The Form DRSLTR Files Dataset packages every EDGAR submission of form type DRSLTR — issuer correspondence transmitted to the staff of the SEC's Division of Corporation Finance during confidential, non-public review of a draft registration statement. Each record captures one accession number: the structured EDGAR header plus the textual letter(s) the issuer (almost always through outside securities counsel) submitted under that accession. The form was introduced into EDGAR on October 1, 2012 alongside Form DRS to operationalize the JOBS Act's confidential-submission regime, so the dataset's earliest sample date is 2012-10-01 and coverage runs forward from there. Records are delivered as monthly ZIP containers holding HTML, JSON, TXT, and PDF artifacts, with a uniform metadata.json envelope describing the EDGAR header for each filing.
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The dataset covers the full population of publicly visible Form DRSLTR submissions on EDGAR. Form DRSLTR is the EDGAR submission type used to transmit issuer correspondence in connection with a draft registration statement (filed under EDGAR types DRS or DRS/A). Draft registration statements are reviewed confidentially by the Division of Corporation Finance under procedures originally created by Title I of the JOBS Act of 2012 for emerging growth companies, then expanded in July 2017 by Division-of-Corporation-Finance policy to any issuer's first registration statement and to certain follow-on offerings within twelve months of an IPO, with the FAST Act technical amendments of 2018 codifying parts of the expansion. DRSLTR is the channel through which filers submit cover letters announcing a confidential or revised draft, point-by-point responses to staff comment letters, supplemental analyses on accounting or disclosure issues, requests for confidential treatment, and acknowledgments of the public-filing timing requirements.
DRSLTR submissions are themselves nonpublic at acceptance and become available on EDGAR only after the issuer publicly files the registration statement, at which point the entire confidential history (the underlying drafts and the DRSLTR correspondence) is released. The dataset reflects this: it contains only DRSLTR records that have become publicly visible. The underlying letter is almost always a counsel-prepared document on outside-law-firm letterhead, structured as a formal business letter rather than as a regulatory form — there are no numbered Items, no Parts, no prescribed schedules. Its anatomy is dictated by professional convention rather than Regulation S-K.
The dataset is distributed as monthly ZIP containers. Inside each container, every record is a folder named with the eighteen-digit unpunctuated accession number (for example 000114036125033464), bundling a structured metadata.json file together with the correspondence document(s) EDGAR accepted under that accession. File types found across the corpus are HTML, JSON, TXT, and PDF.
One record corresponds to a single EDGAR submission of Form DRSLTR — one accession number, one correspondence filing transmitted by or on behalf of an issuer to the staff of the SEC's Division of Corporation Finance during the confidential, nonpublic review of a draft registration statement. Each record is materialized as a folder named with the eighteen-digit unpunctuated accession number (for example 000114036125033464), placed inside a monthly ZIP container, and bundling a structured metadata file together with the correspondence document(s) that EDGAR accepted under that accession. The unit of analysis is the filing as a whole: every letter, attachment row, filer entity, and submission-level attribute that EDGAR associates with the accession is contained in the one folder.
Each accession folder is organized into two layers. The first is a structured metadata layer, embodied in a single metadata.json file at the root of the folder, which captures the EDGAR header, identifiers, filer entities, and an inventory of every document originally submitted. The second is the document layer: one or more SGML-wrapped HTML files holding the letter text and any textual attachments, with the primary letter conventionally named filename1.htm (the default name EDGAR assigns for DRSLTR letters). Embedded images referenced from the HTML are excluded from the dataset by design, so the document layer contains only machine-readable text artifacts. The file-types found in the dataset are HTML, JSON, TXT, and PDF — covering the full historical range — although in practice the overwhelming majority of records contain only the metadata.json and one HTML letter; older or unusual submissions can carry a TXT-only letter or a PDF attachment instead.
