SEC EDGAR Scraper — 10-K, 10-Q & 8-K Filings

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🎯 What this scrapes

The SEC EDGAR system (sec.gov) publishes every public-company filing — 10-K annual reports, 10-Q quarterlies, 8-K material events, S-1 registration statements, proxy statements, Form 4 insider-transaction filings, SC 13D beneficial-ownership reports, and more. The system exposes both per-company submissions endpoints and full-text search APIs.

This sec edgar scraper wraps the per-company submissions endpoint, resolves ticker symbols to 10-digit CIKs automatically, and writes one Pydantic-validated dataset row per filing — including form type, period, filing date, accession number, and the direct URL to the primary document. We handle the rate-limit ceiling (~10 req/sec polite limit), backoff on 429s, and User-Agent compliance so you never have to.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes so the target sees a legitimate browser session, not Python.
• 🌐 Proxy rotation via Apify Proxy — fresh session and exit IP on every retry, keeping your run clean through any turbulence.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 5xx — up to 5 attempts per request, with Retry-After headers honoured automatically.
• 🧱 Rate-limit-aware pacing — when EDGAR pushes back, we slow down instead of hammering and getting your run flagged.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable accession-number IDs, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that land in your dataset. No data, no charge (beyond the small warm-up fee).

💡 Use cases

• Earnings calendar automation — schedule a daily diff for 10-Q and 10-K filings across your covered companies. Build your own earnings calendar without paying for a vendor feed.
• 8-K filing alert and material-events monitoring — pull every 8-K for your watchlist; pipe to Slack or email via n8n / Make / Zapier. Sub-minute freshness is not guaranteed (SEC publishes in batches), but daily-cadence monitoring is solid.
• M&A and activist-investor monitoring — filter for S-4 merger filings and SC 13D beneficial-ownership disclosures. Ideal for investigative journalists and M&A research desks.
• Insider trading filings API substitute — harvest Form 4 filings for any issuer without a per-seat subscription. Use as a free research tool; complement sec-api.io for production.
• Investigative data journalism — structured rows ready for pandas, Jupyter, or R. Used by data-desk reporters at NICAR-affiliated newsrooms for document-heavy investigations.
• Academic finance research — replicate event-study datasets; bulk-download 10-Ks for NLP analysis; reconstruct historical S-1 filings for IPO research.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.
2. Enter one or more ticker symbols (e.g. AAPL, MSFT) or raw 10-digit CIK numbers. We resolve tickers to CIKs via SEC's company_tickers.json automatically.
3. Optionally filter by form type (10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, S-1, SC 13D, etc.) and set a per-company result cap.
4. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset in real time.
5. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or pull via the Apify REST API.

For automated pipelines: the Apify API lets you trigger runs programmatically and fetch the dataset when the run completes. Drop-in for n8n, Make, or Zapier using the native Apify integrations.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
tickers	array	yes	["AAPL", "MSFT"]	Ticker symbols (e.g. AAPL) or 10-digit CIKs. Tickers resolved to CIKs via SEC's company_tickers.json.
formTypes	array	no	["10-K", "10-Q"]	Form types to include (e.g. 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, S-1, SC 13D). Leave empty to include every form.
maxResultsPerCompany	integer	no	20	Cap on filings returned per company. EDGAR returns up to ~1 000 most-recent filings per submissions call.
userAgent	string	no	"DevilScrapes-EDGAR/1.0 (contact: apify.com/DevilScrapes)"	SEC requires a User-Agent with a contact identifier. Replace with your own if you want SEC to associate requests with your organisation.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{"useApifyProxy": false}	Proxy settings. SEC accepts polite anonymous requests; proxy is optional but available if you need it.

Example input

{
  "tickers": ["AAPL"],
  "formTypes": ["10-K"],
  "maxResultsPerCompany": 3,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item representing a single SEC filing.

