If You Invest $1,000 a Year in Morgan Stanley (MS) Stock, How Much Dividend Income Could It Generate Over 20 Years?

Source The Motley Fool

Key Points

  • Morgan Stanley has an exception track record of growing both its stock price and its dividend.

  • 10 stocks we like better than Morgan Stanley ›

If you're looking for meaningful -- and growing -- dividend income, take a look at financial services giant Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS). Its dividend recently yielded a solid 2.5%, and it's been growing at an impressive clip.

If you invest $1,000 annually in Morgan Stanley stock, you could collect a lot over 20 years.

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Here's how Morgan Stanley's dividend has grown over time:

Period

Average annual dividend growth rate

Past five years

10.44%

Past 10 years

19.12%

Past 15 years

23.25%

Data source: Calculations by author using data from Yahoo! Finance.

How much dividend income will you collect over 20 years, buying $1,000 of Morgan Stanley stock annually? Well, it's hard to say, because:

  • We can't know exactly what the dividend's growth rate will be over the next 20 years.
  • We can't know the stock's growth rate over the next 20 years, either.
  • As the stock price grows, $1,000 will buy fewer shares.
  • Your results will differ significantly depending on whether you reinvest the dividends received into additional shares of stock.

Here's a different way to approach this question -- by looking at the stock's total returns, which reflect dividends received (but not reinvested):

Time Period

Average annual gain

One year

20.05%

Three years

39.47%

Five years

15.31%

10 years

20.21%

15 years

18.33%

Data source: Morningstar.com, as of Oct. 21, 2026.

Suppose we estimate that the stock will grow at an average annual rate of 15% over the coming 20 years. If so, investing $1,000 annually will yield a stake worth around $117,800. If the dividend has grown along with the stock price and it still yields 2.5%, the total dividend payment for that 20th year will be around $2,950. So you'll have gone from collecting $25 in one year to nearly $3,000 by year 20. That's the power of patience and compounding!

Long-term income-seeking investors may want to take a closer look at Morgan Stanley.

Should you buy stock in Morgan Stanley right now?

Before you buy stock in Morgan Stanley, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Morgan Stanley wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $355,124!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,296,254!*

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*Stock Advisor returns as of October 25, 2026.

Selena Maranjian has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Disclaimer: For information purposes only. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
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