metadata.jsonThe metadata envelope is uniform across every record; only the contents of array fields vary. The top-level fields are:
formType — always the literal string DRSLTR.accessionNo — the punctuated EDGAR accession number, e.g. 0001140361-25-033464.filedAt — ISO 8601 timestamp with Eastern Time offset capturing the EDGAR acceptance time, e.g. 2025-08-29T17:11:54-04:00.description — a constant label, "Form DRSLTR - Correspondence Related to Draft Registration Statement".linkToFilingDetails — URL of the primary HTML document on www.sec.gov.linkToTxt — URL of the EDGAR full-submission .txt bundle (the SGML concatenation of all documents).linkToHtml — URL of the EDGAR filing index page for the accession.linkToXbrl — empty string, since correspondence carries no XBRL.documentFormatFiles — array describing every file in the original EDGAR submission, including those excluded from the ZIP (notably graphics).entities — array of filer / subject-company / issuer entity objects parsed from the EDGAR submission header.seriesAndClassesContractsInformation — empty array on DRSLTR (used only by investment-company filings).dataFiles — empty array on DRSLTR (no machine-readable data exhibits).id — internal 32-character hex identifier for the record.The documentFormatFiles[] array contains one element per piece of the original submission. Each element carries sequence (a string sequence number assigned by EDGAR; the wrapper full-submission row uses a single space " "), documentUrl (a direct www.sec.gov URL), type (the EDGAR document-type tag — DRSLTR for the letter, GRAPHIC for embedded images, blank for the wrapper .txt), size (byte count as a string), and an optional description such as "GRAPHIC" or "Complete submission text file". The canonical pattern is one DRSLTR HTML at sequence 1, zero or more GRAPHIC rows at higher sequences, and a final wrapper-.txt row whose URL ends in <accession>.txt.
The entities[] array carries one element per filer or subject company in the EDGAR header. Each element typically contains companyName with a parenthetical role suffix ("Icon Energy Corp (Filer)", "... (Subject)", "... (Issuer)"), cik as a string without leading zeros, irsNo (occasionally the placeholder "000000000" when an EIN has not been issued — common for foreign private issuers), stateOfIncorporation as a two-letter code, fiscalYearEnd as MMDD (sometimes absent for foreign filers), sic combining the four-digit SIC code with its industry description (e.g. "6411 Insurance Agents, Brokers & Service"), type repeating the form code, and tickers, an array of ticker symbols associated with the CIK that may be empty for pre-IPO filers, single, or multi-class (e.g. ["JTAI","OXACW","OXAC","JTAIZ","JTAIW","OXACU"]).
filename1.htm)The primary letter file is wrapped in EDGAR's standard SGML document envelope. The opening lines declare the document type, sequence, and original filename, and the body is bracketed by <TEXT> markers:
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<DOCUMENT>
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<TYPE>DRSLTR
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<SEQUENCE>1
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<FILENAME>filename1.htm
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<TEXT>
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<html>
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...letter body...
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</html>
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</TEXT>
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</DOCUMENT>
<TYPE> is always DRSLTR and <SEQUENCE> is always 1 for the primary letter. The HTML body is heterogeneously authored — common authoring toolchains include Broadridge PROfile, Workiva Wdesk, and hand-rolled legal-printer templates such as those produced by EdgarAgents — but the semantic content is consistent. A typical letter contains, in order:
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Division of Corporation Finance, 100 F Street, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20549 — followed by named staff reviewers and an Office designation.Re: subject line naming the issuer, the underlying form (most frequently S-1, F-1, or S-3), and the CIK./s/, the printed name of the signing attorney, and the law-firm affiliation.cc: list naming issuer officers, additional counsel, and accounting advisers.Some accessions include further textual attachments alongside filename1.htm when the filer transmits multiple letters in a single submission, supplemental memoranda, or exhibits to the response (such as proposed disclosure mark-ups). These appear as additional HTML or — less commonly — TXT or PDF files in the same folder, with names matching the original EDGAR <FILENAME> tags. The metadata's documentFormatFiles[] array enumerates all of them, and the sequence field indicates the order in which EDGAR received them.
A record packages the structured metadata JSON plus every textual document originally transmitted in the EDGAR submission: the primary DRSLTR letter and any additional textual attachments. The metadata.json exposes the full EDGAR header (form type, accession, filing timestamp, filer entities, issuer identifiers, ticker symbols, SIC classification, state of incorporation, fiscal year end), the complete inventory of the original submission with direct www.sec.gov URLs, and the dataset's internal record identifier. The SGML wrapper around each letter preserves EDGAR's <TYPE>, <SEQUENCE>, and <FILENAME> markers so that the document boundary and original filename remain recoverable.
Image files referenced by the HTML — typically law-firm logos, scanned signatures, and inline figures with names like image_001.jpg, formdrsltr_001.jpg, or issuer-specific filenames — are intentionally omitted. The HTML retains the <img src="..."> references, so a record opened in a browser will display broken image placeholders, but the corresponding documentUrl entries in metadata.json still point to the live copies on www.sec.gov for callers who wish to retrieve them. The full-submission .txt wrapper that EDGAR produces is not packaged as a file inside the folder; only its URL is recorded in documentFormatFiles[] and linkToTxt. The DRSLTR record also does not contain the underlying registration statement itself (the DRS / DRS/A filing) — that is a separate accession in a separate dataset; only the correspondence about the draft is in scope here. Series-and-classes/contracts information and machine-readable data files are absent because correspondence does not carry such content.
