Secedgar Search Filings
secedgar_search_filingsRead-onlyIdempotent
Search EDGAR filings since 1993. Full-text search covers 2001-present (the EFTS index floor); pre-2001 date ranges (to 1993) are served from the archives by form and entity/date. Pre-2001 free text needs entity scope (ticker:/cik:) — with it, the tool reads the entity's matching filings and matches the terms locally, which costs a few seconds (SEC's request rate caps the scan at roughly 5s for the 50-document maximum). A range crossing 2001-01-01 is split at the boundary and the two eras merged, each row tagged with its source. Supports exact phrases, boolean operators, wildcards, and entity targeting (ticker:AAPL or cik:320193 in query).
Input Schema
TableJSON Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| sort | No | Result ordering. "filing_date_desc" (default) returns most recent first. "filing_date_asc" returns oldest first. "relevance" returns SEC's native search-score order, which weights term match strength over recency. Date sorts re-order the top 100 hits returned by the search index — for broad queries with more than 100 matches and no entity targeting, date-newest filings may sit outside that window. Entity targeting (ticker:/cik:) or a narrower query keeps matches inside the window when absolute recency matters. On the no-query browse path (forms/entity only), EFTS has no relevance signal — every hit scores null — and returns filings in natural date-descending order, so all sort modes effectively yield newest-first. Pre-2001 archive results carry no relevance score either, so relevance collapses to date-descending there. | filing_date_desc |
| forms | No | Filter to specific form types (e.g., ["10-K", "10-Q", "8-K"]). Without this, searches all form types. Note: "10-K" also matches amendments filed as 10-K/A. SEC renamed the blockholder schedules on 2024-12-18 — filings before that date are "SC 13D"/"SC 13G", filings after are "SCHEDULE 13D"/"SCHEDULE 13G" — so a filter spanning that boundary must list both spellings. Ownership forms (3, 4, 5) are indexed by the reporting person (e.g., "LEVINSON ARTHUR D"), not the issuer — rows carry no transaction code, share count, or price. Use secedgar_get_insider_transactions to retrieve parsed ownership XML with person, relationship, transaction code, shares, and price. | |
| limit | No | Results per page. Max 100. | |
| query | No | Full-text search query. Optional — omit (or pass "") to browse by form type and/or entity instead, e.g. every S-1 in a date window, or a company's filings via ticker:/cik:. A date range alone is not a valid search; pair it with forms or entity targeting. The EFTS index that serves free text starts at 2001-01-01; a date range reaching earlier needs ticker:/cik: entity scope, which lets the tool read that entity's filings and match the terms locally (bounded to 50 documents, a few seconds at SEC's request rate), or drop the text terms to browse by form and date. When present, supports exact phrases ("material weakness"), boolean operators (revenue OR income), exclusion (-preliminary), wildcard suffix (account*), and entity targeting (ticker:AAPL or cik:320193 in the query); terms are AND'd by default. The pre-2001 local scan honors the same phrase / OR / exclusion / wildcard syntax. | |
| offset | No | Pagination offset. For sort=relevance on a 2001-onward search, EDGAR pages server-side up to its 10,000-result cap. Everywhere else the offset indexes the rows this call assembled and sorted: a single 100-row window for date sorts and entity targeting, the full matched set on a pre-2001 archive path, or both together on a range that crosses 2001-01-01. Offsets at or past those rows return nothing even when total is larger — switch to sort=relevance for deep pagination on a 2001-onward search, narrow the search (forms, dates, entity targeting), or query the dataframe. On a crossing range the two sides are assembled unevenly — the archive side contributes every row it matched, the full-text side one window of its total — so once the window runs out the rows jump to the pre-2001 era with the remaining full-text matches absent from the middle; search the 2001-onward era on its own to page through those. | |
| end_date | No | End of date range (YYYY-MM-DD). Both start_date and end_date must be provided for date filtering. | |
| start_date | No | Start of date range (YYYY-MM-DD). Both start_date and end_date must be provided for date filtering. |
Output Schema
TableJSON Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| cap | No | The limit cap applied. | |
| scan | No | Present only on the pre-2001 entity-scoped free-text path, where no full-text index exists and terms are matched by reading documents. Reports the scan's shape so a partial read is never presented as a complete one. Each document read is the whole accession .txt — SEC's original flat-submission format concatenates every exhibit into one file, and pre-1997 filings expose no per-document URL at all — so a match may sit in an attached exhibit rather than the body of the requested form. Absent on every other path. | |
| error | No | Present when the call failed. Absent on success. | |
| shown | No | Number of results shown inline. | |
| total | No | Total matching filings, which can exceed the rows returned inline or materialized. On the full-text (2001+) path this is capped at 10,000; entity targeting (ticker:/cik:) scopes server-side via the EFTS ciks param, so it is the entity's exact match count up to the cap. On a pre-2001 archive path it is the exact count within the scanned window (see total_is_exact). On a range crossing 2001-01-01 it is the sum of both eras' counts. | |
| notice | No | Guidance when no results were returned — echoes the query and suggests how to broaden. | |
| dataset | No | Canvas dataframe holding the fetched hits (full-text window, or the full pre-2001 archive match set), each tagged with its `source`. Absent when total ≤ inline limit, canvas is unavailable, or materialization failed. Query with secedgar_dataframe_query SQL. | |
| results | No | Matching filings. | |
| truncated | No | True when results were capped by limit. | |
| effectiveQuery | No | The query as executed against EDGAR (ticker/cik: tokens resolved to entity names). | |
| total_is_exact | No | False when total is a lower bound — the full-text path hit its 10,000 cap, a pre-2001 archive scan hit its page/quarter cap before exhausting the range, or a pre-2001 local text scan hit its document cap (scan.capped). | |
| form_distribution | No | Count of results by form type. Helps narrow follow-up searches. |