The Form 24F-1 Files Dataset is a closed historical archive of the Notification of Election Under Rule 24f-1 filings submitted to EDGAR by open-end management investment companies, unit investment trusts, and face-amount certificate companies under Section 24(f) of the Investment Company Act of 1940. Each record is a single Form 24F-1 accession — an annual fiscal-year-end true-up by which a registered investment company retroactively registered shares it had sold in excess of the amount previously declared on its Securities Act registration statement, paying the Section 6(b) fee on the net-sales amount. The dataset covers every Form 24F-1 accepted by EDGAR from March 1996 through October 11, 1997, the day the SEC rescinded Rule 24f-1 and replaced the form with Form 24F-2; no new Form 24F-1 records are possible, so the corpus is archival by construction.
Programmatically retrieve the full list of dataset archive files, download URLs and dataset metadata.
Dataset Index JSON API
Download the entire dataset as a single archive file.
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Download a single container file (e.g. monthly archive) from the dataset.
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The dataset is built from the late ASCII EDGAR era of the Rule 24f-1 regime. Every record belongs to the narrow window between March 1996, when Form 24F-1 began appearing on EDGAR, and October 11, 1997, when the Commission amended Section 24(f), rescinded Rule 24f-1, and superseded the regime with the revised Form 24F-2 (Investment Company Act Release No. 22815 / Securities Act Release No. 33-7439). Pre-EDGAR Rule 24f-1 notices filed in paper are outside the corpus. The filings are plain-text notifications — no HTML, no XBRL, no inline markup — distributed as month-level ZIP containers that unpack into one folder per accession.
Form 24F-1 itself had a narrow documentary purpose: it identified the issuer, stated the 1933 Act and 1940 Act registration numbers, described the class of security, declared the number of shares being retroactively registered (often reported as zero where the filing merely perfected an existing indefinite registration), defined the period during which the excess sales occurred, computed any Section 6(b) registration fee, and carried an issuer statement affirming the manner of distribution. Execution was by an authorized officer, and per Rule 24f-1 the notification was accompanied by a secretary's certificate attesting to the authorizing board resolution and an opinion of counsel confirming that the shares were legally issued, fully paid, and non-assessable.
One record is a single Form 24F-1 accession — one complete Notification of Election Under Rule 24f-1 filed on EDGAR by an open-end management investment company, unit investment trust, or face-amount certificate company under Section 24(f) of the Investment Company Act of 1940. The record unit is the filing-level accession, not the issuer, the series, or an individual exhibit. Each record materializes inside the container as a folder whose name is the EDGAR accession number with its dashes stripped (accession 0001047469-97-000406 becomes folder 000104746997000406). Inside that folder sit a metadata.json header descriptor and one or more document-<sequence>.txt files corresponding to the sequential <DOCUMENT> parts of the original EDGAR submission.
A record is organized in two layers. The outer layer is the on-disk packaging: one folder per accession containing a metadata.json file plus one text document per submitted sequence. The inner layer is the document body itself — a flat ASCII file whose only consistent structural marker is the pre-2000 EDGAR <PAGE> page-break tag. No SGML <DOCUMENT>, <TYPE>, or <TEXT> wrapper surrounds the per-document text in the record folder; those envelopes live only in the full-submission TXT hosted on sec.gov and reachable through linkToTxt. What is materialized here is the inner payload, preserved verbatim with hard-wrapped 75-to-80-column lines, leading-space centered headings, and dash-underlined signature rules.
A minimal Form 24F-1 accession has just two files: metadata.json and document-1.txt. Filings that packaged the notification, the secretary's certificate, and the counsel opinion as separate <DOCUMENT> parts appear as multiple numbered text files, one per sequence number in the original submission.
metadata.json descriptorThe metadata file is a flat JSON object describing the filing header as EDGAR recorded it. Its top-level fields fall into four groups.
Filing identification. formType is always "24F-1"; accessionNo carries the dashed EDGAR accession; filedAt is an ISO-8601 timestamp with an Eastern-time offset, and for every record the date precedes the October 11, 1997 discontinuation; description holds the form blurb ("Form 24F-1 - Registration of securities by certain investment companies [Rule 24F-1]. Notification of election.").
