A share in a successful company can climb for decades, and at some point the price of a single share starts to look out of reach for a small saver. Many boards have answered that by cutting each share into two or three cheaper ones, which is why the early prices on a long chart can look like loose change.
Looking up those splits is easier than understanding them. Split tables list dates and ratios, yet they rarely agree on which date counts, and they say almost nothing about what the change did to a holder's shares, dividend or orders. Headlines about the next split mostly guess at timing.
A split follows fixed steps that a company sets out in advance: the board approves it, a record date fixes who receives the new shares, and the shares are delivered before trading starts at the lower price. Because every holder's count is multiplied by the same ratio, its effect comes down to division you can do yourself.
Microsoft split its shares again and again in its early years as a listed company, and then the splits stopped while the price kept rising. If your savings are in crypto, BloFin's MSFTUSDT Perpetual follows Microsoft's share price in contracts of 0.01 MSFT.
What is a Microsoft stock split?
A Microsoft stock split gives every shareholder extra shares at a lower price per share, so the total value of each holding stays the same. Microsoft has done this nine times since its March 1986 listing, and its board decides whether there is ever a tenth (source: Microsoft investor FAQ).
The ratio tells you how many shares you end up with. A 2-for-1 split gives you one extra share for every share you hold, so the price halves. A 3-for-2 split gives you one extra share for every two, so the price falls by a third (source: Microsoft investor FAQ). Every other owner on the list of Microsoft's owners gets the same ratio at the same moment, which is why your percentage of the company is unchanged.
Say you own 10 Microsoft shares at $530, worth $5,300 in all. After a 2-for-1 split you would own 20 shares at $265 each, and the holding would still be worth $5,300 until the market moves. Microsoft's last split, a 2-for-1 in February 2003, worked exactly this way (source: Microsoft investor FAQ).
Microsoft's stock split history
Microsoft split its stock nine times between September 1987 and February 2003: seven 2-for-1 splits and two 3-for-2 splits. Taken together, those nine splits turned each share sold at the March 13, 1986 IPO into 288 shares, and Microsoft has done no split of any kind since 2003 (source: Microsoft investor FAQ).
Microsoft's own record gives each split's payable date, the day the new shares were delivered, with the closing price that day and the closing price on the first session that traded at the new basis.
Payable date | Ratio | Close on the payable date | First split-adjusted close | Shares from one IPO share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
September 18, 1987 | 2-for-1 | $114.50 | $53.50 (September 21) | 2 |
April 12, 1990 | 2-for-1 | $120.75 | $60.75 (April 16) | 4 |
June 26, 1991 | 3-for-2 | $100.75 | $68.00 (June 27) | 6 |
June 12, 1992 | 3-for-2 | $112.50 | $75.75 (June 15) | 9 |
May 20, 1994 | 2-for-1 | $97.75 | $50.63 (May 23) | 18 |
December 6, 1996 | 2-for-1 | $152.875 | $81.75 (December 9) | 36 |
February 20, 1998 | 2-for-1 | $155.13 | $81.63 (February 23) | 72 |
March 26, 1999 | 2-for-1 | $178.13 | $92.38 (March 29) | 144 |
February 14, 2003 | 2-for-1 | $48.30 | $24.96 (February 18) | 288 |
The pace stands out as much as the count. Eight of the nine came in the 12 years from 1987 to 1999, often about a year apart, each time with the price back near $100 or higher. The last one followed almost four years later, at a price below $50.
The February 2003 split, date by date
The 2003 split shows the four dates every split carries. Microsoft announced it on January 16, 2003, and holders of record on January 27 received one extra share for each share they held. The new shares were mailed or delivered on or about February 14, and the outstanding count rose to about 10.8 billion (source: Microsoft's 2003 split announcement).
The shares first traded at the new price on Tuesday, February 18, 2003 (source: Microsoft investor FAQ), the first session after the Presidents' Day market holiday on Monday, February 17. That is why some split tables show February 14, the delivery date, while Microsoft describes February 18 as the day the split took effect. Both are correct, and they describe two different steps of the same split.
Microsoft also gave its reason in that announcement, saying it believed the split, combined with an annual dividend, would make the stock more attractive to a broader range of investors (source: Microsoft's 2003 split announcement). From announcement to the first split-adjusted session took 33 days.
