IRON MOUNTAIN INC (IRM) — payout ratio, three ways
Fiscal year ending 2025-12-31 · sector Real estate · computed from SEC filings, not taken from a data vendor.
| Basis | Payout | Why it differs |
|---|---|---|
| Operating cash flow | 68.6% | Before capital spending, so it understates the payout that free cash flow shows. |
| Free cash flow | negative | Operating cash flow was $932m short of capital spending, so no ratio exists. The dividend was not funded from free cash flow this year. |
| Funds from operations | 81.5% | The basis the real estate industry uses. Adds back depreciation on buildings that are not losing value. |
No GAAP earnings figure is shown. This company does not report the inputs for it in its XBRL filings — capital expenditure, in particular, is often folded into a single investing total rather than tagged on its own. The figure is absent from the filings, not zero, and inventing one from a balance-sheet movement would be a guess dressed as a measurement.
Spread between highest and lowest: 13 percentage points. Same filings, different denominators.
The arithmetic
- Operating cash flow — dividends paid $919.4m ÷ operating cash flow $1,340.0m
- Free cash flow — dividends paid $919.4m ÷ (operating cash flow $1,340.0m − capex $2,271.6m)
- Funds from operations — dividends declared per share $3.22 ÷ derived FFO $3.95 per share
- FFO built NAREIT-style: net income, plus real-estate depreciation, less gains on sale, over weighted-average diluted shares
- This is an approximation. Every REIT defines its own adjusted variant in the filing text, so it will not match the earnings release exactly
Where the figures came from
- 10-K filed 2026-02-12 · accession
0001020569-26-000013
Every one is public at sec.gov and free to check. That is the point — you should not have to take my word for any of it.
Caveats on this company
- FFO derived (NAREIT approximation)
- basis discarded as outside the sane band (distribution far larger than the year's income — usually a special dividend or a return of capital, not a payout ratio): earnings
Computed by an open pipeline reading SEC XBRL directly. If any number here looks wrong to you, tell me — that is more useful to me than agreement.