Iberdrola’s scrip dividend: what to do with your rights and what happens to your cost basis

How it works

The mechanism has two parts. For each share you hold you receive a right, and the company sets two figures: how many rights it takes to get one new share and how much it pays in cash to whoever prefers the money.

With those rights you can do three things:

1. Take new shares. It is the default option: if you do nothing, your rights are converted into shares, one for every so many rights.
2. Sell the rights on the market. For a few days they trade like any other security, and you can sell them at whatever price the market sets.
3. Take cash. You give up your rights and the company pays you a dividend for each one. At Iberdrola, that amount is the theoretical value of the right, calculated from the share price. Only those who received the rights by being shareholders can request it, not those who buy them on the market.

You don't have to pick just one: you can split your rights among the three. Until January 2018 there was another route, selling them to Iberdrola itself at a fixed price, which had existed since 2010; in April 2018, Iberdrola notified the CNMV (Spain's securities regulator) of the system that replaced it with the cash dividend. ACS, on the other hand, keeps it: in July 2026 it paid €1.866 gross per right.

The figures change with each edition. These were Iberdrola's two in 2026, according to its filings with the CNMV in January and July:

Which number in your portfolio changes with each option

Let's see it with an example portfolio: 1,000 shares bought at an average of €10, €10,000 in total, and an edition in which it takes 50 rights per new share and the cash is €0.40 per right. They are round numbers, similar to those of July 2026.

In other words, the new shares aren't free money: you have more shares, but each one is worth less. The value of the rights comes out of the share price on the day they are detached from the stock, just as a dividend comes out of the price on the ex-date. We explain it in the article on the ex-dividend date.

If your number of shares isn't a multiple of the ratio, you have rights left over: with 1,010 shares and 50 rights per new share, you receive 20 shares and have 10 rights left. You can sell them, or buy the ones you are missing, while they trade; when the period closes your broker may sell them, but it isn't automatic.

How each option is taxed

The three options don't just move different numbers: they are also taxed differently. This is the general treatment under the IRPF (Spain's personal income tax) in the common territory; the Basque Country and Navarre have their own rules.

• New shares:you aren't taxed when you receive them. Hacienda (the Spanish tax authority) spreads the cost of your shares between the old and the new ones —as article 37.1.a of the IRPF law states—, and according to the Agencia Tributaria (Spanish tax agency) the new ones inherit the holding period of the old ones. You will be taxed when you sell, and on a larger gain (or a smaller loss), because each share now has a lower tax cost.
• Selling the rights on the market: since January 1, 2017, what you collect is a capital gain, with a 19% withholding generally applied by the custodian.
• Cash: it is taxed like any dividend, as income from movable capital, with the same 19% withholding. The same applies to selling rights to the company itself at a fixed price, where that exists, as at ACS.

Which one makes sense?

It depends, above all, on what you are going to do with the money. If you are going to reinvest in Iberdrola anyway, the new shares do the same thing without going through cash and without being taxed until you sell. If, on the other hand, you are counting on that money, cash is the direct route, and it is taxed like any dividend.

Compared with cash, selling the rights on the market pays off if, after your broker's commission, they trade above what the company pays, and the only way to know that is by watching the price during the election days. But price isn't everything: the two routes that give you money aren't taxed the same way.

How Tortuga records it

If your Iberdrola shares are at DEGIRO or ING, Tortuga imports the new shares and your share count adds up on its own. The rights don't count as a position: they are an intermediate step that ends up converted into shares or into money. With ING, those transactions also appear marked as «Scrip» in your trades table.

The average cost Tortuga shows counts those shares at zero cost, so it drops just as in the example: €10,000 spread over 1,020 shares, €9.80. At DEGIRO, Tortuga recognizes them by the rights that the file itself contains: if you export a period that doesn't include them, the new shares come in, but they don't lower your average cost.

With the rest of the brokers —Interactive Brokers, Trade Republic, tastytrade, MyInvestor or a generic CSV—, the scrip dividend doesn't have its own treatment yet.

Iberdrola's two editions, in January and July, are a good example of why it is worth keeping your portfolio's dividend calendar: they are two months in which your decision changes what you collect.

Keep reading

• Dividend calendar: how to build your portfolio’s and get paid every monthThe market calendar tells you who pays this week; your portfolio’s tells you whether you will get anything in March. How to build it separating announced from estimated, and how to fill the empty months.
• Ex-dividend date: the last day you can buy and still get the dividendThe payment date doesn’t tell you whether you get paid; the ex-dividend date does. In New York it matches the record date, in Madrid it falls one business day earlier, and on the ex-date your portfolio drops without that money being lost.
• Tracking your Interactive Brokers dividends: received and projectedYour broker statement tells you what you have been paid. It doesn’t tell you what you will be paid, or how much already comes in without selling anything once you add interest and premiums.