From inception in October 2012 through mid-2017, the form's effective use was restricted to EGC issuers; substantive content reflected that scope, with virtually every cover letter containing an explicit EGC representation and an undertaking to publicly file at least 21 days before any roadshow. Effective July 10, 2017, the Division of Corporation Finance expanded the availability of nonpublic review to any issuer's initial registration statement and to certain follow-on offerings within twelve months of an IPO, and the FAST Act technical corrections in 2018 codified parts of that practice. After mid-2017 the substantive content of DRSLTR letters broadened accordingly: many letters from larger or seasoned issuers no longer include an EGC representation, and the confidential-treatment basis cited shifts from "Section 106 of the JOBS Act" to the Division's expanded policy. The public-filing timing commitment cited in cover letters also shortened, with the JOBS Act's original 21-day pre-roadshow window replaced for non-EGC issuers by the 48-hour / two-business-day pre-effectiveness window adopted in the Division's 2017 guidance.
The structural envelope of the filing — SGML document wrapper, metadata header, optional attachments — has remained stable since 2012. There are no Item-level disclosure requirements that have been added or removed because DRSLTR is correspondence rather than a structured form.
DRSLTR submissions have always been transmitted through the modern EDGAR system and have always carried the SGML document wrapper around an HTML or, less commonly, plain-text body. Because the form was introduced in October 2012, well after EDGAR's transition away from ASCII-only filings, there is no early text-only era to describe; HTML has been the dominant body format for the entire life of the dataset. PDF appears occasionally as an attachment when filers submit scanned or graphics-heavy supplemental materials, and TXT appears as an alternative body format in a small minority of older or simpler letters. XBRL is not applicable to this form. Beyond minor evolution in authoring toolchains — early letters often produced by simple word-processor HTML exports, more recent ones by Broadridge PROfile, Workiva Wdesk, and other professional-grade platforms — there has been no material format transition.
Several nuances matter for downstream use:
filename1.htm because EDGAR's submission template defaults to that name for DRSLTR letters, but this is a convention rather than a guarantee. Applications should resolve the primary document by reading the first documentFormatFiles[] entry in metadata.json to handle edge cases.<img> references will dangle inside the packaged HTML; rendering the letter with images intact requires fetching the referenced files from the URLs in documentFormatFiles[].entities[] array can contain multiple roles — a single submission may list a filer, a subject issuer, and a parent entity — and the role suffix in companyName ((Filer), (Subject), (Issuer)) is the canonical way to disambiguate them.filedAt timestamp captured in metadata reflects the original confidential-submission acceptance, not the date the record became publicly accessible.Form DRSLTR is an EDGAR correspondence submission type, not a registration form. The filer of record is the issuer undergoing confidential, non-public staff review of a draft registration statement (DRS). In practice, the substantive document is drafted and signed by the issuer's outside securities counsel on counsel's letterhead, but the EDGAR submission is made through the issuer's filer credentials.
Eligible filers fall into two regimes:
Typical DRSLTR filers therefore include domestic operating companies on Form S-1, foreign private issuers on Form F-1, Form 20-F, or Form 40-F, Form 10 registrants, recently public follow-on issuers within the twelve-month window, and certain business-combination registrants whose draft submissions are accepted for confidential review. Auditors, valuation specialists, and selling-shareholder counsel may contribute attached analyses, but they do not file DRSLTR records under their own names.
DRSLTR is event-driven, with no statutory deadline for any individual submission. A record is created when the issuer needs to communicate in writing with the staff during the confidential review track. The principal triggers are:
The dominant pattern is comment-driven: an issuer submits a DRS, the staff issues comments (roughly 30 days for a first review, less for subsequent rounds), and the issuer responds with a DRSLTR plus a DRS/A. Each round generates a new DRSLTR record; DRSLTR submissions are not themselves amended.
