SEC EDGAR Full-Text Search API
Free U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) EDGAR API providing access to all public company filings (10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, proxy statements, etc.), financial data (XBRL facts), company information, and full-text search across millions of filings. No API key required.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
No credentials to manage. All data is public and read-only. U.S. government service with no credential compromise risk. HTTPS enforced.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
You need free, authoritative, structured financial data from publicly-traded US companies for agent analysis, research, or due diligence workflows.
Avoid When
You need real-time market data, international company data, or require a commercial SLA.
Use Cases
- • Fetch company financial statements (income statement, balance sheet, cash flow) from XBRL-tagged 10-K and 10-Q filings for agent financial analysis
- • Search for specific disclosures (risk factors, MD&A, related-party transactions) across public company filings for agent due diligence workflows
- • Monitor new 8-K filings (material events, earnings releases) by polling company filing feeds for agent-driven news detection
- • Retrieve ownership disclosures (13-F, 13-D, Schedule 13G) for tracking institutional investor positions in agent portfolio analysis
- • Access structured XBRL financial facts (revenue, EPS, assets, liabilities) for any SEC-reporting company without manual parsing
Not For
- • Real-time (tick-level) financial market data — use Bloomberg, Refinitiv, or Polygon.io for live price data
- • Non-US companies not listed on US exchanges — EDGAR only covers SEC-registered entities
- • Production applications requiring guaranteed uptime — EDGAR is a government service with occasional maintenance windows
Interface
Authentication
No API key or authentication required. SEC requests a User-Agent header identifying your application (company name + email per their fair use policy). Rate limits apply per IP but are generous.
Pricing
Completely free U.S. government service. No paid tier. Rate limited to 10 requests/second per IP. Must set User-Agent header with company name and contact email as per SEC fair use policy.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ User-Agent header is required and must include company name and email (e.g., 'MyAgentApp/1.0 contact@mycompany.com') — requests without User-Agent may be blocked
- ⚠ Rate limit is 10 req/sec per IP — agents making parallel requests must implement rate limiting; 429 errors do not include Retry-After headers
- ⚠ Company identifiers use CIK (Central Index Key) numbers, not ticker symbols — agents must first look up the CIK for a company before accessing its filings
- ⚠ XBRL financial facts use SEC concept tags (us-gaap:Revenues, us-gaap:Assets) which may not map directly to what companies call these items in their filings
- ⚠ Filing documents are HTML or XML and require parsing — agents expecting clean JSON must process raw SEC filing documents
- ⚠ EDGAR search (efts.sec.gov) and filing data (data.sec.gov) are different endpoints with different schemas — agents must use the correct endpoint for each use case
- ⚠ Historical filings before 1993 may not be available in machine-readable format — older data may exist only as scanned PDFs
Alternatives
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Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-07.