The Form 8-K Files Dataset is a full-fidelity archive of every Form 8-K and Form 8-K/A current-report submission accepted by the SEC's EDGAR system, where each record is one complete EDGAR submission identified by an 18-digit accession number and packaged as an accession-number folder containing the structured submission metadata, the primary 8-K document, and every non-image exhibit and ancillary attachment filed with it. Form 8-K is the event-driven "current report" that domestic Exchange Act reporting issuers use to disclose enumerated material events — from material agreements and acquisitions to officer departures, auditor changes, earnings releases, Regulation FD disclosures, and material cybersecurity incidents — typically within four business days of the triggering event. Coverage begins on October 1, 1993, the start of mandatory EDGAR phase-in, and continues to the present, preserving every filed exhibit family (EX-2, EX-3, EX-4, EX-10, EX-16, EX-17, EX-23, EX-99, and the EX-101/EX-104 XBRL components) across the SGML/ASCII, HTML, and inline-XBRL eras. The dataset is distributed as ZIP containers and contains TXT, JSON, HTML/XHTML, PDF, XFD, and FRM file types.
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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A single record in the Form 8-K Files Dataset is one complete EDGAR submission of either a Form 8-K (current report) or a Form 8-K/A (amendment to a previously filed current report), uniquely identified by its 18-digit accession number. Each record is materialized on disk as one accession-number folder that bundles the structured metadata describing the filing, the primary 8-K document, and every supporting exhibit and ancillary attachment submitted in the same EDGAR package, with the sole exception of binary image attachments. The unit of observation is therefore the filing, not the issuer, not the individual reportable event, and not the individual exhibit: a single 8-K that reports several Items under Form 8-K's Item taxonomy and attaches multiple exhibits is still one record.
Form 8-K is the "current report" prescribed by Sections 13 and 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. It is the vehicle through which a domestic registrant discloses, on a near-real-time basis, the occurrence of one or more enumerated material events that fall outside the regular cadence of quarterly (10-Q) and annual (10-K) reporting. The form is event-triggered rather than calendar-triggered, must generally be filed with EDGAR within four business days of the triggering event, and is structured as a list of "Items," each Item corresponding to one specific category of disclosable event — entry into a material definitive agreement (Item 1.01), material cybersecurity incidents (Item 1.05), completion of acquisition or disposition (Item 2.01), results of operations and financial condition (Item 2.02), creation of a direct financial obligation (Item 2.03), changes in registrant's certifying accountant (Item 4.01), changes in control (Item 5.01), departures and elections of directors and officers and compensatory arrangements (Item 5.02), amendments to articles or bylaws (Item 5.03), submission of matters to a vote of security holders (Item 5.07), Regulation FD disclosure (Item 7.01), other events (Item 8.01), and financial statements and exhibits (Item 9.01).
Form 8-K/A is an amendment to a previously filed 8-K, most commonly used to supply Item 9.01(a) financial statements of a business acquired under Item 2.01 within the 71-calendar-day extension window allowed by the Item 9.01 instructions, or to correct, restate, or supplement an earlier disclosure. An 8-K/A retains the same accession-number lifecycle as a fresh 8-K — it carries its own accession number and is therefore its own record — and references the underlying original by date and Item. The dataset's earliest records begin October 1, 1993 with the start of mandatory EDGAR phase-in; pre-EDGAR paper 8-Ks are not part of the electronic corpus.
The body of Form 8-K itself is short. It identifies the registrant on the cover page, lists the Items being reported, narrates each Item in plain English, and incorporates exhibits by reference under Item 9.01. The substantive content typically resides in the exhibits: press releases (EX-99.1), agreements (EX-10.x), auditor letters (EX-16.x), severance and separation arrangements, pro forma financial statements (EX-99.2), engagement letters, indentures, supplemental indentures, and analyst-call slide decks.
