The board of Sierra Bancorp (NASDAQ:BSRR) has announced that it will pay a dividend on the 14th of August, with investors receiving $0.23 per share. This makes the dividend yield 4.7%, which will augment investor returns quite nicely.

See our latest analysis for Sierra Bancorp

Sierra Bancorp's Earnings Will Easily Cover The Distributions

A big dividend yield for a few years doesn't mean much if it can't be sustained.

Sierra Bancorp has a long history of paying out dividends, with its current track record at a minimum of 10 years. While past data isn't a guarantee for the future, Sierra Bancorp's latest earnings report puts its payout ratio at 19%, showing that the company can pay out its dividends comfortably.

Over the next year, EPS is forecast to fall by 0.9%. But if the dividend continues along recent trends, we estimate the future payout ratio could be 43%, which we would consider to be quite comfortable looking forward, with most of the company's earnings left over to grow the business in the future.

Sierra Bancorp Has A Solid Track Record

The company has been paying a dividend for a long time, and it has been quite stable which gives us confidence in the future dividend potential. The annual payment during the last 10 years was $0.24 in 2013, and the most recent fiscal year payment was $0.92. This means that it has been growing its distributions at 14% per annum over that time. So, dividends have been growing pretty quickly, and even more impressively, they haven't experienced any notable falls during this period.

Sierra Bancorp Could Grow Its Dividend

The company's investors will be pleased to have been receiving dividend income for some time. Sierra Bancorp has seen EPS rising for the last five years, at 7.9% per annum. With a decent amount of growth and a low payout ratio, we think this bodes well for Sierra Bancorp's prospects of growing its dividend payments in the future.

Sierra Bancorp Looks Like A Great Dividend Stock

Overall, we think that this is a great income investment, and we think that maintaining the dividend this year may have been a conservative choice. The company is generating plenty of cash, and the earnings also quite easily cover the distributions. However, it is worth noting that the earnings are expected to fall over the next year, which may not change the long term outlook, but could affect the dividend payment in the next 12 months. Taking this all into consideration, this looks like it could be a good dividend opportunity.

Market movements attest to how highly valued a consistent dividend policy is compared to one which is more unpredictable. However, there are other things to consider for investors when analysing stock performance. For example, we've picked out 1 warning sign for Sierra Bancorp that investors should know about before committing capital to this stock. If you are a dividend investor, you might also want to look at our curated list of high yield dividend stocks.