Monthly or quarterly.

The compounding difference is real and tiny

Reinvesting twelve times a year rather than four does compound faster, because each payment starts earning sooner. At a 10% annual rate, monthly reinvestment produces 10.47% against 10.38% quarterly — a difference of about 0.09 percentage points a year.

That is not nothing over decades, and it is smaller than a single distribution cut, a fee difference of 0.2%, or one bad month of price. Choosing a worse fund because it pays monthly is a losing trade by an order of magnitude.

Monthly matters if you are spending it

The honest case for monthly has nothing to do with compounding. Bills arrive monthly. Matching the income to the outgoings means less cash sitting idle and less mental accounting, and that is a genuine quality-of-life difference for someone living on the income rather than accumulating.

If you are still accumulating and reinvesting automatically, the frequency is close to irrelevant.

What the schedule hides

Monthly funds tend to move together. All 10 covered here share one ex-date and one pay date. So "monthly income" is not twelve payments spread across the month — it is a single deposit, once, with nothing in between.

People building an income portfolio sometimes stagger holdings deliberately to get payments every fortnight. With funds on an identical schedule that is not possible, and the answer is a cash buffer rather than a clever calendar. When these funds actually pay.

The thing to check instead

Frequency is fixed and knowable; the amount is neither. A monthly distribution is declared each cycle, so a fund paying twelve times a year has twelve chances to pay you less. That is the number worth looking at — every fund here lists every change it has made to its rate.

Monthly funds ranked by what they pay, and by whether it was worth holding — which is not the same order.