Each record is a directory containing two layers of content:
metadata.json file generated from the parsed EDGAR submission header. This is the addressable, machine-readable spine of the record — it carries the accession number, the form type, the filer identifiers, the filing and period timestamps, the Items reported, and the manifest of every document that was part of the original submission.The two layers are tightly cross-referenced. Every entry in the documentFormatFiles[] and dataFiles[] arrays of metadata.json corresponds (by sequence, type, description, and filename) to a sibling file in the same folder, except for excluded image attachments. SGML headers embedded inside individual documents, where present, mirror the manifest entry exactly.
metadata.json spineEvery accession folder contains exactly one metadata.json. Top-level fields include:
formType: "8-K" or "8-K/A".accessionNo: dashed accession number, e.g. "0000950170-25-087681".id: a 32-character hex identifier serving as the record id within the dataset.linkToFilingDetails: URL of the primary 8-K document on sec.gov.linkToTxt: URL of the complete .txt SGML submission on EDGAR.linkToHtml: URL of the EDGAR filing-index page.linkToXbrl: URL of the XBRL instance, when present (frequently empty for 8-Ks because the form's tagging mandate covers only the cover page rather than financial statements).description: a human-readable summary that typically enumerates the Items reported, e.g. "Form 8-K - Current report - Item 1.01 Item 2.03 Item 9.01".filedAt: ISO-8601 acceptance datetime with timezone offset.periodOfReport: YYYY-MM-DD date of the earliest event reported (the "as of" date on the cover page).items: an array of fully spelled-out Item labels triggered by the filing, e.g. "Item 5.02: Departure of Directors or Certain Officers; Election of Directors; Appointment of Certain Officers; Compensatory Arrangements of Certain Officers". This is the canonical structured handle on which 8-K Items the filing invokes.documentFormatFiles: an array of attachment manifest entries (primary doc, exhibits, complete-submission text, graphics), each carrying sequence, size in bytes (as a string), documentUrl, description, and type (e.g. "8-K", "EX-10.1", "EX-99.1", "EX-16.1", "GRAPHIC").dataFiles: an array of XBRL-related ancillary files in the same shape as documentFormatFiles, holding the schema (EX-101.SCH), label (EX-101.LAB), presentation (EX-101.PRE), calculation (EX-101.CAL), definition (EX-101.DEF), and any extracted instance documents.entities: an array of one or more parties on the filing (filer, subject company, filed-by entity). Each entity carries companyName with a role suffix in parentheses (e.g. "Koppers Holdings Inc. (Filer)"), cik, tickers, type, act ("34" for the Exchange Act), fileNo, filmNo, irsNo, fiscalYearEnd as MMDD, stateOfIncorporation, and sic (the SIC code with industry label).seriesAndClassesContractsInformation: an array populated for fund filers; ordinarily empty for operating-company 8-Ks.The canonical landing document of the filing is the primary 8-K. It is the file the EDGAR filing-detail page links to first and the file whose type in documentFormatFiles[] is "8-K" (or "8-K/A"). Its internal anatomy mirrors the form itself:
In modern filings the primary document is delivered as an Inline XBRL (iXBRL) XHTML file rather than a plain HTML file. The <html> root declares the xmlns:ix="http://www.xbrl.org/2013/inlineXBRL", xmlns:dei="http://xbrl.sec.gov/dei/...", and xmlns:xbrli="http://www.xbrl.org/2003/instance" namespaces, and an <ix:header> block at the top of the body carries the iXBRL contexts, units, and references. Cover-page facts — registrant name, CIK, document type, period of report, trading symbol, exchange, emerging-growth-company status, and the four pre-commencement check-box states — are tagged inline via <ix:nonNumeric> and <ix:nonFraction> elements wrapping the human-readable cover-page text. iXBRL tagging on Form 8-K is confined to the cover page; the per-Item narrative body and the exhibits are not XBRL-tagged.
