ADC Dividend Calculator

What Agree Realty actually is

Agree Realty is a net-lease real-estate investment trust that owns roughly 2,400 freestanding retail properties leased to single tenants on long triple-net terms, where the tenant covers property taxes, insurance and maintenance while Agree collects the rent. It trades under the ticker ADC and, since 2021, pays its dividend monthly rather than quarterly. What sets it apart from the larger net-lease names is a deliberate tilt toward investment-grade tenants — a large share of its rent comes from retailers carrying investment-grade credit ratings — and a growth engine of acquisitions, ground-lease investments and development that is funded to keep per-share cash flow rising. It is a smaller, faster-growing REIT — a market capitalisation around $8 billion rather than a sprawling income anchor — which is why it earns its own projection page instead of being folded into a broad REIT index.

Who tends to reach for it

ADC tends to attract income investors who want the monthly net-lease payout but weight future growth more heavily than the largest possible check today. The contrast with Realty Income (O) is the cleanest way to frame it: O yields more up front — around 5.1% versus ADC's roughly 4.3% — but ADC has grown its per-share dividend faster, with recent increases and its ten-year record running near 5% a year, backed by 2026 adjusted-FFO (AFFO) guidance of about $4.54–$4.58 per share, a mid-single-digit rise. You are accepting a smaller starting yield in exchange for a payout and a cash-flow base that have historically compounded more quickly. Neither is automatically better — O leans toward "how large is my check now," ADC toward "how fast does that check grow" — and the calculator above lets you set the horizon where those two paths cross for your own numbers rather than settling it with a slogan.

How DRIP compounds here

With the DRIP toggle on, each monthly distribution buys additional shares, and those shares pay their own dividend the following month — a reinvestment loop that turns twelve times a year rather than four. The metric that captures it is yield-on-cost: the dividends received in a year divided by what you originally put in. Because ADC starts from a lower yield than O but grows its per-share dividend faster, its yield-on-cost begins from a lower base and climbs more steeply over a long hold, and on a long enough horizon it can overtake a higher-yield, slower-growth REIT. Turn DRIP off and you take the monthly cash instead; the share count stops compounding and the income line flattens sooner. The chart above shows the outcome as a band rather than a line, because the rate of dividend and price growth over a multi-decade hold is genuinely uncertain.

The tax detail worth knowing

ADC's distributions are taxed like other REIT income, and that matters most in a taxable account. Because a REIT passes through income it does not pay corporate tax on, most of its dividend is non-qualified — taxed as ordinary income at your marginal rate rather than the lower long-term capital-gains rate that applies to a fund like SCHD's qualified dividends. The Section 199A deduction can shelter part of that ordinary slice, and a portion may be reclassified as return of capital or capital gain each year, but the base case is that ADC's income is taxed harder than a qualified-dividend payer at the same yield. That is why REITs are so often held inside a Roth or traditional IRA, where the monthly distribution reinvests without an annual ordinary-income bill. The Account toggle above models this: the default taxable path applies ordinary rates with the §199A deduction on the eligible slice and defers return-of-capital basis, while a Traditional IRA or Roth compounds it untaxed.