SEC Filings Data: EDGAR Forms, Documents, and APIs
A primary-source guide to filing identity, document retrieval, structured facts, and historical eligibility.
SEC filings data consists of EDGAR submission metadata and documents identified by filer CIK, form type, accession number, filing and accepted timestamps, reporting period, primary document, and exhibits. The SEC also provides public submissions and XBRL APIs plus nightly bulk archives. Research systems should preserve accessions, amendments, source URLs, and known-at times.
Use the accession as the filing key
Company names and tickers change, while the CIK identifies the filer and the accession identifies the submission. Keep both with form, period, accepted time, primary document, exhibits, and amendment relationship.
Do not collapse an amended form into its predecessor. Historical queries select the filing versions public at the cutoff; current views can separately show the latest state.
Choose the right SEC surface
Submissions JSON provides filing history and entity metadata. XBRL APIs expose extracted facts. Filing archives contain the original documents and exhibits. Bulk archives are efficient for large reconciliations.
Follow the SEC fair-access policy, declare a user agent, cache responsibly, and avoid many repeated per-company requests when a bulk file is more appropriate.
- CIK for filer identity
- Accession for submission identity
- Accepted timestamp for public availability
- Original documents for verification
- Bulk archives for full reconciliation
What a paid layer should add
The SEC is the free benchmark. A vendor earns its price through reliable collection, document parsing, stable pagination, identity mapping, historical completeness, extracted sections, search, joins, coverage, and operational support.
Require every normalized record to retain the source accession and URL. Convenience should shorten the path to evidence, not sever it.
How DataCedar preserves the evidence
DataCedar separates acquisition from serving. Permitted source responses are retained with retrieval time and identifiers, normalized into DataCedar-owned tables, checked against expected coverage, and exposed through a stable versioned API. A collector can be replaced without changing the customer contract or making an upstream provider a runtime dependency.
Every research stream carries effective and known-at time where the distinction matters. Rights-restricted, unavailable, partial, stale, and genuinely empty states remain visible, so a backtest can fail closed and a buyer can see the product boundary before committing engineering time.
Key takeaways
- 01CIK and accession are durable identifiers.
- 02Accepted time is essential for event research.
- 03Keep amendments and original documents.
- 04Use SEC bulk archives for efficient reconciliation.
Query public company evidence through one stable API. Free Explorer tier, no card.
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