Below the primary document sit zero or more exhibit files, each a separate document in the accession folder. The exhibit-type vocabulary used in 8-K filings is governed by Item 601 of Regulation S-K and recurs in metadata.json -> documentFormatFiles[].type. The most common exhibit families on 8-K filings are:
dataFiles[] rather than documentFormatFiles[].Each exhibit is delivered as either a bare HTML/XHTML document or, for some attachments, an HTML body wrapped in the original EDGAR SGML <DOCUMENT> envelope. The SGML wrapper preserves the four-line submission header (<TYPE>, <SEQUENCE>, <FILENAME>, <DESCRIPTION>) followed by a <TEXT> body containing the actual HTML; those four header values mirror the corresponding entry in metadata.json -> documentFormatFiles[]. PDF and XFD attachments occur occasionally for older or specialized exhibits (auditor letters, rendered presentations, paper-form FDS submissions); FRM files appear as legacy form-data attachments. The dominant on-disk file types in modern filings are HTM/HTML for documents and JSON for the manifest.
Filenames vary by filer and filing agent but follow a small number of recurring patterns:
<ticker>-<YYYYMMDD>.htm for the primary 8-K, where the date is the period of report.<ticker>-ex<N>_<M>.htm, ex<N>-<M>.htm, <filer>_ex<N>-<M>.htm, or exhibit<N><M>.htm for numbered exhibits.metadata.json for the per-folder structured manifest, always present.The accession-number folder name itself is the 18-digit packed accession number (no dashes), which uniquely identifies the filing and matches the dashed form in metadata.json -> accessionNo.
Each record includes:
metadata.json.dataFiles[].The file types found in the dataset are TXT, JSON, HTML/XHTML, PDF, XFD, and FRM, with HTML/XHTML and JSON dominating modern records.
Image attachments (JPG, PNG, GIF) referenced by the primary document and exhibits are intentionally excluded from the dataset, even though metadata.json -> documentFormatFiles[] continues to list them with type: "GRAPHIC". Where an exhibit's text or layout depends on inline images (logos, signature scans, charts, photographs in press releases), the HTML retains the <img> references but the binary image targets are not present in the folder. Hyperlinked external content — websites, third-party press-release portals, transcripts hosted off-EDGAR — is also not retrieved, since it was never part of the EDGAR submission. The dataset confines itself to what was filed.
Form 8-K's content requirements have changed materially across the dataset's three-decade span, and the structure of records reflects those changes:
metadata.json -> items[].items[].formType = "8-K/A".The substantive Item structure changed materially over the dataset's span, and so did the file-format envelope of the underlying EDGAR submission:
.txt carries <DOCUMENT> blocks for the primary 8-K and each exhibit, each with the four-line <TYPE> / <SEQUENCE> / <FILENAME> / <DESCRIPTION> header followed by a <TEXT> body of plain ASCII. There was no HTML layout, no inline tagging, and no XBRL.<DOCUMENT> wrappers continued to carry the per-document headers, but the <TEXT> body increasingly held HTML.linkToXbrl is therefore frequently empty for 8-K records of this era.EX-104 cover-page interactive data exhibit and the dataFiles[] array on 8-Ks were introduced as part of this regime. Modern primary 8-K documents are therefore XHTML files with <ix:header> blocks and <ix:nonNumeric> / <ix:nonFraction> elements on the cover page; the body of the filing below the cover page remains conventional HTML.The dataset preserves all of these formats as filed: a 1995 record will be a single SGML/ASCII text submission, a 2010 record will be an HTML primary document with HTML exhibits, and a 2025 record will be an iXBRL XHTML primary document with HTML exhibits. Consumer code must therefore be tolerant of the range of encodings and of the optional SGML envelope around individual documents.
