3 Dividend Stocks You Have to Buy Now to Get Paid in July

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The window to lock in three July dividend checks is closing fast. Two of these stocks, Science Applications International and NetApp, go ex-dividend tomorrow, meaning today is the last trading day to buy shares and still qualify for the upcoming payment. A third, Bank OZK, gives investors a slightly longer runway into next week. All three payouts land inside this month.

Quick mechanics: to collect a dividend, you must own the shares before the ex-dividend date. Buy on or after the ex-date and the seller keeps the check. The pay date is simply when the cash hits your account.

Science Applications International (SAIC)

Science Applications International (NASDAQ:SAIC) just declared its quarterly cash dividend of $0.37 per share, with an ex-dividend date of July 10, 2026 and a payment date of July 24, 2026. That makes today, July 9, the buy-by deadline. The trailing dividend yield sits at roughly 1.3% on an indicated annual payout of $1.48, with shares recently trading around $112.01.

Coverage is the easy part here. The Reston, Virginia defense IT contractor reported Q1 FY27 adjusted diluted EPS of $3.23, beating the $2.28 consensus, and raised full-year guidance to adjusted diluted EPS of $9.90 to $10.10 on revenue of $7.0 billion to $7.2 billion. Free cash flow ran $577 million in FY26 and is guided above $600 million this year. Against a $1.48 annualized dividend, the payout ratio against EPS is in the mid-teens and cash coverage is not a question. The forward P/E is 10x.

NetApp (NTAP)

NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) shares the same tight deadline. The quarterly dividend of $0.52 per share carries an ex-date of July 10, 2026, with cash paid July 29, 2026. Investors must be shareholders of record before tomorrow’s open, which means buying today. The indicated yield is roughly 1.25%, modest on the surface, but that number is partly a function of the stock’s run. NTAP is up 55.98% year to date and 57.3% over the past year.

On coverage, the Sunnyvale storage company reported Q4 FY26 non-GAAP EPS of $2.43 on revenue of $1.95 billion, up 12.5% year over year. Full-year FY26 non-GAAP EPS came in at $8.13 and free cash flow reached $1.87 billion, up 40%. Management guided FY27 non-GAAP EPS to $8.70 to $9.00. That puts the $2.08 annualized dividend at less than a quarter of earnings, with billions in FCF headroom and another $950 million already returned through buybacks last fiscal year. All-flash and the NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) co-engineered AI Data Engine are the growth engines behind the numbers.

Bank OZK (OZK)

Bank OZK (NASDAQ:OZK) offers the highest yield of the three and a slightly longer window to act. The Little Rock, Arkansas regional bank declared a quarterly dividend of $0.48 per share on July 1, 2026, with an ex-date of July 13, 2026 and a payment date of July 20, 2026. Buy by Friday, July 10, to be positioned before shares trade ex-dividend Monday. The current yield is about 3.59%, and the annualized forward estimate is $1.92.

For a bank, the right coverage read is earnings and payout ratio. OZK trades at a trailing P/E of 8x on TTM EPS of $6.15, which puts the $1.92 forward dividend at well under a third of earnings. The dividend has risen by a penny per quarter for eight straight quarters, a steady growth cadence for income holders (readers building around that kind of grinding, low-drama payout growth may want to see how we think about it in Never Touch the Principal at 247wallst.com). The caveat: OZK has heavy commercial real estate exposure, and shares fell 6.58% over the past week, which is inflating that headline yield.

Buy-By Deadlines, Payments, and Yields at a Glance

Bottom Line

Chasing a single quarterly check is never a strategy by itself. The names above are worth a look because the coverage is real, the dates are confirmed, and the payments are already declared. Miss the ex-date and you miss the payment: it is that simple. If any of these fit an existing income plan, the deadline to act is measured in hours for SAIC and NetApp, and just a couple of trading days for Bank OZK.

The post 3 Dividend Stocks You Have to Buy Now to Get Paid in July appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..