The LSE Directory / Fundamental data
EDGAR Full-Text Search is a free, web-based search engine operated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission at sec.gov/edgar/search. It indexes the complete text, including exhibits and attachments, of every filing submitted electronically to EDGAR since index coverage begins on 4 May 2001, spanning more than 400 form types: 10-K annual reports, 10-Q quarterly reports, 8-K current reports, S-1 and S-3 registration statements, DEF 14A proxy statements, Schedule 13D and 13G beneficial-ownership filings, Section 16 insider Forms 3, 4 and 5, and N-PX proxy-vote reports among others. Users can run keyword searches, exact-phrase searches in quotation marks, and boolean queries (an implied AND between terms, a capitalised OR, and exclusion via a capitalised NOT or a leading hyphen), and can filter results by form type, filer or company name, CIK number, and date range. It differs from the SEC's structured-data endpoints, such as the XBRL-based data at data.sec.gov, which return only tagged financial line items: Full-Text Search scans the actual prose of a filing, so it surfaces disclosure language, legal boilerplate, risk-factor wording, and contract terms that never get XBRL-tagged. The web interface requires no account or subscription, and the underlying engine is exposed as a public JSON API at efts.sec.gov, callable without an API key, subject only to a required User-Agent header and standard rate limits. Because the index is built and maintained by the regulator itself rather than a commercial re-aggregator, it is the authoritative record of what has and has not been disclosed to EDGAR, and commercial filing-search products built on the same underlying EDGAR corpus are typically compared against it as the free baseline. Full-Text Search sits inside the wider EDGAR system, which the SEC began developing in 1993 and made mandatory for domestic public company filings by 6 May 1996, extending the requirement to foreign private issuers on 4 November 2002. Per the SEC's own figures, EDGAR as a whole processes over 3,000 filings a day and had logged more than 17 million cumulative filings since 1994 as of May 2025. The full-text index itself only reaches back to 2001; filings from EDGAR's earlier 1993 to 2001 period can still be browsed by company and form type on EDGAR but are not keyword-searchable through this tool. Confidential-treatment redactions in exhibits also fall outside the index, since the withheld text was never filed in searchable form.
