Payout ratio

TTM DPS is the sum of SGX corporate-action cash amounts whose ex-date sits in the last 365 Singapore calendar days. Divide that by EPS, times 100. If EPS is missing or not positive, we skip the figure. A company that lost money is not paying a negative percent of earnings. The cell is a dash.

For an ordinary name we treat payout above 90 percent as a fail on that analysis check. For an S-REIT the fail line is 100 percent, because a REIT is built to distribute taxable income. Those thresholds are ours, for the checklist. They are not MAS rules.

MAS does cap how much an S-REIT may borrow. Since 28 November 2024 every REIT is subject to a 50 percent aggregate leverage limit and a minimum interest coverage ratio of 1.5 times. That is about debt, not about the payout ratio on this page.

A year with a special dividend inflates TTM DPS. A year with a one-off gain inflates EPS. Banks can sit at a modest payout for years and still raise the dollar dividend. The ratio does not say the next dividend is covered in cash. The cash-flow statement is the place for that.