TRIN Stock: Dividend vs NII, ATM Issuance and NAV (Q2 2026)

Which Trinity Capital this is, and what changed in July

Several unrelated companies use the name. This page is about Trinity Capital Inc., the Phoenix, Arizona business development company (BDC) that files with the SEC under CIK 1786108. Any list that still shows “Nasdaq: TRIN” is out of date: on July 14, 2026 the company announced it would withdraw its listing from the Nasdaq Global Select Market and move to the New York Stock Exchange and NYSE Texas, and the Q2 earnings release says the common stock “transferred” on July 27, 2026 under the same ticker. Its two 7.875% notes moved the same day, to TRNZ and TRNI.

It is internally managed. The 10-K says: “Therefore, we do not pay any external investment advisory fees”, because the executives and employees are employed by the company itself. What Trinity pays instead is compensation ($12.4 million in Q2 2026, against $17.3 million in Q1) and other operating costs. It also runs a registered investment adviser, Trinity Capital Adviser LLC, for outside investors, which makes the 10-Q and the investor presentation read more like an asset manager's than a plain lender's; that part has its own section below.

The latest filings are the 10-Q and earnings release of August 5, 2026 (accessions 0001193125-26-333907 and -333904), the October 5 notes 8-K and an October 8 portfolio update. The October 8 update gives preliminary third-quarter activity: $880 million of new commitments, $614 million funded and $495 million of repayments and exits, of which $195 million were early repayments and refinancings and $237 million were debt investments sold. It gives no income or NAV figures. The company says it will release complete third-quarter results on Wednesday, November 4, 2026, and the company filed its 10-Q and its release on the same day in both November 2025 and August 2026. As of October 16, 2026 the 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2026 is not filed, so every balance and per-share figure on this page is as of June 30, 2026 or earlier.

NII against $0.51: eight quarters

The table uses each quarter's earnings release. The payout is the same $0.51 in all eight quarters. The percentage column divides reported NII per basic share by $0.51 (our arithmetic); the company's own slide says “Regular dividend coverage of 100% based on 2Q26 NII per share”.

What the table shows:

• Dollars up, per share down. NII grew from $29.4 million to $46.0 million, 56.5%. Weighted shares grew from 54.4 million to 90.5 million, 66.4%. NII per share peaked at $0.58 in Q4 2024 and has been between $0.51 and $0.53 for five quarters (our arithmetic). In the company's own year-over-year framing, Q2 NII “grew 32.1%”, while the per-share figure fell from $0.53 to $0.51.
• Q2 2026's NII rose for a reason that is not income. Total investment income fell 3.3% from Q1 ($90.1 million to $87.2 million), yet NII rose 3.4% ($44.5 million to $46.0 million) because compensation and benefits dropped from $17.3 million to $12.4 million (investor presentation). Interest expense was $24.8 million, 28.4% of investment income, against 27.3% in Q3 2024 (our arithmetic).
• GAAP earnings sit below NII. The sum of the eight quarterly net increases in net assets per share is $4.03 against $4.08 of distributions (99%, our arithmetic). The gap is realized and unrealized losses: Q4 2025 had a $33.9 million net realized loss, “primarily due to the conversion of two debt positions”, and Q3 2025 a $20.0 million one.
• Annual history is the same story. The 10-K per-share tables:

NAV per share was $16.40 at the end of 2021 and fell $3.25 in 2022 (10-K); it has been between $13.15 and $13.47 at every year end since and at June 30, 2026. Over the same span NII per share fell 10% from its 2023 high (our arithmetic).

Undistributed income, which the company calls spillover, is the other cushion. It was $66.8 million ($1.08 per share) at December 31, 2024, $68.7 million ($0.84) at December 31, 2025 and $66.4 million at June 30, 2026, which is $0.71 on 94.0 million shares (our arithmetic). The dollar pool is flat; each share's slice of it has shrunk by a third in 18 months because there are more shares.