Source links. linkToFilingDetails resolves to the CIK-scoped EDGAR archive folder, linkToTxt to the complete raw SGML submission, linkToHtml to the EDGAR filing-index page. linkToXbrl is an empty string; Form 24F-1 predates the XBRL mandate and no Form 24F-1 filing carries structured financial data.
documentFormatFiles array. One element per document in the original submission. Each element carries sequence (the numeric string that also appears in the corresponding document-<sequence>.txt filename), size in bytes as a string, documentUrl, description (such as "FORM 24F-1" or "Complete submission text file"), and type (typically "24F-1" for the notification). The array also contains a synthetic row for the "Complete submission text file" whose sequence and type are both a single space; this row points to the full SGML envelope on sec.gov and has no counterpart on disk inside the record folder.
entities array. Identifies the filer, typically as a single object with companyName (the issuer name suffixed with a role tag such as " (Filer)"), cik, fileNo (the 1933 Act file number, usually in 033-nnnnn form for investment-company filings), irsNo, filmNo, act (governing statute code, typically "33"), type (the form type), stateOfIncorporation as a two-letter code, and fiscalYearEnd as a four-digit MMDD string.
Two further arrays — seriesAndClassesContractsInformation and dataFiles — appear in the schema but are empty for Form 24F-1 records, since the SEC's series-and-class identifiers and structured-data-exhibit framework were instituted after the form had been discontinued. A trailing id field carries a 32-character hexadecimal hash used as an internal stable identifier.
document-<sequence>.txt bodyEach text document is plain ASCII. The only reliable structural marker inside the body is the <PAGE> tag, which sits on its own line at the start of every logical page and has no closing form and no attributes. Headings, captions, signatures, and letterheads are rendered through whitespace and capitalization conventions rather than tags. Lines are hard-wrapped around column 75 to 80 and centered headings are produced by leading spaces.
A typical Form 24F-1 notification, read top to bottom, moves through the following components.
Opening header. A <PAGE> marker followed, after blank lines, by a centered title such as NOTIFICATION OF ELECTION UNDER RULE 24f-1 rendered in capitals across one or two lines.
Caption-labeled fact block. The substantive content is laid out as a sequence of caption labels followed by indented value paragraphs. The recurring captions are:
NAME AND ADDRESS OF ISSUER: — the registered investment company's legal name and mailing address.REGISTRATION NOS: — the 1933 Act registration number and, where applicable, the 1940 Act registration number.SECURITY: — a textual description of the class, series, or portfolio of shares being retroactively registered.SHARES REGISTERED: — a share count, frequently stated as "Zero, for purposes of fee calculations" when the filing rides on an indefinite registration and carries no incremental fee.PERIOD OF TIME DURING WHICH SHARES SOLD: — the fiscal window during which the excess sales occurred, typically a dated range covering a complete fiscal year.COMPILATION OF FEE: — the Section 6(b) fee computation, showing aggregate offering price, redemptions netted, and the resulting fee, or reciting the statutory basis for no fee being due.STATEMENT BY ISSUER: — the Rule 24f-1 affirmation regarding the method of distribution and the election itself.Signature page. A <PAGE> break introduces the execution block: the issuer's name above a /s/ Name line (sometimes underlined with a dash rule), the signatory's printed name, title, and date. The signatory is typically the principal executive officer or treasurer.
Secretary's certificate. A further <PAGE> break introduces a block headed CERTIFICATE, in which the secretary or assistant secretary attests that the notification was authorized by a duly adopted board resolution, often reciting the operative words of the resolution. A second signature and a seal notation close this component.
Counsel opinion letter. A final <PAGE> break introduces a Rule 24f-1 validity opinion on counsel letterhead: the law firm's name and address, the date, a salutation to the investment company's board, the opinion body (typically confirming that the shares were legally issued, fully paid, and non-assessable under the relevant state law), a standard consent to inclusion, and the firm's signature. In some submissions the opinion is a separate <DOCUMENT> part and appears as its own document-<sequence>.txt; in others it is concatenated into the primary document after the certificate.
