Best Blue Chip Dividend Stocks to Buy for 2025 and Beyond

Wall Street's top-rated blue chip dividend stocks are well-positioned to generate income and deliver outperformance.

blue chip dividend stocks
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It's said the best blue chip dividend stocks never go out of style. True, they might tend to lag in up markets, but they're also likely to hold up better when everything is selling off.

That defensive bias might just be what investors need amid an increasingly opaque outlook for equities.

After lagging the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite by about 16 percentage points on a total return basis in risk-on trading last year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is holding up better than its growthier benchmark in 2025.

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The elite bastion of 30 blue chip stocks was essentially flat for the year to date through late May, while the Nasdaq was still off by 2%.

Moreover, the Dow suffered a maximum drawdown of 12% when the market threw up in April. By comparison, the Nasdaq lost more than 20% at its spring nadir.

Although the very bluest of blue chip dividend stocks were collective laggards in 2024, their defensive aspects could come in handy over the next 12 months or so. After all, trade uncertainty has complicated the Federal Reserve's rate-cutting plans.

The economic outlook has deteriorated as well. Economists' median estimate puts the odds of recession over the next year at 40%. Separately, the New York Federal Reserve's yield-curve model assigns a 30% probability of recession over the next 12 months, up from 23% at the start of 2025.

Happily, Wall Street's top-rated blue chip dividend stocks – with their impregnable balance sheets and rivers of free cash flow – are well-positioned to generate income and deliver outperformance in the year ahead and beyond, analysts say.

How to find the best blue chip dividend stocks

In order to find the best blue chip dividend stocks to buy now, we started by screening all 30 Dow Jones stocks for Wall Street analysts' top-rated names.

Here's how the process works: S&P Global Market Intelligence surveys analysts' stock ratings and scores them on a five-point scale, where 1.0 equals Strong Buy and 5.0 means Strong Sell.

Any score of 2.5 or lower means that analysts, on average, rate the stock a Buy. The closer the score gets to 1.0, the stronger the Buy call. In other words, lower scores are better than higher scores.

The dividend yield on the Dow has fallen below 2%, so we further limited our screen to Dow dividend stocks with yields of more than 2% as of May 27.

And so, without further ado, below please find the sevene Dow dividend stocks yielding more than 2% that analysts like best. Note well that the top-rated stock is one of the biggest positions in Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway equity portfolio.

Swipe to scroll horizontally
Wall Street's top-rated Dow dividend stocks

Company (Ticker)

Dividend Yield (%)

Analysts' Consensus Recommendation Score

Analysts' Consensus Recommendation

Coca-Cola (KO)

2.8

1.65

Buy

Home Depot (HD)

2.5

1.82

Buy

UnitedHealth Group (UNH)

2.8

1.85

Buy

Merck (MRK)

4.2

1.96

Buy

Procter & Gamble (PG)

2.6

2.00

Buy

Cisco Systems (CSCO)

2.6

2.08

Buy

Chevron (CVX)

5.0

2.13

Buy

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Dan Burrows
Senior Investing Writer, Kiplinger.com

Dan Burrows is Kiplinger's senior investing writer, having joined the publication full time in 2016.

A long-time financial journalist, Dan is a veteran of MarketWatch, CBS MoneyWatch, SmartMoney, InvestorPlace, DailyFinance and other tier 1 national publications. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Consumer Reports and his stories have appeared in the New York Daily News, the San Jose Mercury News and Investor's Business Daily, among many other outlets. As a senior writer at AOL's DailyFinance, Dan reported market news from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Once upon a time – before his days as a financial reporter and assistant financial editor at legendary fashion trade paper Women's Wear Daily – Dan worked for Spy magazine, scribbled away at Time Inc. and contributed to Maxim magazine back when lad mags were a thing. He's also written for Esquire magazine's Dubious Achievements Awards.

In his current role at Kiplinger, Dan writes about markets and macroeconomics.

Dan holds a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College and a master's degree from Columbia University.

Disclosure: Dan does not trade individual stocks or securities. He is eternally long the U.S equity market, primarily through tax-advantaged accounts.