formType = "8-K/A" are amendments and are linked back to the original 8-K by registrant CIK and approximate filing date; the dataset does not store an explicit pointer from amendment to original, but the periodOfReport value and the registrant's prior filings on EDGAR establish the linkage.items[] array in metadata.json is the cleanest structured handle on what the filing is reporting. The Item numbers and labels are normalized to the modern decimal taxonomy. The free-text description field contains the same Item numbers in shorter form.<ix:nonNumeric> and <ix:nonFraction> elements; the same facts are also available structurally in metadata.json -> entities[] and on the cover-page EX-104 interactive data file.<html>...</html> document) and some arrive wrapped in an SGML <DOCUMENT> envelope. Parsers must detect and strip the envelope when present, otherwise downstream HTML parsers will choke on the leading <DOCUMENT> / <TYPE> / <SEQUENCE> / <FILENAME> / <DESCRIPTION> / <TEXT> lines.entities[] (filer plus subject company plus filed-by). Each entity object carries its own role-suffixed companyName, cik, and identifiers.<img> references remain intact for context.periodOfReport is the date of the earliest event being disclosed, not the filing date. filedAt is the EDGAR acceptance datetime. The four-business-day rule means these typically sit within a week of each other, but Item 9.01 amendments on an 8-K/A may extend the gap by up to 71 calendar days.Each record in this dataset is a current report submitted to the SEC by a U.S. domestic Exchange Act reporting issuer. The legal filer is the registrant itself, acting through its officers and counsel. One accession equals one Form 8-K (or amending 8-K/A) covering one or more enumerated triggering events at that registrant, packaged on EDGAR with its cover-page items, narrative body, and exhibits.
The filing population consists of issuers subject to Section 13(a) or Section 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, including:
Form 8-K does not branch by issuer size: smaller reporting companies, emerging growth companies, accelerated filers, and large accelerated filers all use the same form.
Form 8-K is event-driven, not periodic. A filing exists only when a specific item in the form is triggered by an actual corporate event. The items group those events into numbered sections:
A single 8-K may invoke multiple items when one underlying event has several disclosure consequences (for example, a CEO departure that also involves a separation agreement and a successor appointment).
The default deadline is four business days after the triggering event, with "occurrence" defined item by item: execution date for an Item 1.01 agreement, notification date for an Item 5.02 officer departure, issuance date for an Item 2.02 earnings release. Specialized timing applies to several items:
Some items are "furnished" rather than "filed" for purposes of Section 18, most notably Item 2.02 and Item 7.01. Furnished material avoids Section 18 liability and is not auto-incorporated into Securities Act registration statements unless the registrant elects. Both filed and furnished submissions appear in this dataset under form types 8-K and 8-K/A.
Form 8-K/A is used to amend an earlier 8-K. The most common pattern is the Item 9.01 financial-statements and pro-forma amendment after a completed business acquisition under Item 2.01, which is permitted up to 71 calendar days after the initial report. Other amendments correct or supplement prior disclosures and have no fixed deadline beyond the general duty to amend promptly.
The Form 8-K Files Dataset overlaps with three families: periodic disclosure forms (10-K, 10-Q), foreign-issuer current reports (6-K), and narrower products that extract items, exhibits, or press releases from the same 8-K corpus. Adjacent insider and ownership filings (Forms 3/4/5, Schedules 13D/G) occasionally cover related events but differ in filer and structure.
Form 10-K and 10-Q (Periodic Reports). Periodic, calendar-driven, and broad. The 10-K carries audited annual financials, MD&A, risk factors, and governance; the Form 10-Q carries unaudited quarterly statements. The 8-K is event-driven and narrow, due within four business days of a triggering event. Earnings often appear first as an 8-K Item 2.02 press release, then in the 10-Q's structured statements. Use 8-K for the date and characterization of a discrete event (e.g., Item 5.02 for an officer departure); use 10-K/10-Q for audited or XBRL-tagged financial detail.
Form 6-K (Foreign Private Issuers). The foreign-issuer analogue to 8-K, used to furnish material information already disclosed abroad. The 8-K Files Dataset excludes 6-K: filer populations differ (domestic registrants vs. FPIs) and triggers differ (6-K keys off home-country publication; 8-K keys off an enumerated item list). Cross-jurisdiction event studies require both; US-only studies need only 8-K.
10-K/A and 10-Q/A (Amendments). Parallel to the 8-K/A filings included here, but typically used for restatements or material corrections. 8-K/A is most often used to supply information unavailable at the original four-day deadline, especially the financial statements required by Item 9.01 after a completed acquisition.
Schedule 13D / 13G (Beneficial Ownership). Filed by acquirers crossing the 5 percent threshold. Overlap with 8-K is limited to change-in-control events triggering Item 5.01, and the viewpoint differs: 13D/G is the holder's perspective, 8-K Item 5.01 is the issuer's. For position accumulation, use 13D/G; for issuer characterization of control changes, use 8-K.