Each record folder contains the metadata descriptor plus the textual payload of every non-image <DOCUMENT> part in the original EDGAR submission. Because Form 24F-1 filings are textual notifications with textual exhibits, virtually the entire informational content of the filing is preserved: the notification proper, the secretary's certificate, the counsel opinion, and any additional text exhibits. Captioned fact fields, signature blocks, and letterhead content are retained in full.
Three categories of material sit outside the record folder. First, image attachments from the original submission are omitted by design; in practice the Form 24F-1 corpus is purely textual and images are vanishingly rare. Second, the full SGML-enveloped submission — the file that preserves the <DOCUMENT>, <TYPE>, <FILENAME>, <DESCRIPTION>, and <TEXT> wrappers around each part — is not materialized on disk but is reachable through linkToTxt. Third, the EDGAR filing-index page and the issuer's CIK folder index are not copied into the record but are addressable through linkToHtml and linkToFilingDetails. Metadata arrays that are unused for this form (seriesAndClassesContractsInformation, dataFiles) are retained as empty arrays.
<PAGE> marker is the only tag parsers can rely on. Section headings, caption labels, and signature rules are typographic conventions; regular expressions should tolerate variation in spacing, terminal punctuation on captions, and capitalization.<PAGE> break or the opening of the next labeled field.SHARES REGISTERED: value of "Zero, for purposes of fee calculations" is a meaningful legal statement, not missing data; it indicates an indefinite-registration filing with no incremental share count.document-<sequence>.txt files.documentFormatFiles row for the "Complete submission text file" — identifiable by its single-space sequence and single-space type — is a pointer to the sec.gov full-submission URL and has no on-disk counterpart; consumers enumerating local documents should skip it.fileNo field in entities almost always follows the 033-nnnnn format typical of 1933 Act registrations by investment companies, and combines with cik for cross-referencing these filings against the post-October-1997 Form 24F-2 filings of the same issuers.<PAGE> as its sole structural tag, and no record carries HTML or inline markup. The dataset should be read as a closed historical corpus rather than a growing feed, and parsers should target the stable caption-labeled prose layout described above.Each record is a Form 24F-1 submitted to EDGAR by a registered investment company that had sold more of its securities than were covered by its effective Securities Act of 1933 registration statement. Under the pre-1997 version of Section 24(f) of the Investment Company Act of 1940 and Rule 24f-1 thereunder, the filing population was limited to three issuer classes:
The legal filer is the investment company itself, as the Securities Act registrant. The form is signed by an authorized officer of the fund or, for a UIT, an authorized officer of the depositor or trustee. Advisers, distributors, underwriters, transfer agents, and custodians are not filers, even when they supply the underlying sales and redemption data.
Form 24F-1 sat at the intersection of two statutes:
Under the pre-1997 Section 24(f), Rule 24f-1 allowed an eligible issuer to retroactively register shares already sold in excess of the amount previously declared, by filing a notice of election on Form 24F-1 and paying the registration fee required by Section 6(b) of the Securities Act. The fee was computed on the aggregate sale price of the excess shares net of redemptions during the covered period — the defining economic feature of the regime, and the feature that distinguished it from an ordinary Section 6(b) fee paid on the gross amount registered up front.
The triggering condition is quantitative: during the fiscal period covered by the election, net sales of the fund's securities exceeded the amount previously registered under the 1933 Act. Without a cure, those excess sales would violate Section 5.
Under the former Rule 24f-1, the notice of election was filed within 90 days after the end of the fiscal year in which the excess sales occurred, together with payment of the Section 6(b) fee on the net-sales amount. The record is therefore an annual, fiscal-year-end true-up keyed to the issuer's fiscal calendar, not an event-driven filing tied to any single transaction.
Each notice identifies the registrant, the 1933 Act registration statement being supplemented, the number and aggregate offering price of the additional securities being registered retroactively, the retroactive effective date, the fiscal period covered, and the fee computation.
The Commission amended Section 24(f), rescinded Rule 24f-1, and discontinued Form 24F-1 effective October 11, 1997 (see Investment Company Act Release No. 22815 / Securities Act Release No. 33-7439). The successor Rule 24f-2 and Form 24F-2 replaced retroactive registration with indefinite registration at the outset, combined with an annual reconciliation filed within 90 days after fiscal year-end that reports net sales and pays the Section 6(b) fee on that net amount.
