LONDON, April 23, 2026, 20:02 BST
Shares of Legal & General Group Plc slid 5.6% to 253.65 pence by 18:25 in London Thursday, with the FTSE 100 insurer and asset manager going ex-dividend for its final 2025 payout of 15.67 pence a share. Investors expecting the cash will see it hit their accounts June 4.
Mostly a technical move, the decline nonetheless swung attention back to L&G’s capital-return narrative. This comes less than two months after the company launched a record £1.2 billion buyback, signaled £2.4 billion in shareholder payouts for the coming year, and posted a 6% rise in 2025 core operating profit to £1.623 billion.
Shares trading ex-dividend no longer carry entitlement to the upcoming payment. For L&G, the record date lands on April 24. The company plans to pay out 21.79 pence per share in dividends for 2025, an increase from the 21.36 pence distributed in 2024, according to its dividend history.
L&G reported snapping up 35.6 million of its own shares, spending around £89 million on buybacks through April 17 since rolling out the program on March 11. For the latest week, buybacks totaled 6.66 million shares.
Chief executive António Simões says the overhaul is starting to make a difference. Back in March, L&G called itself “a sharper, more focused business”. Simões told Reuters afterward, “In two years, we’ve reshaped the company.” Legal General Group
Even so, investors aren’t fully convinced yet. Back in March, Reuters noted that since Simões stepped in as CEO at the beginning of 2024, L&G’s shares barely budged, stuck near flat. Aviva, on the other hand, jumped around 44%, and the FTSE 100 was up roughly 34%.
L&G still dominates pension risk transfer, a space where insurers absorb defined-benefit pension liabilities from companies. The group reported £11.8 billion in global pension risk transfer transactions for 2025—£10.4 billion of that coming from the UK. But according to the Financial Times, competition is heating up as Brookfield and Apollo-backed Athora make deeper moves into the British market.
That’s the risk point. Thursday’s drop had the feel of dividend positioning, not a new judgment on the business itself. Still, investors remain focused on L&G’s Solvency II coverage ratio—a crucial gauge of financial health—after KBW analyst William Hawkins labeled the March solvency figures a “big miss”. Interactive Investor
Simões told Reuters the group felt “very comfortable” about its solvency and confirmed plans to hand back £2.4 billion to investors in the coming year. Still, whether that pledge — and the buyback — will be enough to close L&G’s valuation gap with rivals is unclear. Reuters
The focus shifts to the April 24 dividend record date, followed by L&G’s annual and general meetings scheduled for May 21, with the payout set for June 4. Right now, the ex-dividend slide has thrown the insurer’s cash-return story back into the market’s spotlight.
