What Is 7-Day Yield?

The 7-day yield is a standardized measure of the income a fund has produced over the most recent seven days, annualized. It was created by the Securities and Exchange Commission primarily for money market funds, and it is still the number you will see quoted for money market products on brokerage screens and fund fact sheets. Because it is a required, uniform calculation, it lets you compare money market funds against each other on an apples-to-apples basis in a way that a headline 'current rate' or 'distribution rate' does not.

The mechanics are straightforward. A fund takes its net investment income per share over the past seven days, subtracts fund expenses, and annualizes the result. In simplified form: 7-day yield = (net income per share over 7 days × 365 ÷ 7) ÷ share price. Here is a worked example with clearly illustrative numbers — these are not real fund figures. If a $1.00 share of a money market fund earned $0.00095 of net investment income over seven days, its 7-day yield would be approximately (0.00095 × 365 ÷ 7) ÷ 1.00, or about 4.95%. In practice funds also publish a 'compound 7-day yield' that assumes weekly reinvestment; that number is a fraction of a basis point higher than the simple 7-day yield.

The reason 7-day yield exists is that money market funds hold very short-duration instruments — Treasury bills, commercial paper, repurchase agreements — whose interest rates change quickly. A rolling seven-day window captures the current earning power of the portfolio in a way that a trailing-twelve-months figure cannot. When rates rise or fall, the 7-day yield adjusts almost immediately; a 12-month trailing yield lags by nearly a year.

The 30-day SEC yield is the same basic idea applied to bond funds. It uses a 30-day observation window and follows a formula prescribed by SEC Rule 30e-1. The 30-day window is a reasonable trade-off for bond funds, whose income is smoother and whose portfolios turn over more slowly than money market funds. For most bond ETFs, the 30-day SEC yield is the most comparable single yield number you can use across funds — much better than trailing 12-month yield when you want to know what a fund is currently earning after expenses.

Distribution yield is a different beast. It annualizes the fund's most recent distribution and divides by the current price. For a fund that pays weekly, a single large weekly distribution × 52 ÷ price can look striking. Distribution yield is not standardized the same way, is not net of every expense in the same way, and does not represent what the underlying portfolio is earning — it represents what the fund chose to pay out. A fund can pay out more than it earns (drawing on principal, return of capital or realized gains) and still show a high distribution yield.

Weekly-paying dividend ETFs — YieldMax, Roundhill WeeklyPay, GraniteShares YieldBOOST and their peers — are quoted almost entirely on distribution-yield style figures rather than SEC yields. That is because their income comes from option premium and short-term realized gains, and those flows do not fit the SEC yield formula cleanly. On this site the 'yield' figure printed on each ETF page is a distribution-style yield calculated as the most recent weekly distribution × 52 ÷ price. It is transparent about that fact, and pages consistently show total return alongside so you can see whether headline income is being funded by real earnings or by NAV drift.

So which yield figure should you actually use when comparing funds? For money market funds, use 7-day yield. For bond funds, use 30-day SEC yield. For equity income and covered-call ETFs, the SEC does not require an equivalent standardized figure, so you should combine distribution yield with total return and, where available, the fund's own disclosed 'yield to worst' or 'yield to maturity' data. A high distribution yield with a poor total return is a warning; a moderate distribution yield with a healthy total return is the profile most long-run investors want.

One more nuance: yields are always annualized, but the underlying window is not the same length across metrics. A 7-day yield reflects a very recent, potentially unusual week. A 30-day yield reflects the last month. A trailing 12-month distribution yield reflects the last year. None of them is a forecast of the next year. Use each for what it is — a snapshot of a specific window — and pair it with total return, expense ratio and the fund's strategy before you draw conclusions.

For more on how yield metrics differ on this site, see the yield methodology page and the dividend yield vs SEC yield article, which walks through the same distinction from a different angle.