If You Invested $1,000 in Apple 10 Years Ago
If you invested $1,000 in Apple at the close on 12 October 2016, it was worth $11,623 at the close on 12 October 2026 on price alone. If every dividend had been used to buy more shares, it was $12,707, by Yahoo Finance's adjusted close.
What your money in Apple became
Type any amount. The answers use Apple's real closing prices up to 12 October 2026.
Price-only lines divide one Yahoo Finance closing price by an earlier one, on the dates shown; Nasdaq.com’s closes give the same results. The dividends-reinvested line uses Yahoo’s adjusted close alone, with no second source. All lines are fixed at 12 October 2026 and ignore fees, taxes and inflation.
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If you invested $1,000 in Apple at the close on 12 October 2016, it was worth $11,623 at the close on 12 October 2026, counting the share price only.
Apple also paid you to hold it. If every dividend had gone straight back into more Apple shares, the same $1,000 would have reached $12,707 by Yahoo Finance’s adjusted close. This page is mostly about that $1,083 gap and where it came from.
| Put in $1,000 on | Apple, price only | Apple, dividends reinvested (Yahoo only) | SPY, price only |
|---|---|---|---|
| 13 Oct 2025 (1 year) | $1,377 | $1,382 | $1,174 |
| 12 Oct 2021 (5 years) | $2,410 | $2,470 | $1,794 |
| 12 Oct 2016 (10 years) | $11,623 | $12,707 | $3,641 |
The formula, and the 2020 split
The price-only answer is a ratio of two closes. Apple closed at $340.97 on 12 October 2026 and at $29.335 on 12 October 2016, in today’s split-adjusted terms. The ratio is 11.62, so $1,000 became $11,623.
The 2016 close was really about $117.34. Apple split its shares 4-for-1 on 31 August 2020, a date that both Yahoo Finance’s split record and StockSplitHistory.com give. Every price before that date is divided by four in the adjusted data, and every share count is multiplied by four. So $1,000 bought about 8.5 shares at the time, which count as about 34.09 shares today.
The dividend answer swaps in the adjusted close. Yahoo’s adjusted close assumes each dividend bought more shares at the close on its payment day. Dividing the adjusted closes gives 12.71, or $12,707 per $1,000. We have no second source for that adjusted series, so the reinvested numbers here are Yahoo only.
Sundays are skipped. The one-year start is 13 October 2025, because 12 October 2025 fell on a Sunday.
Cash in hand or more shares: a walk through
Apple paid 40 quarterly dividends between 12 October 2016 and 12 October 2026, by Yahoo’s dividend record. Adjusted for the split, they add up to $8.575 per share.
Take them as cash. The 34.09 shares bought with $1,000 would have paid 34.09 × $8.575, or about $292, over the ten years. Add that cash to the $11,623 share value and you hold about $11,915.
Reinvest them instead. Each payment buys a sliver more stock, and those slivers earn their own dividends and their own price gains. The end value becomes $12,707.
So of the $1,083 extra, about $292 is the cash itself and roughly $791 is what that cash grew into once it was put back into Apple. Type any amount into the calculator: the reinvested line always sits about 9.3% above the price-only line.
Ten years of dividend cash
The dividend per share kept rising. Here is the cash the original 34.09 split-adjusted shares would have paid in each October-to-October year, from Yahoo’s dividend record (single source):
| Year ending | Payments | Cash on the original $1,000 of shares | As a % of the $1,000 paid |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 2017 | 4 | $20.45 | 2.05% |
| Oct 2018 | 4 | $23.18 | 2.32% |
| Oct 2019 | 4 | $25.57 | 2.56% |
| Oct 2020 | 4 | $27.10 | 2.71% |
| Oct 2021 | 4 | $28.98 | 2.90% |
| Oct 2022 | 4 | $30.68 | 3.07% |
| Oct 2023 | 4 | $32.04 | 3.20% |
| Oct 2024 | 4 | $33.41 | 3.34% |
| Oct 2025 | 4 | $34.77 | 3.48% |
| Oct 2026 | 4 | $36.13 | 3.61% |
On the price you paid, the yearly payout rose from about 2.0% to about 3.6%. On today’s price it is far smaller, because the shares grew faster than the dividend. That is why the dividend yield quoted on a quote screen can look tiny for a stock like this one.
A worked example from 2021
Say you put $1,500 into Apple at the close on 12 October 2021. The split-adjusted close that day was $141.51.
By 12 October 2026 the close was $340.97. Divide: $340.97 ÷ $141.51 = 2.41. Multiply by $1,500 and you get about $3,614, on price alone.
The road had one deep dip. On 5 January 2023 Apple closed at $125.02, and your $1,500 was worth about $1,325, down 11.7% after fifteen months. Anyone who bought at the 2021 high close of $180.33 on 27 December 2021 was down further, to $693 per $1,000, on the same day.
A smoother ride than most
Apple’s worst fall in the decade was 38.7%. It ran from a high close on 3 October 2018 to 3 January 2019, and the 2016 stake slid from $1,978 to $1,212. A 38.7% fall needs a gain of about 63% to undo.
The longest wait below an old high was 525 days, from 3 January 2022 to 12 June 2023. The next longest was 373 days, from 3 October 2018 to 11 October 2019.
The stake barely dipped below what went in. Its lowest close was $901, on 14 November 2016, and it never closed under $1,000 again after 5 January 2017.
Apple moved less than Tesla, Nvidia, Meta or Amazon did over the same ten years. The yearly spread of its daily price changes, a common gauge of volatility, came to about 29%, against about 18% for SPY, on both Yahoo’s and Nasdaq.com’s closes.
The original data behind the dividend gap
Every price figure here comes from 2,513 daily closes of Apple and SPY, 12 October 2016 to 12 October 2026, downloaded from Yahoo Finance on 13 October 2026. Nasdaq.com’s Apple closes for those days match Yahoo’s on the median day and are never more than 0.08% apart, and its ten-year answer is the same $11,623.
The dividend count, the $8.575 per share and the reinvested values come from Yahoo alone. The daily file, with both closes, both $1,000 values and Nasdaq’s close beside them, is published as the Apple price and dividend data file.
The chart draws the two versions of the same $1,000 day by day. The green line is the reinvested one, the blue line is price alone.
The gap opens slowly. On 12 October 2021 the two lines were $4,824 and $5,144, about $320 apart. Five years later they are $1,083 apart.
When it fails: tax and a single source
The reinvested line ignores tax. In an ordinary account each dividend is taxed in the year it is paid, so less than the full amount is left to reinvest. In a tax-sheltered account the line is closer to real.
Hindsight picks the winner. Apple is on this page because it did well; a list of the biggest companies of 2016 includes names that did much worse. That is survivorship bias at work.
The dividend history is one source. We could check every price against Nasdaq.com but had no second source for the dividend dates and amounts, so the $292, the $12,707 and the table above all rest on Yahoo.
Inflation is left in. Prices rose over the decade, so the 2026 dollars buy less than the 2016 dollars did; the inflation-adjusted return calculator can take it out.
The past is not a forecast. Rising dividends can stop, and nothing here says what Apple will do next or whether to buy it.
Related tools for dividend holders
The dividend income calculator works the yearly cash out for any yield. The dividend page explains how and when a company pays one.
For why the 2016 price looks so small, the stock split page walks through what a split does to a share count.
Decide before you buy what you will do with the dividends. Spending them and reinvesting them look alike in year one and drift apart every year after. Set it up once in your account so you never have to choose again each quarter.
— Michael Whitman
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