How one IPO share became 288
The 288 comes from multiplying the nine ratios. Seven 2-for-1 splits double a holding seven times, which gives 128, and two 3-for-2 splits multiply it by 1.5 twice, which gives 2.25. Then 128 times 2.25 is 288, the figure Microsoft gives for one original share (source: Microsoft investor FAQ).
So if you had bought 100 shares at the IPO and never sold, you would now hold 28,800 shares. No new money went in at any point along the way. Each split handed out more shares, and the price of each share fell by the same factor on the day it happened.
Microsoft's share price on each split day
On each split day, Microsoft's price fell by about the split ratio, and the rest of the move was ordinary trading. Comparing each first split-adjusted close with the old close divided by the ratio shows a gap of between 6.6% below and 7.0% above, using Microsoft's own closing prices for the nine splits (source: Microsoft investor FAQ).
Take the first split, in September 1987. The stock closed at $114.50 on the payable date, so a 2-for-1 split points to $57.25. The first split-adjusted close was $53.50, about 6.6% lower, so the shares lost 6.6% in that first session on top of the split itself.
December 1996 went the other way. The stock closed at $152.875, which halves to about $76.44, and the next close was $81.75, about 7.0% higher. In the other seven splits the gap was smaller, from 0.6% to 5.2%. That spread is the clearest way to see that a split resets the unit while the market keeps setting the value.
How split-adjusted prices work
A split-adjusted price is an old price divided by every split that came after it, so you can compare it directly with today's price. Microsoft's close of $178.13 on March 26, 1999, the last day before that year's split, becomes about $44.53 once you divide it by 2 for the 1999 split and by 2 again for 2003 (source: Microsoft investor FAQ).
That is why Microsoft's 1986 IPO price of $21.00 shows up on long charts as about 7 cents: $21 divided by 288 (source: Microsoft investor FAQ). Price data sites restate the whole record this way after every split, so the line on the chart stays smooth across each split day.
Microsoft's investor site has a historic price lookup that does the same arithmetic for you. It shows prices on a split-adjusted basis for the date you choose, which gives a holder of old shares their cost per share on today's basis (source: Microsoft dividends and stock history). Read across 40 years, those adjusted prices trace Microsoft's long-run price record through each boom and fall since the IPO.
The 23 years since Microsoft's last split
For most of the 23 years since Microsoft's last split, its share price sat well below the range where it used to split. After the 2003 split it did not close above $50 again until October 2015, and it first passed $100 in June 2018, according to The Motley Fool (source: The Motley Fool).
That article, published on October 3, 2026, put the split question back in front of investors. It noted that Microsoft's first eight splits all came with the share at roughly $98 to $178, and that the stock crossed $178 only in February 2020 (source: The Motley Fool). The highest price at which Microsoft ever split was its $178.13 close on March 26, 1999 (source: Microsoft investor FAQ).
The price now sits far above that old range. Microsoft closed at $531.33 on October 27, 2026 (source: Stock Analysis MSFT history), which is 2.98 times the highest price it ever split at. Undo the 2003 split, and that close equals about $1,063 on the old share basis.
The share count has moved the other way. Microsoft had about 10.8 billion shares right after the 2003 split (source: Microsoft's 2003 split announcement) and 7,426,426,719 on September 30, 2026 (source: Microsoft's 2026 proxy statement). That is about 31% fewer shares. Microsoft keeps buying back its own stock: its fiscal 2026 10-K reports repurchases in each of the three fiscal years from July 2023 to June 2026 (source: Microsoft's fiscal 2026 10-K).
Will Microsoft split its stock again?
Any decision to split Microsoft's stock again rests with its board (source: Microsoft investor FAQ), and Microsoft has announced no plan for another split (source: The Motley Fool). What you can weigh are the conditions any tenth split would meet: who has to approve it, how many shares the company may issue, and what a lower share price would change.
The approval rules come from Washington, where Microsoft is incorporated. Microsoft is a Washington corporation (source: Microsoft's fiscal 2026 10-K) with a single class of stock (source: Microsoft's 2026 proxy statement). Washington law lets the board of a company with one class of shares carry out a forward split on its own, and raise the number of authorized shares in proportion, unless the company's articles say otherwise (source: Washington RCW 23B.10.020). So a shareholder vote would be needed only if the articles required one.
