Dividend growth
The change in the payment per share from one period to the next.
How to read the number
It has to be read against the change in profit and cash flow: a payment growing faster than the business simply means a larger share of it is being distributed.
When the metric lies
Splits and one-off special payments break the series: without restating for the ratio and stripping out one-offs, the growth is an artefact of arithmetic.
Also known as: dividend growth