Realty Income owns more than 15,500 properties across all 50 U.S. states and nine countries in Europe, then leases those properties to businesses under long-term contracts. The tenants pay rent every month, cover most of their own property costs like taxes and maintenance, and Realty Income keeps the difference as income. Its biggest tenants include 7-Eleven, Dollar General, Walgreens, and FedEx. About 91% of its retail rent comes from tenants whose businesses are considered non-optional for consumers, like grocery stores, convenience stores, and drug stores. That is a deliberate choice: businesses people visit whether the economy is good or bad tend to keep paying rent. The diagram below traces where the money goes.
Five years of numbers tell a clear story about growth. Revenue has climbed every single year, from $2.1 billion in 2021 to $5.7 billion in 2025. That is not a small jump. Cash from operations has followed the same direction, rising from $1.3 billion in 2021 to $4.0 billion in 2025. A meaningful part of that growth came from acquisitions, not just organic expansion. The $9.3 billion purchase of Spirit Realty Capital closed in January 2024 and added thousands of properties at once.
Free cash flow has kept pace with revenue almost exactly, which matters. It means the cash the business collects is real and not eaten up by property costs. In 2025, free cash flow reached $3.9 billion against $5.7 billion in revenue. The company also paid out $2.92 billion in dividends to shareholders that year, continuing a streak of 31 consecutive years of dividend increases. It has raised its dividend 133 times since listing on the stock exchange in 1994.
The net lease structure is the reason free cash flow tracks revenue so closely. Realty Income does not pay the electric bill or fix the roof at a Dollar General store. The tenant does. That keeps Realty Income's costs low and its cash flows stable across economic cycles. As of December 31, 2025, the portfolio was 98.9% occupied, and when leases expired during 2025, Realty Income re-leased those properties at an average of 103.9% of the previous rent. That means it captured slightly more rent on renewal than it was getting before.
Europe is becoming a bigger piece of the picture. As of December 31, 2025, properties in the United Kingdom and Europe represented about 19% of annualized base rent, up from 14% a year earlier. In 2025, about 60% of the company's total acquisition spending went into the U.K. and Europe. Realty Income also expanded into Poland and the Netherlands during the year, and in January 2026 made its first investments in Mexico through a joint venture.
Beyond property ownership, Realty Income has been expanding into lending. By the end of 2025, it held $3.1 billion in loans and preferred equity interests, more than double the $1.5 billion it held a year earlier. It also launched a private fund in 2025, raising approximately $1.5 billion in commitments from large institutional investors. These moves generate fee income and let the company deploy capital beyond direct property purchases.
The risks here are specific and worth naming plainly. First, if Realty Income were to lose its REIT status by failing to meet tax requirements, it would owe regular corporate income taxes and be locked out of REIT status for four years. That would reduce the money available for dividends by a significant amount. Second, the business depends entirely on tenants paying rent. If a large tenant goes bankrupt or shuts down, Realty Income loses that income and has to find a new tenant, which can take time and may require accepting lower rent. Third, some properties in the portfolio sit on land that was previously used for gas stations or chemical storage. If contamination is found, Realty Income as the property owner can be held responsible for cleanup costs even if it did not cause the problem. Fourth, real estate is slow to sell. If conditions change and the company needs to raise cash quickly, selling properties may take months or require accepting a lower price.
International operations add another layer of exposure. When Realty Income borrows in British pounds or euros, or collects rent in foreign currencies, changes in exchange rates affect how much those amounts are worth in U.S. dollars. The company had $29.7 billion in total outstanding borrowings as of December 31, 2025, with a weighted average interest rate of 3.9% and 93% of that debt at fixed rates. The weighted average time until that debt matures was 5.5 years. That spread-out maturity schedule reduces the risk of needing to refinance everything at once, but the sheer size of the debt load means interest costs remain a permanent and large expense.