The share limit is the second condition. Microsoft is authorized to issue 24 billion common shares (source: Microsoft's fiscal 2026 10-K), about 3.23 times the 7,426,426,719 shares outstanding. A 2-for-1 or a 3-for-1 split would fit inside that limit, while a 4-for-1 would need about 29.7 billion shares, so the limit would have to rise with it. The same Washington rule lets the board make that change in proportion to the split.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is where a lower price would show. The Dow weights its members by share price, and The Motley Fool put Microsoft at roughly 6% of the index, the third-largest weight, which a 2-for-1 split would cut to about 3% (source: The Motley Fool).
Recent splits elsewhere came at much higher prices. The same article listed Nvidia's 10-for-1 announced in May 2024 near $950 a share, Broadcom's a month later at about $1,500, and Netflix's in October 2025 at about $1,090 (source: The Motley Fool). None of these cases tells you what Microsoft's board will choose, though Nvidia's 10-for-1 split shows the steps one recent split followed.
What a split would change for a Microsoft shareholder
For a Microsoft shareholder, a split resets the share price, the share count and each per-share number, such as earnings or the dividend per share. Your total value, your stake in the company and ratios such as the dividend yield end up where they started, because the price and the per-share numbers shrink by one and the same factor.
Here is what a 2-for-1 or a 10-for-1 split would do at an illustrative price of $530, using Microsoft's quarterly dividend of $0.98 a share (source: Microsoft dividends and stock history) and the 7,426,426,719 shares outstanding on September 30, 2026 (source: Microsoft's 2026 proxy statement).
What you look at | Before, at $530 | After a 2-for-1 split | After a 10-for-1 split |
|---|---|---|---|
Share price | $530 | $265 | $53 |
Shares outstanding | 7,426,426,719 | 14,852,853,438 | 74,264,267,190 |
Market value | about $3.9 trillion | about $3.9 trillion | about $3.9 trillion |
Quarterly dividend per share | $0.98 | $0.49 | $0.098 |
Dividend yield | 0.74% | 0.74% | 0.74% |
Your 10 shares become | 10 shares, $5,300 | 20 shares, $5,300 | 100 shares, $5,300 |
Quarterly dividend on that holding | $9.80 | $9.80 | $9.80 |
Stock behind one 100-share options contract | $53,000 | $26,500 | $5,300 |
Your holding is worth the same after either split, and the dividend you receive each quarter is the same $9.80. What does change is the size of the smallest unit you can buy, and that matters most for options, since one listed contract covers 100 shares. At $530 a share, a single contract controls $53,000 of stock, which a 10-for-1 split would cut to $5,300.
Buying a small slice of Microsoft at today's price
Companies have mostly split to bring a whole share within reach of a small budget, and buying part of a share does the same. Brokers such as Fidelity sell fractions from $1 (source: The Motley Fool), and the MSFTUSDT Perpetual, one of BloFin's listed stock perpetuals, trades in contracts of 0.01 MSFT (source: BloFin MSFTUSDT listing notice), which is also its smallest order (source: BloFin MSFT contract details).
At a price of 530 USDT, one contract is worth about 5.30 USDT, and at 10x leverage the margin for it is about 0.53 USDT. The share price, through the contract's mark price, still sets what each contract is worth and how much margin it needs, so a higher price means a bigger contract. It just stops deciding whether you can start at all.
A split would leave that arithmetic in place. If Microsoft's shares were split 2-for-1 and the price fell to about 265 USDT, a 0.01 MSFT contract would be worth about 2.65 USDT, and you would need twice as many contracts for the same exposure. Broker fractions, tokenized shares and the perpetual each give you exposure to part of a share in a different way, and buying Microsoft with crypto sets out what each route includes.
You can see the live price and the contract's terms on the MSFTUSDT Perpetual trading page.
How an MSFTUSDT position would be treated in a split
If Microsoft announced a split, BloFin would publish a separate market notice explaining how the MSFTUSDT Perpetual handles it. BloFin's listing notice for the contract promises separate market notices for corporate actions that may materially affect the share price, naming stock splits, reverse stock splits, mergers and spinoffs (source: BloFin MSFTUSDT listing notice).