The monthly switch, and why trailing yields look wrong

Until the end of 2025 Trinity declared one dividend a quarter, paid in the middle of the month after quarter end. The December 17, 2025 declaration changed that: it declared the Q4 2025 quarterly $0.51 (record December 31, paid January 15, 2026) and, in the same declaration, monthly $0.17 payments for January, February and March 2026. The 10-Q shows these dates:

Two consequences. First, the 10-Q lists $2.55 of distributions declared “during the year ended December 31, 2025”: four quarterly $0.51 declarations plus the $0.51 of first-quarter 2026 monthlies, which were declared in 2025. Second, if you add up payments dated October 15, 2025 through September 30, 2026 you also get $2.55 ($0.51 on October 15, $0.51 on January 15, and nine monthly $0.17), against the $2.04 a year the board has actually been paying (our arithmetic). A trailing-twelve-month yield calculated from payment dates will include the extra $0.51 of that overlap until early 2027. The company's own slide annualizes the $0.17 monthly payment against the $17.89 June 30 closing price: 11.4%. Since inception it has declared $12.27 per share.

The company's wording is that its board “generally determines and announces the Company's dividend distributions on a quarterly basis, with distributions paid monthly”. The July-to-September declaration came on June 17, and we found no SEC filing declaring October to December 2026 as of October 16, 2026. The Q3 2026 release is the next likely place. The company also cites “27th consecutive quarter of a consistent regular dividend”; the 10-Q price table shows $0.51 in each quarter since the first quarter of 2024 and the 10-K shows $2.04 a year for 2023, 2024 and 2025.

40 million shares: ATM issuance and what it did to NAV

Trinity sells stock continuously through an at-the-market (ATM) program. A new agreement on May 7, 2026 added up to $300.0 million of capacity. Here is the quarter-by-quarter record from the earnings releases; the premium column compares the average ATM price with that quarter-end's NAV per share (our arithmetic).

Between July 1 and August 3, 2026 it sold another 662,575 shares at $17.75 for $11.6 million net. Shares outstanding went from 51,849,429 at June 30, 2024 to 94,023,371 at June 30, 2026 (+81.3%), and net assets from $680.0 million to $1,266.8 million. The ATM accounts for about 40.1 of the 42.2 million new shares (our arithmetic); the releases do not itemize the other 2.0 million, and the 10-Q reports 72,751 shares from the dividend reinvestment plan in the first half of 2026. The Q2 release describes the effect on NAV: “The increase in total net assets was primarily due to accretive ATM issuances, partially offset by net portfolio performance.”

The per-share tables in the 10-K and 10-Q put numbers on “accretive”. When a share is sold for more than NAV per share, the cash raised is more than the book value the new share takes on, so NAV per share rises; sold below NAV, it falls. The per-share table has a line for this, “Effect of shares issued and repurchased”:

Without the issuance line, NAV per share would have fallen $0.19 in the first half of 2026 (the 10-Q reports a $0.05 rise; our arithmetic), and across the 2.5 years the portfolio's net losses of $0.32 would have outweighed the $0.22 NII surplus. The Q1 2026 line was $0.01, so about $0.23 of the $0.24 came in Q2, the quarter when the ATM price was 21.7% above NAV (our arithmetic). That is also the limit of the mechanism: it works only while the price stays well above NAV. Issued at or near NAV, new shares add little per share, and in Q2 2026 NII left nothing above the payout.

Price against NAV

The 10-Q gives a closing price at each period end next to NAV, and a high and low close for each quarter.

Between December 31, 2025 and June 30, 2026 the price rose 22.1% while NAV per share rose 0.4% (our arithmetic). On August 3, 2026 the NYSE close was $17.83, a 32.4% premium to the June 30 NAV, and in the 10-Q table the lowest close in any quarter since Q4 2024 was above NAV. The filings do not say why the price moved. The practical point is that the share issuance and the premium are linked: the ATM sold 6.13 million shares in the quarter the premium reached 32.8%.