Field	Type	Notes
cik	string	10-digit CIK (zero-padded).
ticker	string | null	Ticker symbol, if resolved from one.
company_name	string	Registrant name as it appears on EDGAR.
form_type	string	Form type (10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, S-1, SC 13D, Form 4, etc.).
accession_number	string	Accession number (e.g. 0000320193-24-000123). Stable unique ID.
filing_date	string	Filing date in YYYY-MM-DD format.
report_date	string | null	Reporting-period end date (not present for all form types).
acceptance_datetime	string | null	EDGAR acceptance timestamp (ISO-8601).
primary_document	string | null	Primary document filename.
primary_document_url	string	Direct URL to the primary HTML or PDF on sec.gov.
filing_index_url	string	EDGAR filing index URL — links to all exhibits.
is_xbrl	boolean | null	Whether the filing includes XBRL-tagged financial data.
scraped_at	string	ISO-8601 timestamp for when this row was recorded.

Example output

{
  "cik": "0000320193",
  "ticker": "AAPL",
  "company_name": "Apple Inc.",
  "form_type": "10-K",
  "accession_number": "0000320193-24-000123",
  "filing_date": "2024-11-01",
  "report_date": "2024-09-28",
  "acceptance_datetime": "2024-11-01T06:01:36.000Z",
  "primary_document": "aapl-20240928.htm",
  "primary_document_url": "https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/000032019324000123/aapl-20240928.htm",
  "filing_index_url": "https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0000320193&type=10-K",
  "is_xbrl": true,
  "scraped_at": "2024-11-02T09:14:22.000Z"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.005	One-off warm-up charge per run.
result	$0.002	Per dataset item (one filing row).

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $2.00. No subscription, no minimum, no card required to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit, which covers your first 2 500 filing rows.

🚧 Limitations

• Filing history depth: we pull from each company's submissions/CIK#.json, which covers the most recent ~1 000 filings. For historical filings beyond that window, the EDGAR full-text search and per-year archive endpoints need a separate request pattern.
• Ticker resolution scope: ticker-to-CIK resolution works for the operating-company set in SEC's company_tickers.json. Mutual-fund CIKs and individual-filer CIKs are supported if you supply the CIK directly.
• Filing content: we surface primary_document_url and filing_index_url — we do not download or parse the filing body. Pair with a generic HTML fetcher to retrieve the actual document text.
• Sub-minute freshness: SEC publishes filings to EDGAR in processing batches; new filings can take minutes to appear in the submissions API. For near-real-time push, use SEC's RSS or PDS feeds alongside this scraper.
• Form 4 display names: insider-person names are in the XML body of the Form 4 — not in the submissions metadata we extract. primary_document_url links directly to the XML for downstream parsing.

❓ FAQ

What is an sec edgar scraper used for?

Investigative journalists, equity analysts, compliance teams, and academic researchers use an sec edgar scraper to bulk-download structured filing metadata — form type, filing date, accession number, direct document URL — without hand-rolling ticker-to-CIK resolution and rate-limit handling. Common workflows: earnings calendars, 8-K alert feeds, M&A monitoring, and NLP datasets from 10-K text.

Is there an edgar filings api I can use instead?

The SEC publishes a free edgar filings api (no key required, just a contact User-Agent). This Actor wraps that API and adds ticker resolution, form-type filtering, Pydantic-validated output rows, and Apify-native export — so you get clean structured data without writing the plumbing yourself.

How does this compare to sec-api.io or edgartools?

sec-api.io and edgartools are paid subscription products. This Actor is priced per-result and integrates natively with n8n, Make, Zapier, and any tool that supports the Apify API. For one-off or irregular extractions it is usually cheaper. For very high-volume production pipelines, compare cost profiles.

What is the sec edgar api rate limit?

SEC asks for no more than 10 requests per second and a descriptive User-Agent. We pace requests conservatively, honour 429 responses with backoff, and surface partial-success status messages so you always know where your run stands.

Can I use edgar full-text search with this Actor?

This Actor uses the per-company submissions endpoint. The EDGAR full-text search index (efts.sec.gov) lets you search filing content by keyword — useful for finding specific disclosures across all filers. A separate full-text search Actor is on the roadmap; contact us on the Issues tab if that workflow is blocking you.

Do I need an API key?

No. SEC requires only a User-Agent string with a contact identifier. The default User-Agent in this Actor already satisfies that requirement.

Why is report_date sometimes null?

Some form types (notably 8-K current reports) record only a filing date, not a reporting-period end date. report_date is null for those rows.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a form type we're not handling? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab in Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and read every report. If the edgar full-text search or XBRL-data extraction angle is on your roadmap, say so and we will prioritise it.

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