Dividend checks continue to get fatter in Corporate America, as more companies jack up their distribution rates.

Readers of the Income Investor newsletter can certainly appreciate that kind of thinking. Let's take a closer look at some of the companies that inched their payouts higher this past week.

Let's start with Washington Federal (Nasdaq: WFSL).

The regional banker with $13.4 billion in assets is making its quarterly dividend more interesting, hiking it 33% to $0.08 a share. Washington Federal juiced up its yield despite announcing the acquisition of a failed Phoenix-based bank just a few days earlier.

CVS Caremark (NYSE: CVS) issued upbeat guidance for 2012 last week, giving the drugstore chain and prescriptions manager the flexibility to increase its quarterly rate 30% to $0.1625 a share.

Fulton Financial (Nasdaq: FULT) is boosting its quarterly disbursements by 20% to $0.06 a share. The regional banker has 273 branches through six affiliate banking brands in its home state of Pennsylvania as well as Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Yes, Virginia. There is a payout hike.

Finally we have Village Super Markets (Nasdaq: VLGEA) stocking up on chunkier distributions. The operator of 28 ShopRite grocery stores declared a quarterly dividend of $0.25 a share, well ahead of the $0.10 a share that it was paying in the three previous quarters.

These companies join smartphone semiconductor specialist Spreadtrum Communications (Nasdaq: SPRD) and banker Colony Financial (Nasdaq: CLNY) in recently jacking up their yields. Medical products maker Zimmer Holdings (NYSE: ZMH) initiated a quarterly dividend policy.

Subscribers to the Income Investor newsletter can appreciate the companies sending more and more money to their investors. The newsletter singles out companies that are committed to growing their distributions with market-thumping results.

Want to see what is being recommended these days? Go ahead and give the newsletter service a shot with a 30-day trial subscription. Who knows? Maybe the next thing that will get hiked will be your interest.

If you want to track these stocks to see if and when they hike their payouts again, consider adding them to MyWatchlist.