How much of NII is early-repayment income

Trinity records accelerated fees and end-of-term payments when a loan is repaid early, and charges prepayment penalties. The 10-Q income table separates them. The next table adds acceleration of original-issue-discount and end-of-term payments to prepayment penalties and related fees, divides by weighted shares and subtracts from reported NII (our arithmetic). It is a rough pre-tax floor: it ignores the compensation and excise-tax effects that would also fall away, and cents may not subtract exactly because the NII figure is calculated from unrounded dollars. Q4 figures are full-year 10-K amounts less the nine-month 10-Q amounts.

In none of the eight quarters does NII without these items reach $0.51; the closest is Q4 2024 at 97%. That does not mean the dividend is fragile: these items appear in every quarter, and the effective yield on average debt investments has been 15.0% to 16.4% throughout (Q2 2026: 15.0%; the investor presentation puts the core yield, which leaves out prepayment items, at 12.8%). It means the payout is covered only because of the repayment cycle and because of the fee lines. Total investment income in Q2 2026 was made of:

Dividend income plus other fee income was $7.8 million in Q2 2026 (8.9% of investment income) against $2.4 million in Q2 2025 (3.5%), and dividend income alone was $4.6 million in Q1 2026. The investor presentation footnotes that this line “includes fees and dividend income earned from Senior Credit Corp 2022 LLC, Eagle Point Trinity Senior Secured Lending Company, Direct Lending 2025 LLC, and CapTrin Partners, LLC”. The next section explains what those are; the filings do not split the $7.8 million among them.

Managed funds: the RIA and the joint ventures

Trinity describes itself as an alternative asset manager, and the structure supports the claim in part. The 10-Q says the BDC owns, as an unconsolidated wholly owned subsidiary, Trinity Capital Adviser LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser that started operations on June 28, 2024. It receives management and incentive fees from the funds it advises and “expects to declare and pay dividend distributions to the Company”. The BDC shares staff and facilities with it and charges it a pro-rata share of expenses: $0.9 million in Q2 2026 and $2.0 million in the first half, against $0.5 million and $0.9 million a year earlier. At June 30, 2026 the Adviser owed the BDC $6.4 million.

The investor presentation counts $3.2 billion of “Total Platform Assets Under Management” at fair value at June 30, 2026, against $2.8 billion at December 31, 2025 and $2.0 billion at September 30, 2024, and says that figure “includes the fair value of assets managed by Trinity Capital through Senior Credit Corp 2022 LLC, Eagle Point Trinity Senior Secured Lending Company (fka EPT 16 LLC), Trinity Capital Adviser LLC, Direct Lending 2025 LLC, and Trinity Capital SBIC LP”. What the 10-Q gives for each:

• Senior Credit Corp 2022 LLC: a joint venture, 12.5% owned by Trinity, with $212.9 million of investments at June 30, 2026. It buys loans Trinity originates; Trinity sold it $44.7 million of investments in the first half of 2026 and $110.6 million in 2025, and earns origination and administrative fees (about $0.6 million a quarter).
• Eagle Point Trinity Senior Secured Lending Company (EPT): started as EPT 16 LLC in June 2024 with a specialty credit manager and converted into a statutory trust that elected BDC status on August 28, 2025. Trinity owns 16.4%; its portfolio was $140.0 million. Trinity sold it $28.3 million of investments in the first half of 2026 and $74.0 million in 2025, and the Adviser earns base management and incentive fees from it.
• Direct Lending 2025 LLC: a 50/50 joint venture with a credit financing platform, each side committing $100.0 million; Trinity had contributed $23.3 million and had $87.4 million unfunded, and the portfolio was $24.5 million. The Adviser earns base management and incentive fees from it too.
• Trinity Capital Adviser LLC: the RIA above. The three vehicles hold $377.4 million (our arithmetic), small next to the $2.7 billion on the BDC's own balance sheet. The 10-Q gives no figure for the Adviser's fee income, so the filings do not let a reader size what managed funds contribute to the $0.51 of NII.

The reasonable reading is that managed-fund fees and joint-venture income are real and growing (the dividend and fee lines more than tripled in a year), but small next to $64.0 million of stated interest, and not yet separable in the filings. Trinity's own CEO frames the company in these terms in the Q2 release: “directly originated, diversified across five verticals, a growing managed funds platform”.