As a result, this dataset is archival. It covers Form 24F-1 submissions made to EDGAR from March 1996 through October 11, 1997; no new Form 24F-1 filings are possible. Post-1997 annual reconciliations by the same categories of issuers appear as Form 24F-2 filings. Pre-EDGAR Rule 24f-1 notices were filed in paper and are not included here.
Form 24F-1 is a short election notice filed under the pre-1997 Rule 24f-1 regime by open-end funds, UITs, and face-amount certificate companies. Its closest neighbors are its direct successor, the underlying registration statements it sat on top of, its pre-EDGAR paper antecedents, and adjacent prospectus or registration filings that users sometimes mistake for share-count notices.
Form 24F-2 replaced Form 24F-1 on October 11, 1997 and inverted the regime: 24F-1 retroactively registered shares already sold in excess of the originally registered amount, while 24F-2 treats shares as registered in unlimited number and requires an annual notice within 90 days of fiscal year-end reconciling net sales (sales minus redemptions) and paying fees on that net figure. 24F-2 permits redemption netting, is a continuously filed active dataset, and contains no retroactive notices; 24F-1 is a closed archive that 24F-2 cannot substitute for.
Form N-1A is the full open-end fund registration statement carrying the prospectus, SAI, strategy, fee tables, and financial highlights; Form 24F-1 is a procedural notice that presupposes an effective N-1A and only records the curing of oversold shares. N-1A is narrative and periodically amended; 24F-1 is numeric (share counts, dates, fiscal period, signatures) and tells you only that a fund oversold and is reconciling.
Forms 24E-1 and 24E-2 were the paper-era predecessors for registering additional investment-company shares before Rule 24f-1 and before EDGAR. They exist only as a historical lineage, not as an EDGAR dataset; the 24F-1 corpus captures only the narrow 1996-1997 electronic slice of that longer paper tradition.
Rule 497 filings deliver updated prospectuses, stickers, and SAIs to the SEC; 24F-1 filings register share counts and pay Section 24(f) fees. The same funds file both, but the purposes do not overlap: 497 governs prospectus content, 24F-1 governs share-count registration. The 497 corpus is large and ongoing; the 24F-1 corpus is closed and procedural.
Form S-6 is the Securities Act registration statement for unit investment trusts, the UIT analogue of N-1A. UITs were eligible 24f-1 filers and appear in the 24F-1 population, but S-6 is the substantive disclosure vehicle while 24F-1 is merely the retroactive election notice sitting on top of an already-effective S-6.
Form N-2 (closed-end management companies) and Form N-3 (management-company separate accounts) mark the outer eligibility edge of the 24F-1 dataset rather than overlapping with it. Closed-end funds were generally ineligible for Rule 24f-1 because retroactive registration was designed for continuously offered, variably issued open-end products; closed-end share-count activity is recorded through N-2 and conventional post-effective amendments, not 24F-1.
Form 24F-1 is distinct along four hard edges:
For oversold-share notices between March 1996 and October 1997, 24F-1 is the only direct source. For fund strategy, fees, or prospectus content, use N-1A or Rule 497; for post-October-1997 fee and net-sales reconciliation, use Form 24F-2.
The dataset is an archival reference, not a live feed, and its users are correspondingly narrow.
Fund attorneys consult the dataset when reconstructing pre-1997 registration history for open-end funds, UITs, or face-amount certificate companies — typically in response to SEC staff inquiries or when comparing the rescinded Rule 24f-1 retroactive regime to the current Rule 24f-2 indefinite regime. They read the issuer name and CIK from metadata.json, the retroactively registered share count and fiscal period from the document body, and the signature block for officer attestations.
CCOs at fund complexes that absorbed predecessor funds through mergers use the filings to verify that a legacy fund properly elected retroactive registration for shares sold beyond its prior authorization. Relevant fields are the issuer name, share count, fiscal period, and authorized-officer signatures — pulled during trust-level reconciliations or SEC exam responses reaching into pre-1998 records.
Authors of treatises, CLE materials, and regulatory-history scholarship use the dataset as a primary source on the final phase of Rule 24f-1 and the 1997 transition to indefinite registration. They read the full document body for drafting patterns and rely on filing-date metadata to bound the historical window against the October 1997 cutoff.
