LONDON, April 23, 2026, 20:02 BST
Legal & General Group Plc shares were down 5.6% at 253.65 pence by 18:25 London time on Thursday as the FTSE 100 insurer and asset manager traded ex-dividend for its final 2025 payout of 15.67 pence a share. The cash is due to be paid on June 4.
The drop appeared mainly technical. But it put the focus back on L&G’s capital-return story just six weeks after the group unveiled a record £1.2 billion buyback, flagged £2.4 billion of shareholder returns over the next year and reported 2025 core operating profit of £1.623 billion, up 6%.
Trading ex-dividend means the shares change hands without the right to the next payout. L&G’s record date is April 24, and the company’s dividend history shows a total 2025 payout of 21.79 pence a share, up from 21.36 pence for 2024.
In its latest weekly buyback update, L&G said it had repurchased 35.6 million shares for about £89 million through April 17 under the programme announced on March 11. The most recent reporting week alone accounted for 6.66 million shares.
Chief executive António Simões has said the overhaul is beginning to show through. L&G described itself in March as “a sharper, more focused business”, and Simões later told Reuters: “In two years, we’ve reshaped the company.” Legal General Group
Still, the market wants more proof. Reuters reported in March that L&G’s shares had remained broadly flat since Simões took the top job at the start of 2024, while rival Aviva gained about 44% and the FTSE 100 rose about 34%.
L&G remains a heavyweight in pension risk transfer — deals where companies pay insurers to take over defined-benefit pension liabilities. The group said it wrote £11.8 billion of global pension risk transfer business in 2025, including £10.4 billion in the UK, but the Financial Times said the market is getting more crowded as Brookfield and Apollo-backed Athora push further into Britain.
That is where the risk sits. Thursday’s selloff looked more like dividend mechanics than a fresh verdict on the business, yet investors are still watching L&G’s Solvency II coverage ratio, a key measure of financial strength, after KBW analyst William Hawkins called the March solvency outcome a “big miss”. Interactive Investor
Simões told Reuters the group was “very comfortable” with its solvency position and said it would return £2.4 billion to investors over the next year. Whether that reassurance, plus the buyback, is enough to narrow L&G’s valuation gap with peers remains the live question. Reuters
Next up are the April 24 dividend record date, L&G’s annual and general meetings on May 21 and the June 4 payment date. For now, the stock’s ex-dividend drop has pulled the insurer’s cash-return pitch back under the market light.
