Best IYRI Alternatives in 2026

The Best IYRI Alternatives category groups 12 real-estate income funds spanning broad market-cap-weighted REIT trackers and higher-yield, niche REIT strategies. Vanguard, Schwab, State Street, and iShares dominate the plain-vanilla REIT index space with VNQ, SCHH, XLRE, REET, USRT, IYR, and ICF, all paying quarterly distributions with expense ratios between 0.07% and 0.37%. A second tier—KBWY and SRET—represents more concentrated, higher-yield approaches from Invesco and Global X, paying monthly and carrying materially higher expense ratios. Issuers like InfraCap and YieldMax appear in the category's issuer list but are not among the top 10 shown here, suggesting additional specialized or derivative-income strategies exist among the remaining two funds not detailed above.

• Strategy mismatch: several funds on this list track a different index or use a different income mechanism than IYRI, so swapping into one changes the exposure — upside participation, payout cadence, and tax character can all shift, not just the ticker.
• Concentration in one theme: most funds here focus on real estate, so the whole list tends to draw down together when that corner of the market falls out of favor — diversification across the table is lower than the fund count suggests.
• Distributions are not contractual: each payout is declared period by period, so the yields on this page can fall without notice when portfolio income, option premium, or fund policy changes.
• Methodology divergence: every fund here follows its own index rules or mandate, so two funds with similar headline yields can hold very different portfolios and diverge sharply in a drawdown — category membership is not interchangeability.
• Screens react after the fact: a fund's place in this list is re-rated only once a dividend cut, strategy change, or asset decline has already shown up in the reported data.

• Universe: a hand-curated peer set, split into close peers (1 here — same core exposure and same income mechanism, so a like-for-like swap) and broader substitutes (a different index, underlying asset, or income mechanism). Every fund is labelled in the Strategy fit column; IYRI itself is excluded.
• Eligibility: active ETFs only — liquidated, delisted, and renamed funds drop out automatically. Leveraged and inverse products are never listed: a daily-reset 2x or -1x fund is not an alternative to a long income position.
• Ranking: assets under management, used only as a fund-size ranking. Never ranked by yield — yields are shown as data, not used to order the list.
• Fit: how each fund's strategy differs from IYRI — and who each one suits — is covered in the strategy notes and FAQ below.