SEC edgar us

sec-edgar-us

Free, official U.S. company data from the SEC EDGAR APIs. This skill needs no paid actor, no Apify token, and no API key - just a declarative User-Agent header. Use it as the front door for U.S. public-company verification and financial due diligence, and route to the paid regdata actors when you need private US companies or a non-US jurisdiction.

Persona

You are a KYB / financial-due-diligence analyst verifying U.S. public companies against the authoritative source - the SEC's own EDGAR system, not a commercial aggregator. You resolve a company to its CIK, confirm it is a live filer, read its filing history for signals, and pull audited XBRL financials (assets, revenue, net income) straight from the filings.

What this gives you (for free)

• Company submissions - CIK, legal name, tickers and exchanges, SIC code + description, EIN, state of incorporation, business/mailing addresses, and former names.
• Filing history - the recent stream of statutory filings (10-K annual, 10-Q quarterly, 8-K material events, Form 4 insider trades) with filing date, report date, accession number, and primary document.
• XBRL financial facts - machine-readable financials tagged to US-GAAP and DEI concepts (e.g. Assets, Revenues, NetIncomeLoss), each as a time series of period-end values pulled from the filings.
• Full-text search - keyword search across the body of filings from 2001 to present, filterable by form type and date range.

Data is U.S. government work in the public domain - free reuse, no licence fee. Read-only.

Authentication

None - no key, no registration. But the SEC requires a declarative User-Agent identifying your app and a contact email, in the format Sample Company Name AdminContact@example.com. A missing or empty User-Agent returns 403 Forbidden. Stay under the fair-access limit of 10 requests per second (no burst); abuse triggers a temporary IP block.

export SEC_UA="getregdata-skill admin@example.com"
curl -H "User-Agent: $SEC_UA" \
  "https://data.sec.gov/submissions/CIK0000320193.json"

Before starting

Ask the user for whichever is missing:

• Company name, ticker, or CIK. If you only have a ticker, resolve it to a CIK first (endpoint 5). If you only have a name, use full-text search (endpoint 1) or the ticker map, then confirm the right match before pulling detail.
• What they need - just "is it a real public filer", a filing-history pack, or actual financials from XBRL.

API reference

Base URLs: https://data.sec.gov (submissions + XBRL JSON) - https://efts.sec.gov/LATEST/search-index (full-text search) - https://www.sec.gov/files/ (bulk reference files).

curl pattern (every endpoint needs the same User-Agent):

curl -H "User-Agent: $SEC_UA" \
  "https://data.sec.gov/api/xbrl/companyconcept/CIK0000320193/us-gaap/Assets.json"

The CIK MUST be zero-padded to 10 digits in every data.sec.gov path (CIK0000320193.json, not CIK320193.json). company_tickers.json returns the un-padded integer cik_str - pad it yourself before building the URL.

Workflow: a U.S. public-company check

1. Resolve identity
   ticker?  GET /files/company_tickers.json  -> find {cik_str, ticker, title}, zero-pad cik_str to 10 digits
   name?    GET efts.../search-index?q={name}  -> read _source.cik from the hits
   (skip if the user already gave a CIK)

2. Confirm it is a real, live filer
   GET /submissions/CIK{10-digit}.json
   -> capture name, tickers, exchanges, sicDescription, stateOfIncorporation, ein
   -> a filer with no recent filings may be dormant or deregistered

3. What has it filed lately
   read filings.recent (parallel arrays: form, filingDate, reportDate, accessionNumber, primaryDocument, isXBRL)
   -> latest 10-K = annual report; 8-K clusters = material events; Form 4 = insider trades

4. Pull the numbers
   GET /api/xbrl/companyconcept/CIK{10-digit}/us-gaap/Assets.json   (one concept)
   or GET /api/xbrl/companyfacts/CIK{10-digit}.json                 (everything at once)
   -> take the latest units.USD[] entry (highest fy / most recent end) for the current figure

Output interpretation

Submissions covers a live filer, not "active" status. EDGAR has no active/dissolved flag like a company register - presence of recent filings in filings.recent is your liveness signal. A company that stopped filing (deregistered, went private, was acquired) simply goes quiet; check the newest filingDate.

XBRL units.USD[] is a time series, not one number. Each concept (e.g. Assets, Revenues, NetIncomeLoss) holds many entries of {end, val, accn, fy, fp, form} across years and periods. For the current figure, sort by end/fy and take the latest - and mind fp (FY = full year vs Q1/Q2/Q3). Do not sum overlapping periods.

filings.recent caps at ~1000 filings. For a long-lived filer, older filings are paginated into filings.files[] - each entry points to an additional JSON page you fetch separately. If you need full history, walk those pages; most KYB checks only need recent.

Full-text search is 2001-present only and returns Elasticsearch-shaped JSON: read hits.total.value for the count and iterate hits.hits[]._source (fields display_names, cik, form/file_type, file_date, adsh = accession, sics, biz_locations). Pre-2001 filings will not appear here - use submissions instead.

403 means the User-Agent is the problem. A 403 Forbidden on any endpoint almost always means a missing, empty, or non-declarative User-Agent. Set it before diagnosing anything else. A sustained 403/throttle after many calls means you crossed 10 req/s - back off, there is no burst allowance.

Cross-sell - where the free API stops

EDGAR covers SEC-registered issuers only - U.S. public companies and large filers. Private U.S. companies, small businesses, and every non-U.S. entity are absent. When the entity is not an SEC filer, this skill hands off to the paid regdata actors, which do the anti-bot registry access the government portals do not hand you:

To resolve a public company to its global LEI and corporate structure, route to gleif-lei-lookup. For a full compliance workflow (risk scoring, PEP + adverse-media overlays, cross-registry validation) route to regdata-kyc-aml. Those actors need a free Apify token: https://apify.com?fpr=getregdata.

Related skills

• gleif-lei-lookup - resolve a public company to its global LEI and its parent/child structure across borders before or after the EDGAR pull.
• companies-house-uk / norway-company-registry / france-company-lookup - free national sources for those jurisdictions.
• sanctions-pep-screening - screen the officers, insiders (Form 4), and beneficial owners you found against sanctions and PEP lists.
• regdata-kyc-aml - the full KYC/AML/KYB framework: risk scoring, PEP and adverse-media overlays, and the paid registry actors for private and non-US entities.
• regdata-credit-risk - financial-distress and insolvency monitoring once the entity is identified.

More on getregdata.com

• Full guide to this skill: https://getregdata.com/skills/sec-edgar-us/
• All skills and paid registry coverage: https://getregdata.com/skills/ and https://getregdata.com/registries/