Forms 3, 4, and 5 (Insider Transactions). Structured, per-transaction reports by insiders. They sometimes correlate with 8-K Item 5.02 officer changes but answer different questions: Forms 3/4/5 give tabular trading data by individuals; 8-K gives narrative issuer disclosure of the underlying corporate event.
Item-level structured 8-K datasets. Downstream products that parse 8-Ks into one row per item (1.01, 2.02, 5.02, 7.01, 8.01, etc.) with normalized fields and event tags. The Files Dataset is the upstream source: complete original EDGAR submissions per accession, including the primary document, all exhibits, and the metadata file. Use structured extracts for event studies on a fixed schema; use the Files Dataset when full text, exact exhibits, or uncovered items are needed.
Item-specific extract datasets (1.01, 2.02, 5.02, 7.01, etc.). Single-item slices for material agreements, earnings releases, officer changes, or Reg FD disclosures. The Files Dataset is a superset spanning every item, every amendment, and every exhibit from October 1993 onward, which is required for cross-item analyses, co-occurring item flags, and items without dedicated extracts.
Exhibits-only and press release datasets. Products that isolate Exhibit 99.1 press releases or Exhibit 10 contracts attached to 8-Ks. These are slices of the same submissions but typically drop the link between an exhibit and the specific item under which it was furnished or filed. The Files Dataset preserves that relationship; exhibits-only products are lighter when only bulk press release text is needed.
The Form 8-K Files Dataset is distinguished by four properties that no neighbor replicates together: (1) full-fidelity preservation of the original EDGAR submission per accession, including primary document, non-image exhibits, and metadata; (2) coverage of all items and amendments from October 1993 to present; (3) event-driven cadence on a four-business-day window, unlike any periodic form; and (4) scope limited to domestic registrants, separating it from 6-K. Use it when the question concerns timely material events from US issuers and the analysis needs the full filing. Use 10-K for audited financials, 10-Q for quarterly statement detail, 6-K for foreign issuers, Forms 3/4/5 for insider trades, and Schedules 13D/G for ownership accumulation. It complements rather than replaces item-level and exhibit-level extracts, which trade fidelity for schema convenience.
The Form 8-K corpus is the primary record of material corporate events between periodic reports. Different roles read different items and exhibits, but all use the same underlying filings.
Used as the canonical source of inter-quarter disclosures for trading. Focus on Items 1.01, 2.01, 2.02, Item 2.05, Item 4.02, 5.02, and 8.01, with Exhibit 99.1 press releases and underlying agreements (2.x, 10.x). Filing timestamps and item tags drive event chronologies, post-event drift analysis, restatement watch lists, and merger-arbitrage sizing.
Ingest the full 1993-onward corpus to engineer event features. They rely on accession numbers, precise filing timestamps, item-number tagging, and machine-readable exhibit text to build factor signals, drift models, restatement risk scores, and tone-shift features from earnings exhibits.
Concentrate on Item 4.01, Item 4.02, and Exhibit 16 auditor letters. They reconstruct auditor turnover, disagreements, and restatement triggers, linking 8-Ks to subsequent 10-K/A and 10-Q/A filings to support case files, expert reports, and audit-quality studies.
Benchmark drafting across peer 8-Ks: Item 1.01 agreement summaries, Item 5.02 separation terms, Item 8.01 voluntary disclosures, and forward-looking-statement blocks. The corpus feeds precedent libraries, trigger analyses, and assessments of timeliness and completeness.
Mine Items 1.01 and 2.01 plus the underlying merger, asset-purchase, credit, and indenture agreements filed as Exhibits 2.x, 10.x, and 4.x. Used to extract conditions precedent, MAC clauses, termination and break fees, and financing contingencies for deal-term comparables and negotiation positions.
Watch Items Item 1.03, 2.03, 2.04, Item 3.03, and Item 8.01 covenant waivers and amendments for events that change credit risk between covenant reporting dates. Cross-reference textual disclosure with the indenture or credit agreement exhibit for covenant monitoring, default-watch lists, and recovery analysis.
