The “Set It & Forget It” Stocks I’d Want to Own

Passive income is the ballast that keeps a portfolio steady when paychecks get interrupted. Layoffs, medical bills, or a market drawdown can knock earned income sideways in weeks, but a dividend that lands in your brokerage account every 90 days does not care. It just shows up.

Quality dividend growers deserve a permanent seat in an income portfolio, even when headline yields look modest next to mortgage REITs or junk-rated BDCs. The stocks below combine investment-grade balance sheets, decades of payout discipline, and the kind of infrastructure or healthcare cash flow that compounds through recessions. They also trade on major exchanges with penny-tight spreads, a liquidity advantage rental real estate cannot match.

We screened our 24/7 Wall St. dividend equity research database and found a collection of companies that, combined, can generate over $2,300 a year in passive annual income if you invest $25,000 in each stock at the time of this writing.

Equinix

• Yield: 1.87%
• Shares for $25,000: 23.97
• Annual Passive Income: $495

Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX | EQIX Price Prediction) runs the largest neutral interconnection footprint in the world, with $2.63 billion in Q2 2026 revenue and 52 expansion projects across 33 markets aimed at AI training and inference workloads.

The company converted to a REIT in 2015, which mandates distributing at least 90% of taxable income to shareholders. Equinix has grown its quarterly payout from $2.66 in 2020 to $5.16 today.

Institutions own 99.6% of the float, and the stock sits inside every major digital infrastructure ETF. KeyBanc analyst Brandon Nispel wrote in July that he expects “data center companies like Digital Realty and Equinix to continue exceeding estimates,” a view backed by a 37.48% year-to-date price gain on top of the growing distribution.

Johnson & Johnson

• Yield: 2.04%
• Shares for $25,000: 96.44
• Annual Passive Income: $517

Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) is the definition of a set-it-and-forget-it dividend. The company has raised its payout for 64 consecutive years, carries one of only two AAA corporate credit ratings in the United States, and generated $97.93 billion in trailing revenue across Innovative Medicine and MedTech.

The Q1 2026 bump from $1.30 to $1.34 per quarter extended the Dividend King streak another year.

The high payout results from six decades of steady free cash flow returned to shareholders while the balance sheet stayed pristine. Institutions hold 76.9% of shares outstanding, and the stock has delivered a 54.9% total return over the past year, quietly outrunning much of the S&P 500 while paying you to wait.

Amgen

• Yield: 2.42%
• Shares for $25,000: 60.83
• Annual Passive Income: $613

Amgen (NASDAQ:AMGN) is a large-cap biotech whose franchise drugs (Repatha, Prolia, Enbrel, and the growing obesity pipeline) throw off enough cash to fund a rapidly growing dividend.

The Board lifted the quarterly payout 6% for 2026, from $2.38 to $2.52 per share, and the stock now yields more than most Big Pharma peers. Trailing revenue reached $38.1 billion with an operating margin of 35.5%.

Amgen sits at 85.5% institutional ownership and carries a beta of just 0.413, meaning it tends to move roughly half as much as the broader market. That low-volatility profile plus a rising payout is what income investors want from healthcare exposure. Shares are up 27.39% year to date.

SBA Communications

• Yield: 2.58%
• Shares for $25,000: 135.85
• Annual Passive Income: $679

SBA Communications (NASDAQ:SBAC) owns and leases wireless towers across the Americas and southern Africa, collecting long-dated escalator-linked rents from major mobile carriers. Like Equinix, it operates as a REIT, so the 90% distribution rule structurally forces cash back to shareholders. The quarterly dividend jumped from $1.11 in 2025 to $1.25 in 2026, continuing an unbroken climb from $0.37 in 2019.

Under CEO Brendan Cavanagh, SBA recently transitioned to investment grade and refinanced with a $3.5 billion unsecured notes offering and a $2.5 billion revolver, lowering the cost of capital that supports future distribution growth. The stock trades below its 2021 highs, which explains the highest yield in this group.

The bottom line

Combined, these four positions generate $2,304 in annual passive income on a $100,000 investment: a blended yield of 2.30%. SBA Communications contributes $679, Amgen adds $613, Johnson & Johnson kicks in $517, and Equinix rounds out the portfolio with $495.

The quiet power of a portfolio like this is the reinvestment loop. Every dividend that clears buys fractional shares at whatever price the market is offering that quarter, and each of these four companies has raised its payout multiple times in the past five years. Start the machine at any point, leave it alone, and the income line moves in one direction.

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