Engineers building exhaustive EDGAR ingestion pipelines include 24F-1 for form-type completeness. The metadata JSON exercises form-type dictionaries and filer identification logic; the raw document text stress-tests parsers against pre-modern EDGAR formatting. The dataset doubles as a regression fixture that catches pipelines silently dropping rare or discontinued form types.
In disputes over legacy fund reorganizations or historical share-issuance practice, analysts cite 24F-1 filings to establish what was registered and when. They anchor filings with accession-level metadata, extract retroactively registered share amounts from the body, and identify attesting officers from the signature block.
Transfer agents maintaining records for long-lived legacy series reconcile internal share histories against 24F-1 authorizations when corporate-action reviews surface discrepancies. They match on issuer name, CIK, and fiscal period, then confirm incremental share counts from the filing body.
The dataset is small and closed, so the realistic use cases are narrow, high-precision lookups and historical references tied to the 1996-1997 Rule 24f-1 election notices.
Reconstructing a fund's pre-1998 registration history. Investment Company Act counsel responding to an SEC staff inquiry about a legacy open-end fund pulls the filer's 24F-1 accessions by cik and fileNo in metadata.json, then extracts the REGISTRATION NOS:, SHARES REGISTERED:, and PERIOD OF TIME DURING WHICH SHARES SOLD: captions from document-1.txt to produce a dated record of what was retroactively registered before the October 11, 1997 cutover to Form 24F-2.
Surviving-entity diligence in fund-merger reorganizations. Fund compliance teams at a complex that absorbed a predecessor trust match legacy series to 24F-1 filings on issuer name and CIK, then lift the fiscal-period range, retroactive share count, and signatory from the notification and secretary's certificate to confirm that pre-merger share issuance beyond the originally registered amount was properly cured under Rule 24f-1.
Regulatory-history scholarship on the 24f-1 to 24f-2 transition. Authors of treatises or CLE materials on the 1997 rule change use the dataset as the closed EDGAR endpoint of Rule 24f-1, reading the STATEMENT BY ISSUER: and COMPILATION OF FEE: blocks across the records to illustrate actual retroactive-registration and Section 6(b) fee practice, and citing the filedAt timestamps to bound the historical window against October 11, 1997.
EDGAR ingestion pipeline regression fixture. Data-platform engineers include the records as a test suite that exercises discontinued-form handling: the formType value "24F-1" validates form-type dictionaries, the documentFormatFiles array with its single-space "Complete submission text file" row tests synthetic-row skipping, and the ASCII <PAGE>-only bodies verify that pre-SGML-wrapper parsers do not silently drop rare form types.
Historical share-issuance evidence in litigation. In disputes over legacy fund reorganizations, litigation-support analysts cite the accession number and filedAt from metadata.json as authoritative anchors and quote the signed notification body plus counsel opinion letter to establish which shares were registered, under which 1933 Act file number, and attested by which officer and law firm.
Transfer-agent reconciliation of long-lived series. Registrars auditing share histories on funds that existed before 1998 match 24F-1 filings to internal ledgers on CIK, fiscal-year-end, and PERIOD OF TIME DURING WHICH SHARES SOLD:, using the retroactive share count and authorizing board-resolution language in the secretary's certificate to resolve discrepancies surfaced during corporate-action reviews.
The Form 24F-1 Files dataset is served by sec-api.io through three endpoints: a JSON index describing the dataset and its containers, a full ZIP archive covering all records, and individual container URLs for month-level downloads. The dataset is static and archival — Form 24F-1 was retired in 1997 — so container updatedAt timestamps only change on rare correction runs.
The full archive and single-container endpoints require authentication via an Authorization: <API_KEY> header or a ?token=<API_KEY> query parameter. See the sec-api.io documentation for obtaining credentials.
Dataset Index JSON API: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-24f1-files.json
Returns dataset metadata (name, description, earliest sample date, total records, total size, form types, container format, and file types), the full-archive download URL, and an array of container objects. Each container carries downloadUrl, key, size, records, and updatedAt, which lets consumers enumerate available files and detect which containers changed in the most recent refresh. This endpoint does not require an API key.