What it lends to: loans, equipment and warrants

At June 30, 2026 the portfolio was $2,732.3 million at fair value ($2,718.2 million at cost) across 190 portfolio companies: $2,046.9 million of secured loans to 97 companies, $390.4 million of equipment financings to 23 companies and $295.0 million of equity and warrants in 161 companies (investor presentation). Equity and warrants are 10.8% of the portfolio (our arithmetic). Warrants were $80.5 million at fair value in 202 positions across 129 companies; equity was $214.5 million, of which $29.8 million is carried at the net asset value of multi-sector holdings that own loans Trinity originated. The presentation says the largest credit exposure is under 4% of debt investments and shows 8.2% in an international bucket of its geographic allocation.

The presentation describes five verticals: tech lending (senior secured term loans to institutionally backed technology companies), equipment finance (financing of manufacturing equipment and hard assets), healthcare and life sciences (term loans to commercial-stage life sciences companies), sponsor finance (enterprise-value term loans to private-equity-backed growth companies) and asset-based lending (revolving lines to bankruptcy-remote special-purpose vehicles). The 10-Q does not give dollars by vertical; it gives industries:

SaaS and AI infrastructure went from 15.4% to 21.7% of the book in six months (our arithmetic), while biotechnology fell from 5.0% to 3.3%. In Q3 2026, per the October 8 update, $77 million of the $614 million funded was warrant and equity investments, against $38.2 million in Q2.

Loan book: first lien, ratings, non-accruals

Two quality trends run opposite to what a reader might expect from a fast-growing lender. The share of first-lien loans has risen every quarter since December 2024, and the internal ratings have moved up.

The two rating columns are sums of the shares in each release (our arithmetic). The scale is 1 (default or workout) to 5 (very strong), so a higher score is better. The company cautions: “A company may be downgraded as it approaches the need for additional capital or if it is underperforming relative to its business plans.” Ratings are internal and move with funding cycles, so the jump to 52.9% strong or very strong is a statement about the portfolio's recent funding as much as its credit.

Non-accruals tell a more mixed story, because fair value and cost move differently:

At June 30, 2026 loans to four portfolio companies and equipment financing to one were on non-accrual, carried at 45.6% of their cost (our arithmetic: $18.7 million over $41.0 million). The cost of non-accruals fell from $56.2 million to $20.7 million between September and December 2025, the quarter that booked a $33.9 million net realized loss which the release attributes to the conversion of two debt positions (the filings do not say whether those were the same loans), and had doubled to $41.2 million by March 31. Realized losses were booked in seven of eight quarters, $79.7 million in total (our arithmetic). The company's investor presentation cites an annualized loss rate of 22 basis points that it says is “more than offset by realized gains on warrant and equity investments”; that is a cumulative company measure and is not comparable to the quarterly statement of operations lines, which include warrants and equity. The same release shows $10.6 million of net unrealized depreciation on debt investments in Q2 2026 and $8.5 million of appreciation on warrants.

Debt: the 4% notes meet 7%

At June 30, 2026 the company had $1,513.98 million of borrowings in the contractual-obligations table (our sum of the debt lines, excluding $8.8 million of leases), a net debt-to-equity ratio of 118% and an asset coverage ratio of 183.7% against the 150% minimum. Available liquidity was $430.1 million: $22.2 million of cash and $407.9 million of undrawn capacity on the $690.0 million KeyBank credit facility. The investor presentation lists the instruments:

The two 2026 notes are $200.0 million at a blended 4.33% (our arithmetic). If they are replaced at the 7.000% of the May 2031 notes, interest rises $5.3 million a year; at the 7.500% of the new 2032 notes, $6.3 million. On 94.0 million shares that is $0.06 to $0.07 a share a year, which on a $0.51 payout and 100% coverage is not small. This is an illustration, not a forecast. The October 2 prospectus supplement says the 7.500% notes' estimated net proceeds of $342.61 million will “pay down a portion of our existing indebtedness outstanding under the KeyBank Credit Facility and for general corporate purposes”, a floating-rate line costing SOFR plus 2.85% to 3.25%, so the net effect depends on SOFR, which these filings do not settle. The filings we read do not say how the August 24 maturity was funded; the Q3 10-Q will show it.