Parse Items 5.02, 5.03, 5.07, and Item 5.08 to extract appointment and separation terms, equity grants, bylaw amendments, and vote tallies. Output supports proxy-season notes, severance benchmarking, and board-composition tracking.
Route filings by item code: Item 5.02 updates insider lists, Items 1.03 and 2.04 affect counterparty exposure, Item 4.02 may trigger restricted-list status, and Item 7.01 informs Regulation FD reviews. The dataset drives automated alerts and conflict checks.
At vendors and large buy- and sell-side firms, engineers use the metadata file, accession numbers, exhibit indexes, and consistent multi-decade file mix to populate event-history tables and feed internal event APIs and search interfaces.
Build retrieval and extraction systems on a long-history, item-tagged corpus. Full filing bodies and varied exhibit formats (TXT, HTML, PDF, JSON) support fine-tuning, evaluation, and citation grounding for summarization, classification, and QA over current reports.
In-house IR and outside disclosure advisers compare peer practice on Item 2.02 earnings exhibits, Item 7.01 Regulation FD presentations, Item 5.02 transition language, and forward-looking-statement updates to inform drafting checklists and investor-day planning.
Use near-complete 1993-onward coverage and exhibit text for event studies, executive-turnover work, disclosure-timeliness research, and analyses of structural changes after Form 8-K rule amendments.
Track governance triggers: poison pills (Items 3.03, 8.01), board changes (5.02), bylaw amendments (5.03), shareholder settlements (1.01), and contested vote outcomes (5.07), tying disclosure text to the filed agreement or amended bylaws to plan and evaluate campaigns.
The Form 8-K Files Dataset supports a small set of recurring, concrete workflows built on accession-level metadata, item tags, and full exhibit text.
Item 4.01 auditor-change monitoring. Filter records where metadata.json -> items[] contains Item 4.01, then pull the EX-16.x letter from the former independent accountant in the same accession folder. Used to maintain auditor-turnover watch lists, flag disagreements that may precede a restatement, and link the 8-K to the registrant's subsequent 10-K/A or 10-Q/A.
Item 2.02 earnings-release event studies. Stream all filings tagged with Item 2.02 across the 1993-onward corpus, extract the EX-99.1 press release text, and align filedAt timestamps with intraday returns. Drives post-earnings drift research, tone-shift signals, and surprise-vs-guidance benchmarks where the 10-Q's structured statements arrive weeks later.
Item 1.01 / EX-10.x material-agreement comparables. Pull every accession reporting Item 1.01 along with its EX-2.x, EX-4.x, and EX-10.x attachments to build a corpus of credit agreements, merger agreements, and indentures. Used by M&A and credit teams to extract MAC clauses, termination fees, covenant packages, and financing conditions for deal-term comparables.
Item 5.02 executive-transition tracking. Combine the Item 5.02 narrative in the primary 8-K with attached separation, employment, and equity-award exhibits (EX-10.x, EX-17.x). Feeds severance benchmarking, board-composition timelines, insider-list updates for compliance surveillance, and trigger flags for forensic reviews of officer departures clustered with restatements.
Item 1.05 cybersecurity-incident corpus. Filter post-December-2023 records carrying Item 1.05 to assemble the full population of material cybersecurity incident disclosures. Supports incident-rate benchmarking, peer-language comparison on materiality determinations, and timeliness studies against the four-business-day deadline.
8-K/A acquisition financial-statement linkage. Identify records with formType = "8-K/A" and Item 9.01, then match back to the original Item 2.01 8-K by registrant CIK and periodOfReport. Used to measure the lag inside the 71-day window, recover the EX-99.x audited target financials and pro formas, and complete acquisition-history datasets for diligence and post-deal performance studies.
RAG and extraction grounding over current reports. Index the per-accession folder — metadata.json plus primary iXBRL document plus exhibits — as the retrieval unit, with items[] as a structured filter. Powers LLM workflows for current-report summarization, item classification, and citation-grounded QA where answers must point back to a specific exhibit within a specific accession.
