SEC EDGAR Full-Text Search

Search the SEC EDGAR full-text filing index by free-text query and/or CIK. Returns structured filing records — form type, file date, accession number, CIK, tickers, SIC, headquarter location — without API keys, OAuth, or captchas.

Built for the workflows where you need to answer questions like:

• "Show me all 10-K filings mentioning insider trading policy filed in Q1 2024."
• "Pull every Form 4 insider-trading report from Apple (CIK 320193) in 2025."
• "Find recent 8-K disclosures for any issuer in SIC code 737 (software / data processing)."
• "Get every recent exhibit from any issuer that includes the words going concern in the body."

Backed by SEC's public efts.search index — no proxy rotation, no scheduler, no quota to burn. Polite-pool only: a descriptive User-Agent and a soft 120ms inter-request sleep are baked in.

Input

Field	Required	Description
query	conditional	Free-text search. Supports phrase queries ("insider trading") and AND/OR operators. Must be supplied if ciks is empty.
ciks	conditional	Comma-separated CIK numbers (10-digit zero-padded or trimmed, e.g. 0000320193 or 320193). Must be supplied if query is empty.
forms	no	Comma-separated form-type filter (e.g. 10-K,10-Q,8-K,4). Leave empty for all forms.
dateRange	no	EDGAR built-in date range (custom, today, last-week, last-month, last-quarter, last-year, 1d, 5d, 30d, 90d, 1y). Use custom with startdt/enddt.
startdt	conditional	YYYY-MM-DD lower bound. Only when dateRange='custom'.
enddt	conditional	YYYY-MM-DD upper bound. Only when dateRange='custom'.
maxItems	no	Max records to return (1-100, default 10). EDGAR /search-index caps page size at 100.

Validation rule: at least one of query or ciks must be non-empty. The actor fails fast at startup if both are missing.

Output

One JSON record per filing hit. Every field is a string (Apify's output schema v1 only renders string-typed properties — arrays are JSON-encoded).

Field	Description
id	EDGAR _id (filename within accession)
accessionNumber	0001213900-24-003044-style accession
accessionUrl	EDGAR archive URL for the filing
form	Filing form type (10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, 4, ...)
fileType	Document type within filing (10-K, EX-19.1, ...)
fileDescription	Free-text description
fileDate	Filing date YYYY-MM-DD
periodEnding	Period of report YYYY-MM-DD (or null)
cik	Primary CIK (10-digit zero-padded)
allCiks	JSON array of all CIKs in the filing
displayNames	JSON array of issuer names (incl. ticker + CIK suffix as EDGAR publishes them)
tickers	JSON array of ticker symbols parsed from displayNames
sic	4-digit SIC code
sicDescription	Human-readable SIC industry (resolved against an inline SEC SIC subset)
bizState	State of incorporation
bizLocation	Headquarter location string
fileNum	File number (001-41866-style)
filmNum	Film number (legacy SEC id)
documentUrl	Direct URL to the document
filingIndexUrl	Filing index page
edgarCompanyUrl	SEC EDGAR company filings page for primary CIK
score	EDGAR full-text relevance score
sourceQuery	Audit trail — the query + filters as dispatched
fetchedAt	Actor fetch timestamp (ISO-8601)

Example inputs

# Query mode: "insider trading" in 10-K filings, Q1 2024
echo '{"query":"\"insider trading\"","forms":"10-K","dateRange":"custom","startdt":"2024-01-01","enddt":"2024-03-31","maxItems":5}' > .actor/input.json
apify run -p

# CIK mode: every Form 4 from Apple in 2025
echo '{"ciks":"0000320193","forms":"4","dateRange":"custom","startdt":"2025-01-01","enddt":"2025-12-31","maxItems":10}' > .actor/input.json
apify run -p

# Combined: software industry (SIC 7372) + "data breach"
echo '{"query":"data breach","forms":"8-K","dateRange":"last-month","maxItems":10}' > .actor/input.json
apify run -p

Limits and gotchas

• Rate limit. SEC guidance: "no more than 10 requests per second" with a polite-pool User-Agent. The actor sends one request per run by default; pagination beyond maxItems=100 requires an external loop (intentional — EDGAR caps /search-index page size at 100).
• No proxy. This is a keyless public endpoint. SEC blocks anonymous datacenter IPs at peak hours; consumer traffic from Apify's IP pool works fine for typical workloads but heavy commercial usage should consider a polite-pool agreement with SEC.
• SIC subset is partial. The actor embeds a ~250-entry subset of SEC's SIC table covering finance, real estate, manufacturing, retail, services, and government. Less-common SIC codes will return sicDescription=null — consumers can resolve via https://www.sec.gov/corpfin/division-of-corporation-finance-standard-industrial-classification-sic-code-list.
• Free-text quirks. EDGAR uses Elasticsearch's match-phrase semantics. A bareword query matches across all token positions; quoted strings anchor to phrase order; capitalisation is normalised. Wildcard * returns an empty result set (use forms + date filters to scope instead).

Pricing

Free tier: 10 runs/month on the Apify Free plan. Pro: pay-as-you-go compute units (negligible for single-call API actors — typically <0.001 CU per run).

Changelog

• 0.1.0 — initial release.