DRIP ACB Calculator
Enter a ticker and your purchases. The calculator pulls the real dividend and split history, reinvests every dividend, and gives you the adjusted cost base, with a line-by-line ledger you can check.
Transactions
| Date | Type | Shares | Price / share | Fee |
|---|
Leave price blank to use that day's closing price. Enter shares as they were on that date (before any later splits). For return of capital and reinvested capital gains, enter the per-share amount in the price column.
Assumptions
With fractional shares off, leftover cash is paid out, like most broker DRIPs. Set withholding to 15 for US stocks in a Canadian non-registered account.
Reinvesting vs. taking the cash
Year-end values
| Date | With DRIP | Without DRIP | Amount invested | DRIP advantage |
|---|
Ledger
| Date | Type | Detail | Shares ± | Price | ACB ± | Shares held | Total ACB | ACB / share |
|---|
How it's calculated, and its limits
- Average-cost method (Canadian ACB): buys (plus fees) and reinvested dividends add to total ACB. A sale removes ACB in proportion to the shares sold.
- You get a dividend if you held shares before its ex-date. It's reinvested at the closing price on the pay date, which is approximated as the ex-date plus the lag you set. Yahoo doesn't publish pay dates, so this is an approximation.
- The chart compares total value. "With DRIP" is shares held × price. "Without DRIP" is the shares you bought × price, plus every dividend collected as cash (not reinvested or invested elsewhere). Both include any sale proceeds, and withholding tax is lost in both.
- Splits change the share count but not the total ACB.
- Return of capital lowers ACB, and if ACB goes negative, the excess is a capital gain. Reinvested ("phantom") capital gains distributions raise ACB. Neither appears in price data, so ETF holders should enter them from the fund's annual tax breakdown.
- Prices and dividends come from Yahoo Finance via this site's proxy. Check results against your statements before filing anything.