Jun 24, 2026· sec · fundamentals

Free EDGAR Search: How to Find Any SEC Filing Online

EDGAR is the SEC's public database of every filing a US company has ever made. Here's how to search it for free, what each form type means, and a faster alternative to the official site.

EDGAR — the SEC's Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval system — is a free public database of every filing a US-listed company has ever submitted to the SEC. 10-Ks, 10-Qs, 8-Ks, proxy statements, insider transactions: it's all there, and it's all free to access. You don't need a Bloomberg terminal or a paid data subscription to read a company's annual report. You just need to know where to look.

How to search EDGAR

The official site is at sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar. You can search by company name or ticker to pull up a filing history — every form the company has filed, ordered by date. Click any entry to see the filing index, which lists the actual documents: the full submission text, exhibits, financial statements.

The search works, but the interface is unchanged from around 2002. There's no charting, no quarter-by-quarter data view, and no way to compare numbers across filings without doing the legwork yourself.

What happened to FreeEDGAR?

FreeEDGAR.com is an older third-party site that put a cleaner interface on top of the EDGAR database. It was widely used in the early 2000s when the SEC's own interface was essentially unusable, and many people still search for it by name out of habit. The SEC has improved its own site since then, but it's still not what most people would call user-friendly — no charting, no cross-filing data view, and a search UI that hasn't changed much in two decades.

Form types: what you're looking at

10-K — Annual report. The most detailed filing a company makes: audited financial statements, business overview, risk factors, and management's discussion of results. Filed within 60-90 days of fiscal year end.
10-Q — Quarterly report for Q1, Q2 and Q3. Condensed financials, unaudited. No 10-Q for Q4 — that's folded into the annual 10-K.
8-K — Material events. Earnings releases, executive changes, acquisitions, credit agreement updates. Companies have four business days to file.
DEF 14A — Proxy statement. Executive compensation, shareholder votes, board composition.
SC 13G / SC 13D — Large shareholder disclosures. Filed when an entity crosses 5% ownership.

A faster way to read the numbers

If you want to read a filing's full text, the SEC's EDGAR site works fine — it links straight to the documents. But if you want to see revenue, net income, earnings per share and cash flow across quarters without opening a dozen PDFs, there's a better path.

The SEC publishes structured financial data through its companyfacts API at data.sec.gov. Every us-gaap concept a company has reported — revenue, EPS, operating cash flow, capex — is available as machine-readable JSON. Finterm is a free EDGAR viewer that reads this data and presents it as a quarter-by-quarter fundamentals table for any US-listed ticker. Type a ticker, see the filings list and the financial trend together, no account needed.

infoThe SEC's EDGAR API is public domain and has no rate limit for reasonable use. Every quarterly earnings figure for every US public company going back decades is sitting there for free.

What you can't get for free

EDGAR covers everything a company is required to file. What it doesn't have: analyst estimates, earnings call transcripts, alternative data, or real-time news. If you need those, a paid terminal is the right answer. For the actual source documents and reported financial history, free is sufficient.