The reason is the price the contract follows. The MSFTUSDT Perpetual tracks the price of Microsoft's US-listed common stock (source: BloFin MSFTUSDT listing notice). On a split's first day that price drops by the ratio, so a 2-for-1 would take a $530 share to about $265 at the open. Left unadjusted, a long position would show that drop as a loss even though Microsoft's value had stayed the same, which is why the event needs its own handling.
The contract also carries no rights to the shares. Under BloFin's stock futures notice, the contracts carry no shareholder rights of any kind, and share splits are named among the rights offerings left out (source: BloFin stock futures notice). A split hands extra shares to shareholders, so a contract holder receives nothing extra and depends on the notice for how the position is treated.
That makes the notice the thing to read before you hold a position across a split date. With leverage, a sharp price change can bring the liquidation price into reach, so check the MSFT perpetual's margin and funding terms at the same time.
Looking to trade Microsoft's share price, split or no split? To get started, you'll need to first create a BloFin account, fund your account with cryptocurrency, and go to the MSFTUSDT Perpetual trading page.
Frequently asked questions
Does a stock split change Microsoft's dividend?
The dividend per share falls by the split ratio, while the total you receive stays the same because you own more shares. Microsoft declared an annual dividend on January 16, 2003, the same day it announced its last split. It set the payment at $0.16 a share before the split, or $0.08 after it, for holders of record on February 21, three days after the split took effect (source: Microsoft's 2003 split announcement).
How many shares would $1,000 of Microsoft's IPO stock be now?
At the IPO price of $21.00 a share, $1,000 bought about 47.62 shares on March 13, 1986 (source: Microsoft investor FAQ). Nine splits have multiplied each share by 288, so those 47.62 shares are now about 13,714 shares. At Microsoft's $531.33 close on October 27, 2026, those shares were worth about $7.3 million, before counting any dividends collected along the way (source: Stock Analysis MSFT history).
What happens to an open order at a broker when Microsoft splits?
Your broker changes any open buy limit or sell stop order you hold on the first split-adjusted day. Under FINRA Rule 5330, the order price is cut by the split's value, and the share count is multiplied by the ratio and then rounded down to the nearest whole share. Marking an order "Do Not Increase" keeps its size as it was, and in a reverse split the broker cancels open orders instead (source: FINRA Rule 5330).
Has Microsoft ever done a reverse stock split?
All nine of Microsoft's splits were forward splits, either 2-for-1 or 3-for-2, so each one raised the share count (source: Microsoft investor FAQ). A reverse split works the opposite way: it merges several shares into one at a higher price, usually to lift a low share price. A 1-for-10 reverse split would turn 10 shares at $5 into one share at $50, with the total value unchanged at $50.
How do you find Microsoft's split-adjusted price for an old date?
Divide the price on your old statement by every split that took effect after that date. Say you paid $90 a share in January 2000: only the 2003 split came later, so that is $45 a share on today's basis. A $90 price from August 1998 came before both the 1999 and the 2003 splits, so it divides by 4, to $22.50. Microsoft's historic stock lookup gives the adjusted close for any date you pick (source: Microsoft dividends and stock history).
Researched and written by the BloFin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. All facts independently verified. Primary sources include Microsoft's investor FAQ and dividends and stock history pages, its January 16, 2003 split and dividend announcement, its 2026 proxy statement and fiscal 2026 10-K, Washington's RCW 23B.10.020, FINRA Rule 5330, The Motley Fool and Stock Analysis. BloFin's sources are its MSFTUSDT listing notice, its stock futures notice and its MSFT contract details, current as of October 28, 2026.
Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold Microsoft in any form. A stock split leaves a holding's value unchanged, so buying on a rumored split carries the same price risk as any other purchase. The MSFTUSDT Perpetual gives you no shares and no split entitlement, how it would treat a split depends on a notice BloFin publishes for that event, and a leveraged position can be liquidated if Microsoft's price moves against you. Past performance does not indicate future results. Do your own research and consider your risk tolerance before you trade on BloFin.