Interest expense rose from $16.9 million in Q3 2024 to $24.8 million in Q2 2026 (+46.7%, our arithmetic) as the book grew, against investment income up 41.1%. The company's presentation lists ratings of BBB (Egan-Jones), BBB(low) (Morningstar DBRS) and Baa3 (Moody's), and 32.1% of borrowings were floating rate at June 30 against 81.5% of loans.

TRIN against HTGC

Hercules Capital is another internally managed BDC that lends to venture-backed companies, and our Hercules page covers it. The two share a structure and differ on the points below (HTGC figures from that page, June 30, 2026 unless stated).

The structural difference is the way each fills the gap between earnings and a high payout. Hercules pays a small base and tops it up from a spillover pool that has grown. Trinity pays a flat amount that NII just covers and funds the growth of the book largely by selling new shares above NAV. Neither is a statement about future payouts. For how the same questions look on external-manager BDCs, see Main Street Capital, Blue Owl Capital Corporation and our 36-BDC non-accrual census; the listed BDC list ranks all of them by net assets.

What a holder or reader can do with this

This is a checklist built from the filings, not a recommendation.

• Decide what you are measuring. Against $0.51, NII covered the payout 100% to 114% in eight quarters; without early-repayment and prepayment items it was 79% to 97% (our arithmetic). The 100% in Q2 2026 includes a drop in compensation and a jump in fee income.
• Read the Q3 release for five lines (November 4, 2026): NII per share against $0.51; the October to December declaration; non-accruals at cost ($41.0 million at June 30) and at fair value; shares sold through the ATM and the price against NAV; and how the August 24 notes were repaid.
• Look at the premium before the yield. The 32.8% premium at June 30 is what makes new shares accretive. If it narrows, issuance adds less to NAV per share, and the source of growth changes.
• Check any “trailing” yield. Count payments from October 15, 2025 through September 30, 2026: $2.55. The run rate is $2.04.
• If you hold a non-traded BDC or interval fund, compare what you can see here with what you can't: a daily price, a premium to NAV and an ATM that sells new shares, all absent in a fund that prices at NAV and exits through tender offers. The non-traded BDC list and what a BDC is cover that structure.
• Mind the tax paperwork. Distributions on a BDC share usually arrive on Form 1099-DIV after year end; see our 1099-DIV timeline.

FAQ

All figures are from Trinity Capital Inc.'s SEC filings read on EDGAR on October 16, 2026: the earnings releases (Exhibit 99.1) for Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (accessions 0000950170-24-118599, 0000950170-25-027340, -25-065026, -25-103546, 0001193125-25-265801, 0001193125-26-068599, -26-207619 and -26-333904); the Q2 2026 investor presentation (Exhibit 99.2, accession 0001193125-26-333904); the Forms 10-Q for September 30, 2024 (0000950170-24-118600), March 31, 2025 (0000950170-25-065028), June 30, 2025 (0000950170-25-103547), September 30, 2025 (0001193125-25-265807), March 31, 2026 (0001193125-26-207620) and June 30, 2026 (0001193125-26-333907); the Forms 10-K for 2024 (0000950170-25-027341) and 2025 (0001193125-26-068600); the 8-K of July 14, 2026 (0001193125-26-303247); the 8-Ks of October 5 and October 8, 2026 (0001213900-26-106862 and 0001193125-26-418097); and the prospectus supplement of October 2, 2026 (0001213900-26-106392). HTGC figures are from our Hercules Capital page, which cites that company's own filings. Percentages of one figure against another, sums across quarters, the NAV bridge, the NII-less-items table, premiums to NAV and the refinancing illustration are our arithmetic. Effective yield, core yield and platform assets under management are company measures. This is analysis of public documents, not investment, legal or tax advice.