3 Overlooked Dividend Stocks to Buy and Hold

Ten years is a long time. In a decade, interest rates will have cycled multiple times, a recession will have come and gone, and the stocks that dominate the headlines today will likely have been replaced by something no one is talking about yet. That’s exactly why dividend investing across a 10-year window is different from everything else in a portfolio.

You’re not really trying to predict the next quarter or the next runner. You’re buying businesses that will pay you while you wait, and ideally pay you more each year than they did the year before. The three companies below are solid dividend stocks to hold for the next 10 years.

1. The Clorox Company
The Clorox Company (CLX) has been through a stretch that would have broken a lesser brand. A $580 million ERP system upgrade in 2023 caused a cyberattack disruption that knocked organic sales down 17% in a single quarter. The stock fell to decade-low valuations. Most investors moved on.

What happened next is the actual story. Clorox spent the following years rebuilding, and in January 2026, it made its most significant strategic move in decades: a $2.25 billion acquisition of GOJO Industries, the maker of Purell. The deal closed April 1, 2026. Purell is not a specialty brand. It is the category. After the pandemic permanently changed how the world thinks about hand hygiene, owning Purell for the next 10 years means owning a product that now lives in every school, hospital, office building, and restaurant in the country, as a reflex rather than a purchase decision. Clorox’s long-term sales target of 3% to 5% organic growth now has a new engine behind it.

The near-term noise is real: Fiscal 2026 earnings-per-share guidance was cut as GOJO integration costs and debt weighed on the balance sheet. The stock yields nearly 5% at current prices. Morningstar values it at $134 per share against a price near $95. For a 10-year holder, those integration costs become a footnote. The Purell brand does not.

2. Brown-Forman Corporation
Brown-Forman Corporation (BFB) has raised its dividend for 42 consecutive years. That streak covers the dot-com crash, the 2008 financial crisis, COVID-19, and the current macro uncertainty, and it kept going through all of it. The company makes Jack Daniel’s, Woodford Reserve, Herradura Tequila, and el Jimador, among others. Its core product is aged whiskey, which takes years to produce, creates a natural supply constraint, and carries margin profiles that most consumer goods companies would trade anything to have.

The stock is under pressure right now because the global spirits market has softened. Premium bourbon and tequila consumers pulled back in 2025 and early 2026 as price fatigue set in after years of category inflation. This is all a cyclical problem, not a structural one. Meanwhile, Brown-Forman launched Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Blackberry in 2026 and saw “outstanding consumer engagement” on the new flavor extension — proof that the brand still has room to grow inside an audience it already owns.

The dividend yield near current prices sits around 3.6%. A decade from now, if Brown-Forman maintains its historical dividend growth rate of roughly 6% to 8% per year, the yield on today’s cost basis will be substantially higher, which is the entire logic of buying a dividend grower when sentiment is low. Ten years of compounding on a premium spirits portfolio is a quiet but powerful bet.

3. Kimberly-Clark
Kimberly-Clark (KMB) is in the middle of what its own company filings call the most consequential transformation in its 154-year history. The company that makes Huggies, Kleenex, Scott, Cottonelle, and Pull-Ups is rebuilding itself from the inside — selling lower-margin businesses, restructuring its cost base, and reinvesting in brand equity and product innovation.

In Q1 2026, adjusted operating profit grew 3.7%, and the company reaffirmed its full-year guidance — a signal that the restructuring isn’t disrupting the underlying business. In May, Pull-Ups launched a new Learning Layer system that adds educational interactivity to the training pant category. That might sound like a small product update, but Kimberly-Clark has been a Dividend King — notching 50-plus consecutive years of dividend increases — by making exactly these kinds of moves: incremental improvements to products parents buy on autopilot, over and over, for decades.

The pending combination with Kenvue (KVUE) will create one of the world’s largest personal care and consumer health platforms. For a 10-year investor, that combination means owning Kleenex, Huggies, Neutrogena, Tylenol, and Listerine under one operational umbrella. The dividend yield is safe, the brands are permanent, and the stock doesn’t show up on any “hot picks” list, which is common for 10-year compounders.

— Micah Zimmerman

Source: The Motley Fool