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{
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"datasetId": "1f13365b-9ae0-6a7b-9a0e-aca358a0e228",
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"datasetDownloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-24f1-files.zip",
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"name": "Form 24F-1 Files Dataset",
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"updatedAt": "2026-04-16T08:56:51.219Z",
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"earliestSampleDate": "1996-03-01",
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"totalRecords": 8,
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"totalSize": 21761,
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"formTypes": ["24F-1"],
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"containerFormat": "ZIP",
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"fileTypes": ["TXT", "JSON"],
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"containers": [
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{
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"downloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-24f1-files/1997/1997-10.zip",
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"key": "1997/1997-10.zip",
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"size": 5432,
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"records": 2,
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"updatedAt": "2026-04-16T08:56:51.219Z"
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}
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]
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}
Fetch the index with curl:
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curl https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-24f1-files.json
Download Entire Dataset: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-24f1-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Returns a single ZIP containing every container in the dataset. Because the corpus is small, downloading the full archive is usually the most practical option. Requires an API key.
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curl -o form-24f1-files.zip \
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"https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-24f1-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY"
Download Single Container: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-24f1-files/1997/1997-10.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads one month-level container listed under containers[].downloadUrl in the index. Inside each container there is one folder per accession number (dashes stripped) containing metadata.json and one or more document-*.txt files. Requires an API key.
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curl -o 1997-10.zip \
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"https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-24f1-files/1997/1997-10.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY"
Decompress any downloaded archive with unzip <file>.zip.
The dataset covers Form 24F-1, the Notification of Election Under Rule 24f-1 filed on EDGAR by open-end management investment companies, unit investment trusts, and face-amount certificate companies under Section 24(f) of the Investment Company Act of 1940. It is the pre-1997 retroactive share-registration notice and is not the same form as its successor, Form 24F-2.
The triggering condition was quantitative: during the fiscal period covered, net sales of the fund's securities exceeded the amount previously registered on its Securities Act of 1933 registration statement. To cure what would otherwise be unregistered sales under Section 5, the issuer filed Form 24F-1 within 90 days after fiscal year-end, retroactively registered the excess shares, and paid the Section 6(b) fee computed on the net-sales amount.
The SEC amended Section 24(f), rescinded Rule 24f-1, and discontinued Form 24F-1 effective October 11, 1997 (Investment Company Act Release No. 22815 / Securities Act Release No. 33-7439). The successor Rule 24f-2 and Form 24F-2 replaced retroactive registration with indefinite registration at the outset and moved the fee mechanic to an annual net-sales reconciliation filed within 90 days after fiscal year-end.
Form 24F-1 retroactively registered shares already sold in excess of the originally registered amount and paid the Section 6(b) fee on that net-sales amount. Form 24F-2 treats shares as registered in unlimited number from the outset and uses an annual notice to reconcile net sales (sales minus redemptions) and pay fees. 24F-2 is an active, continuously filed dataset; 24F-1 is a closed archive that 24F-2 cannot substitute for.
Form 24F-1 was available only during a narrow electronic window — March 1996, when it began appearing on EDGAR, through October 11, 1997, when Rule 24f-1 was rescinded — and many funds completed their Rule 24f-1 reconciliations on paper before EDGAR or had already shifted to the indefinite-registration approach that Form 24F-2 later formalized. The corpus therefore exhausts the regulatory artifact rather than streaming ongoing disclosure, and pre-EDGAR Rule 24f-1 notices filed in paper are not included.
No. Because Rule 24f-1 was rescinded on October 11, 1997, no new Form 24F-1 filings are possible. The dataset is static and archival; container updatedAt timestamps change only on rare correction runs, and any post-1997 annual reconciliations by the same issuer classes appear instead as Form 24F-2 filings.
Open the record's metadata.json and read the entities array. Each filer element carries companyName (the issuer's legal name, suffixed with a role tag such as " (Filer)"), cik, fileNo (typically in 033-nnnnn form for 1933 Act investment-company registrations), stateOfIncorporation, and fiscalYearEnd. Combining cik with fileNo also lets you cross-reference the same issuer against its post-October-1997 Form 24F-2 filings.