Although the individual DRSLTR has no clock, the underlying confidential dossier does. Under Section 6(e) (as amended by FAST Act Section 71003), an EGC must publicly file the registration statement and all prior draft submissions and related correspondence at least 15 days before commencing a road show or, absent a road show, before requested effectiveness. The 2017 staff procedure imposes the same 15-day public-filing requirement before a road show or effectiveness for non-EGC IPOs and follow-ons, and at least 15 days before effectiveness for Forms 10, 20-F, and 40-F. Confidential DRS, DRS/A, and DRSLTR submissions become publicly available on EDGAR at that public-filing point. Staff comment letters themselves are released no earlier than 20 business days after effectiveness, consistent with the staff's general release policy.
The Form DRSLTR dataset sits inside a tight cluster of pre-IPO and registration-review records on EDGAR. The most useful comparisons are with DRS/DRS/A, UPLOAD, CORRESP, the eventual public registration statements (S-1, F-1, S-11, Form 10/10-12B), and aggregated public comment-letter packages.
DRS and DRS/A are the confidential draft registration statements (and amendments) submitted for non-public Division of Corporation Finance review. They contain the substantive disclosure: prospectus, financials, risk factors, MD&A, exhibits, signatures. DRSLTR is the cover-and-response correspondence that travels alongside these submissions. DRS is the disclosure document; DRSLTR is the issuer's narrative letter explaining how staff comments were addressed, what changed in a given amendment, and any supplemental analyses or accounting/legal positions. Researchers studying what was disclosed pull DRS; researchers studying the negotiation and revision history pull DRSLTR.
UPLOAD is the staff side of the same conversation: letters issued by Division staff raising comments on a draft registration statement. DRSLTR is the issuer's reply. The two should be read in pairs and typically iterate over several rounds until staff has no further comments. Filer population differs sharply: UPLOAD is authored and filed by SEC staff; DRSLTR is submitted by the issuer (usually through outside counsel). Both are held confidentially during review and become publicly visible on EDGAR only after the registration statement is publicly filed and the review concludes. Reconstructing the full back-and-forth requires joining both datasets on CIK and time order.
CORRESP and DRSLTR are functionally analogous issuer-to-staff response letters; they differ on confidentiality and timing. DRSLTR is used during the non-public draft review window; CORRESP is used once the filing is public. A confidential filer typically generates DRSLTRs during the draft phase, then switches to CORRESP once the registration statement is publicly filed and amendments draw further staff comments. Reconstructing a complete comment-and-response history of a single offering therefore usually requires splicing DRSLTR and CORRESP.
S-1 (domestic), F-1 (foreign private issuer), S-11 (real estate), and Form 10/10-12B (Exchange Act class registration) are the public registration statements that confidential DRS submissions convert into at the public phase. The disclosure text is often nearly identical to the final DRS/A, but filed under a public form type. DRSLTR sits on the upstream, non-public side of that boundary; these public forms sit on the downstream side. DRSLTR does not contain registration disclosures themselves — it contains correspondence about how those disclosures were drafted and revised.
Once a registration statement becomes effective (or is abandoned for more than 180 days), Division staff publicly releases the full UPLOAD plus CORRESP/DRSLTR package on EDGAR, generally about 20 business days after the review closes. Aggregated comment-letter products bundle UPLOAD, CORRESP, and DRSLTR into a single corpus. The DRSLTR dataset is narrower: only issuer-authored response letters tied to the confidential draft phase, with no staff letters and no post-public correspondence mixed in.
What makes DRSLTR distinct is the intersection of four constraints: confidential draft-review origin (under JOBS Act Section 106, expanded by FAST Act Section 71003 and the Division's December 2017 broadening to most IPOs and certain follow-ons within twelve months); issuer-side authorship; correspondence content rather than registration disclosure; and a per-round trigger keyed to specific staff comments, with delayed public availability. UPLOAD captures the staff voice but not the issuer's. CORRESP captures issuer correspondence but only post-public. DRS captures the draft disclosure document but not the dialogue. S-1/F-1/S-11/10-12B capture the final public registration but not the iterative drafting record. Only DRSLTR isolates issuer response letters generated during the confidential review phase.
DRSLTR filings are the issuer-side responses to SEC staff comments during confidential pre-IPO review of draft registration statements. They expose how registrants and counsel argued through accounting policies, segment reporting, non-GAAP measures, executive compensation, and risk-factor disclosures. Three parts of each record carry most of the value: the metadata.json filer entity block (CIK, issuer name), the HTML or PDF letter body with numbered response paragraphs, and accession metadata (accession number, filed date, signing counsel).
