EDGAR: The Filing Database
Every filing a US registrant submits is public, free, and searchable within moments of being accepted. It is the single most underused resource in equity research.
MadStockAlerts Research · Updated August 28, 2026
What to take away
- EDGAR holds every filing from every US registrant, free and without registration.
- Filings appear within minutes of acceptance, so it is genuinely current.
- Full-text search covers the body of filings, not just their metadata.
- The company's own filing index is usually the fastest way in.
- Financial statements are tagged, so the numbers are machine-readable.
MAD Academy Training Video · 0:45
Everything, Free, The Moment It Lands
EDGAR holds every filing a public company makes, published the instant it is accepted — the same feed the professionals read.
This lesson is part of a Stock Alerts + Tools plan.
What is in it
The Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval system holds the complete filing history of every company registered with the SEC, going back to the mid-1990s and in many cases further. Annual and quarterly reports, current reports, registration statements, proxies, insider transactions and institutional holdings are all there.
Filings appear on EDGAR within minutes of acceptance. Somebody watching a company's filing index sees a Form 8-K at the moment it is filed, which is frequently before it has been written about anywhere.
It is worth being explicit about the asymmetry this removes. The information in a filing is the same information a professional analyst has, published at the same instant, at no cost. Very few advantages in markets are available to everyone; this one is.
The three ways to search
- 1By companyEvery registrant has a CIK, a permanent identifier that survives name changes and ticker changes. The company page lists every filing in date order.
- 2By form typeFiltering a company's index to a single form type is how you get a clean list of, say, every 8-K in the last two years.
- 3Full textFull-text search covers the body of filings from 2001 onward, which is how you find every company that mentioned a specific term, customer or technology.
The CIK is worth knowing about because ticker symbols are not stable. A company that changed its name, moved exchanges and changed ticker twice has one CIK and one continuous filing history, and searching by ticker will miss most of it.
Reading a filing index
Each entry shows the form type, the filing date, the period it covers and the accession number. The filing date and the period covered are different things, and the gap between them is sometimes the point: a filing made months after the period it describes is itself information.
Amendments carry an /A suffix. A 10-K/A is a revised annual report, and the reason for the amendment is stated in it. Amendments to a completed period are worth reading, because most companies would rather not file one.
Late filings are flagged too. An NT 10-K or NT 10-Q is a notification that a periodic report will be late, and it must state why. That form is one of the highest information-per-word documents on the entire system.
- 0001193125The filing agent's central index key, not the company's
- 26The year it was transmitted
- 041839A sequence number for that agent, that year
- The index pageLists every document and exhibit in the submission
Structured data
Financial statements are tagged in XBRL, which means the numbers are machine-readable rather than only being in a document. This is what makes it possible to compare a line item across hundreds of companies without any manual extraction.
It is also what makes market-wide statement screening possible at all. Asking which companies grew revenue while margins expanded, across the whole market, is a database query against tagged filings rather than a research project.
Deep Dive 2 carries EDGAR full-text search and the filing index directly, so a phrase can be searched across the market without leaving the platform.
Filing text search — for membersFiler status, and why deadlines differ
How quickly a company must file is determined by its filer status, which is set by the public float of its shares and by how long it has been reporting. The categories explain why two companies reporting the same quarter file weeks apart.
| Status | Public float | 10-K deadline | 10-Q deadline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Large accelerated | $700m or more | 60 days | 40 days |
| Accelerated | $75m to $700m | 75 days | 40 days |
| Non-accelerated | Under $75m | 90 days | 45 days |
Two related designations change what has to be included rather than when. A smaller reporting company may provide two years of financial statements rather than three and may omit some disclosures entirely. An emerging growth company, a status available for up to five years after an IPO, may phase in certain requirements including the auditor attestation on internal controls.
A missed deadline is itself a filing. Form 12b-25, commonly called an NT 10-K or NT 10-Q, requests a short extension and must state why the report could not be filed on time. The stated reason is frequently the most informative sentence a company publishes all year.
Full-text search, and what it can find
EDGAR indexes the text of filings from 2001 onward, and the search runs across every filer rather than one at a time. That inverts the usual research direction: instead of asking what a company disclosed, it becomes possible to ask which companies disclosed a particular thing.
- Search a phrase in quotation marks to find exact language, which is how boilerplate and its variations are distinguished.
- Search a customer, supplier or competitor name to find every filer that mentions them, including those that do not appear in any obvious industry classification.
- Search an auditor or a law firm to map who works with whom, which occasionally matters when a firm is under scrutiny.
- Filter by form type and date range to separate a risk factor's first appearance from its subsequent repetitions.
The 2001 cutoff is worth remembering: anything earlier is on EDGAR as a document and is not indexed for text search, so a historical question has to be answered by opening filings individually.
The most productive use of full-text search is comparative rather than exploratory. A phrase that appears in one company's filing and in none of its competitors', or in this year's and not last year's, is a finding; a phrase that appears everywhere is boilerplate.