio is an indicator of whether a company can maintain its dividend; it is calculated by dividing the per-share dividend payment by net earnings per share. A payout ratio of 80 percent or less indicates that a mining stock has the flexibility to both maintain its dividend and make the investments it needs to boost its production or take on further exploration.

Which ASX gold stocks have the highest dividends?

Below are five of the top ASX-listed gold dividend stocks based on dividend yield. Data for this article was gathered using TradingView’s stock screener on March 20, 2024, and companies had market caps of over AU$50 million at the time.