IPO and disclosure counsel use the corpus as a working library of how peer issuers answered staff comments. They pull comparables by SIC code, counsel signature, and filed date, then mine the response narrative for how registrants framed non-GAAP objections, segment aggregation, revenue-recognition timing, or pro forma treatments. Output: faster, better-calibrated draft responses and pre-empted comments in the original S-1.
ECM and syndicate desks track which issuers are in confidential review and how far they have progressed. Accession sequences and filed dates against a single CIK reveal the cadence of staff rounds; response content signals which issues remain open. Used for IPO pipeline maps, deal-readiness assessments, and launch-window timing.
Analysts surface issues raised in pre-public review that the final S-1 may smooth over. They extract response paragraphs on KPI definitions, customer concentration, related-party transactions, and going concern matters to build pre-deal notes, valuation cautions, and management Q&A for roadshows.
Issuer compliance teams and disclosure consultants run text searches across letter bodies to identify recurring staff focus areas: segment reporting, revenue recognition, lease accounting, cybersecurity, climate risk, MD&A trends. Used for internal training, drafting checklists, and pre-review readiness scoring.
Accounting specialists treat DRSLTR responses as a primary source on how registrants resolve technical questions before effectiveness. They focus on responses citing specific ASC sections, SAB topics, and non-GAAP guidance, plus supporting tables. Used for technical alerts, IPO readiness checklists, and benchmarking accounting conclusions.
Researchers link letters to matching DRS filings and later S-1 amendments via CIK and accession number, then apply NLP to comment themes, response length, and revision intensity. Supports empirical studies on disclosure quality, IPO outcomes, and regulatory behavior.
Product teams ingest the metadata for issuer identity and timeline normalization, then parse letter HTML to extract numbered comments and response paragraphs. Outputs include IPO pipeline trackers, topic classifiers (revenue, segments, going concern, compensation), and entity-resolution pipelines linking DRSLTR letters to subsequent S-1, 424B, and 10-K filings.
Short-side analysts mine the response narrative for disclosure weaknesses the issuer had to defend in private: aggressive revenue recognition, related-party concentration, going-concern flags, weak internal controls. Used for short-thesis memos, governance-risk flags on newly public issuers, and proxy-season targets.
Issuers preparing their own IPO or follow-on registration assemble comparable correspondence by counsel firm, SIC code, and date range to scope expected staff comments and instruct outside counsel.
IR consultants coach management on the disclosure questions the SEC most often raises in their sector and the language registrants use to resolve them. They extract response excerpts on KPIs, non-GAAP measures, and risk-factor framing for pre-roadshow messaging and draft Q&A.
Teams building securities-law assistants use DRSLTR letters as high-signal training and retrieval material because each response pairs a specific staff question with a substantive issuer answer. Metadata JSON provides clean entity grounding; HTML supports chunking and embedding for comment-letter classifiers and precedent-response retrieval.
The DRSLTR corpus is most useful when the workflow depends on issuer-side response language, draft-review timing, or counsel-firm patterns. Each of the following uses ties directly to the metadata, the numbered response narrative, or the accession-level anchors of the records.
IPO counsel and audit-firm technical accounting groups query letter bodies for recurring topics — non-GAAP reconciliations, segment aggregation under ASC 280, revenue-recognition timing under ASC 606, going-concern language, cybersecurity disclosure — and pull the surrounding response paragraphs as drafting precedent. The entities[] block (CIK, SIC, state of incorporation) supports peer filtering by industry, and the SGML-wrapped HTML preserves numbered response structure for clean chunking. Output: a searchable response-precedent library used to pre-empt staff comments in initial S-1 drafts.
ECM desks and pipeline-tracking vendors group DRSLTR accessions by CIK and order them by filedAt to reconstruct the cadence of confidential review rounds for each issuer. Round count, gap between letters, and signing counsel from the letter body indicate deal readiness and likely launch window. Output: a pre-IPO pipeline tracker that flags issuers nearing the public-filing trigger and projects launch timing.
Researchers and disclosure-data vendors pair DRSLTR records with UPLOAD staff comment letters on CIK and chronological order to assemble complete comment-and-response threads, then splice in CORRESP letters once the registration becomes public. The accessionNo, filedAt, and filer CIK in metadata.json supply the join keys. Output: round-by-round dialogue datasets used in NLP studies of disclosure negotiation, regulator behavior, and revision intensity.
Lawyers, ECM bankers, and corporate general counsel selecting IPO counsel parse the signature block and cc: list of each letter — together with the issuer SIC and state of incorporation in metadata — to tally which firms handle which sectors, how many rounds their deals require, and how their response style differs across topics. Output: counsel league tables, sector-specific firm shortlists, and informed pitches against named competitors.
