A 10-year U.S. Treasury bond now pays more income than 118 of America’s biggest companies.
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA), Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO) are all on that list.
Nvidia makes the point fastest. The company pays a dividend yield of 0.46%. The 10-year Treasury pays roughly 4.7%.
That is more than ten times the cash return, from the federal government, with no earnings risk attached.
Nvidia is not the outlier. It is the norm.
Only 3.85% Of The S&P 500 Still Beats A Government Bond
A dividend yield is simply the annual cash a company pays out divided by its share price. If a $100 stock pays $2 a year, the yield is 2%.
For most of modern market history, a meaningful slice of the S&P 500 paid more of that cash than a Treasury bond did.
In July 2016, the figure hit 63.4%, a record outside the COVID-19 crash, according to Ned Davis Research data circulated by Charles Schwab strategist Liz Ann Sonders.
As of July 31, 2026, that share had collapsed to 3.85%.
That is the lowest reading since May 2007.
Put differently, roughly 96 out of every 100 companies in America’s benchmark index now hand shareholders less annual income than a piece of government paper.
118 Names Above $100 Billion, Yield Less Than The 10-Year Bond
A Benzinga Pro screen of U.S. companies with market values above $100 billion returned 118 tickers yielding less than the current 10-year Treasury.
How The Gap Got This Wide
The first is the bond side. The 30-year Treasury yield touched 5.34% this week, its highest since 2007. The 10-year hit 4.75%, a 20-month high, before easing to about 4.65% Thursday. Rising yields raise the bar that any dividend has to clear.
The second is the equity side. Mega-cap technology companies have returned capital through share buybacks rather than dividends, and their share prices have risen far faster than any payout has. Yield falls when the denominator runs.
Neither force is new. What is new is both running hard at once.
There is a Federal Reserve fingerprint here too.
Long-dated yields surged in part because Chair Kevin Warsh has declined to signal a rate hike as his answer to inflation, leaving the long end of the curve to do the tightening instead.
The bond market is setting the hurdle the Fed will not.
What It Means For Investors
For anyone who needs cash from their capital, the arithmetic has flipped.
The safest asset in the world now outpays almost the entire large-cap universe.
That is a reason bonds have been drawing money back. The iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (NASDAQ:TLT) rallied this week after the Treasury doubled its long-end buyback operations.
For anyone owning the AI complex, nothing about the thesis changes. Those companies were never bought for income.
The question is what happens to the 96% if the growth stops arriving.
Image: Shutterstock
© 2026 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
Source link
