5 Dividend Stocks Perfect for Gen Z Investors

Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 12:40 PM 6 min read

• The Motley Fool analyzed Gen Z investing trends and identified a clear lean toward growth stocks.

• The tech space is traditionally growth-oriented, but there are fantastic dividend stocks within this sector.

• These five dividend-paying tech winners have both price appreciation and dividend potential moving forward.

• 10 stocks we like better than Meta Platforms ›

It's conventional wisdom that young investors, who have decades to wait for their investments to grow before retirement, would target growth stocks. These emerging companies may be riskier, but the upside is higher for anyone who finds the right stocks and can stomach the volatility. It makes perfect sense, especially in today's golden age of technology, that society's youngest and most tech-savvy demographic -- Gen Z includes people born between 1997 and 2012 -- would gravitate toward investing in innovative companies.

Research by The Motley Fool backs up that notion, with a recent study findng that growth stocks are the most popular type of investment among Gen Z in 2025.

However, young people should not write off dividend stocks as a potent wealth-building tool. Passive income isn't just for retirement. In fact, while there are no guarantees in investing, reinvested dividends can turbo-charge a stock's returns over a multidecade time frame.

And if the younger set wants to stick with tech stocks, it turns out that there are some excellent growing and innovative tech companies that just so happen to pay dividends. Here are five dividend stocks that are perfect for Gen Z investors to buy and hold for the long term.

Semiconductors (chips) are technology's building blocks and play a crucial role in the tech sector. Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) has made its name with chips for networking, but the company has expanded over the years into infrastructure software for corporations. Broadcom is also an underrated player in artificial intelligence (AI), where its networking chips help enable vast AI chip clusters in data centers to communicate quickly and efficiently to process colossal amounts of data.

Broadcom is also already a well established dividend stock. The company has raised its dividend for 15 consecutive years. Broadcom's rampant growth has helped management raise that dividend by an average of 14% annually over the past five years. Given Broadcom's wide-open AI opportunities and a modest 36% dividend payout ratio, Gen Z investors should enjoy many years of healthy dividend increases ahead.

Legacy tech giant Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is still a top player across many tech markets today. The multitrillion-dollar behemoth has its hands in cloud computing, software, gaming, and, yes, AI. The technology space is seemingly always perilous because innovation can turn a business upside-down relatively quickly. That said, Microsoft might be as close as you'll find to a company that's too big to fail in the tech scene.