Dataset Index JSON API: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-8k-files.json
This endpoint returns dataset-level metadata (name, description, last updated timestamp, earliest sample date, total records, total size, covered form types, container format, and file types), the full dataset download URL, and the complete list of monthly container files. Each container entry includes its key, size in bytes, record count, updated timestamp, and direct download URL. Poll this endpoint to detect which containers were refreshed in the latest run and selectively download only those archives on a daily basis. No API key is required to call this endpoint.
Example response:
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{
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"datasetId": "1f1333bd-dbdd-6a50-bdf2-2106570945e7",
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"datasetDownloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-8k-files.zip",
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"name": "Form 8-K Files Dataset",
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"updatedAt": "2026-04-29T03:00:29.691Z",
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"earliestSampleDate": "1993-10-01",
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"totalRecords": 4566293,
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"totalSize": 62254196451,
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"formTypes": ["8-K", "8-K/A"],
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"containerFormat": "ZIP",
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"fileTypes": ["TXT", "JSON", "HTML", "PDF", "XFD", "FRM"],
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"containers": [
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{
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"downloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-8k-files/2026/2026-04.zip",
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"key": "2026/2026-04.zip",
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"size": 13818783,
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"records": 154,
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"updatedAt": "2026-04-29T03:00:29.691Z"
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}
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]
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}
Download Entire Dataset: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-8k-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads the complete Form 8-K Files dataset as a single ZIP archive covering all filings from October 1993 to the present. This endpoint requires an API key.
Download Single Container: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-8k-files/2026/2026-04.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads a single monthly container archive instead of the full dataset, which is useful for incremental updates or targeted backfills. This endpoint requires an API key.
The dataset covers Form 8-K (current report) and Form 8-K/A (amendment to a current report) submissions filed on EDGAR by domestic Exchange Act reporting issuers. It does not include Form 6-K, which is the foreign-private-issuer analogue, nor any periodic forms such as Form 10-K or Form 10-Q.
One record is one complete EDGAR submission, identified by an 18-digit accession number and materialized as one accession-number folder. The folder bundles a single metadata.json file, the primary 8-K document, and every non-image exhibit and ancillary attachment that was part of the same EDGAR package. A single 8-K that reports several Items and attaches multiple exhibits is still one record.
U.S. domestic issuers subject to Section 13(a) or Section 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 — including domestic operating companies registered under Section 12(b) or 12(g), Section 15(d) reporters, subsidiary debt issuers, asset-backed issuers, and successor registrants. Foreign private issuers furnish Form 6-K instead and are not part of this dataset; registered investment companies generally use the N-series forms, although closed-end funds and BDCs that are Exchange Act reporters do file 8-K.
The default deadline is four business days after the triggering event. Item-specific timing applies to several Items: Item 5.07 (vote results) runs from the meeting, Item 1.05 (material cybersecurity incidents) runs from the materiality determination, and Item 7.01 (Regulation FD) requires simultaneous or prompt disclosure. Form 8-K/A amendments supplying Item 9.01 financial statements after an acquisition are permitted up to 71 calendar days after the original report.
The earliest records begin on October 1, 1993, the start of mandatory EDGAR phase-in, and coverage continues to the present. Pre-EDGAR paper 8-Ks are not included. The dataset preserves filings as filed across the SGML/ASCII era (1993-2001), the HTML era (2001-2018), and the inline-XBRL cover-page era (2019-present).
The dataset is distributed as ZIP container archives, organized into monthly containers that can be downloaded individually or as a single full-dataset archive. Inside the records, the file types found are TXT, JSON, HTML/XHTML, PDF, XFD, and FRM, with HTML/XHTML and JSON dominating modern records. Every accession folder contains exactly one metadata.json file as its structured spine.
Item-level structured datasets parse 8-Ks into one row per Item with normalized fields and event tags. The Form 8-K Files Dataset is the upstream source — complete original EDGAR submissions per accession, including the primary document, all non-image exhibits, and the metadata file. Use structured extracts for event studies on a fixed schema; use the Files Dataset when full text, exact exhibits, cross-item analyses, or coverage of Items without dedicated extracts is required.