Short-biased and pre-IPO analysts mine response paragraphs for issues the issuer had to defend privately — aggressive revenue recognition, customer concentration, related-party transactions, internal-control weaknesses, going-concern triggers — and link them to the eventual public S-1 to identify language that was softened or removed. Output: short-thesis memos, governance-risk flags on newly public issuers, and pre-deal research notes.
NLP and RAG developers use DRSLTR records as a high-signal corpus because each response paragraph pairs a specific staff question with a substantive issuer answer. The metadata.json entity block provides clean grounding (CIK, issuer name, SIC, tickers); the SGML-wrapped HTML supports deterministic document-boundary detection and chunking. Output: comment-letter topic classifiers, precedent-response retrieval indexes, and grounded drafting assistants for IPO counsel.
The Form DRSLTR Files Dataset is available through three access methods: a metadata index endpoint, a full dataset archive, and individual monthly container downloads.
Dataset Index JSON API: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-drsltr-files.json
This endpoint returns dataset-level metadata (name, description, last updated timestamp, earliest sample date 2012-10-01, total records and total size, covered form types, container format, and contained file types) along with the full list of monthly container files. Each container entry includes its key, size, record count, last updated timestamp, and direct download URL. Use this index to monitor which containers were updated in the most recent refresh run and to decide which containers to download on a daily basis. This endpoint does not require an API key.
Example response:
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{
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"datasetId": "1f13365b-9ae0-6947-89ff-baa6e2db28bd",
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"datasetDownloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-drsltr-files.zip",
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"name": "Form DRSLTR Files Dataset",
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"updatedAt": "2026-04-25T03:02:39.982Z",
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"earliestSampleDate": "2012-10-01",
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"totalRecords": 5884,
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"totalSize": 158824389,
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"formTypes": ["DRSLTR"],
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"containerFormat": "ZIP",
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"fileTypes": ["HTML", "JSON", "TXT", "PDF"],
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"containers": [
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{
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"downloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-drsltr-files/2026/2026-04.zip",
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"key": "2026/2026-04.zip",
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"size": 1342118,
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"records": 47,
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"updatedAt": "2026-04-25T03:02:39.982Z"
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}
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]
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}
Download Entire Dataset: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-drsltr-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads the complete Form DRSLTR Files Dataset as a single ZIP archive containing all monthly containers from the earliest sample date forward. This endpoint requires a valid SEC API key.
Download Single Container: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-drsltr-files/2025/2025-08.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads one monthly container ZIP holding all DRSLTR filings for that month, including the original HTML, TXT, and PDF source files plus a JSON metadata file per filing. Replace the year and month segments with any container key returned by the index JSON. This endpoint requires a valid SEC API key.
The dataset covers EDGAR submission type DRSLTR — issuer correspondence transmitted to the SEC's Division of Corporation Finance during the confidential, non-public review of a draft registration statement (filed under EDGAR types DRS or DRS/A). It does not include the underlying draft registration statement itself, which is a separate EDGAR submission type.
One record represents a single EDGAR DRSLTR submission — one accession number — and is materialized as a folder named with the eighteen-digit unpunctuated accession number. The folder contains a metadata.json envelope plus one or more SGML-wrapped HTML letters (and occasionally TXT or PDF attachments) that the issuer transmitted under that accession.
The filer of record is always the issuer, although the letter is almost always drafted and signed by outside securities counsel. Eligible filers are emerging growth companies under Section 6(e) of the Securities Act (added by JOBS Act Section 106) and, since the Division of Corporation Finance's expanded procedures effective July 10, 2017, any issuer pursuing an initial registration statement (S-1, F-1, S-11, Form 10, 20-F, or 40-F) or a follow-on offering within twelve months of an IPO or initial Exchange Act registration.
The dataset's earliest sample date is 2012-10-01, which is when Form DRSLTR was introduced into EDGAR alongside Form DRS to operationalize the JOBS Act confidential-submission regime. There are no pre-2012 records because the form has no pre-EDGAR analog. Coverage runs forward from October 2012 to the most recent monthly container.
Records are delivered as monthly ZIP containers. Inside each container, every record is a folder named with the unpunctuated accession number, holding a metadata.json plus the textual correspondence files. File types found across the dataset are HTML, JSON, TXT, and PDF; embedded images referenced from the letter HTML are intentionally excluded.
DRSLTR is issuer-authored correspondence during the confidential draft-review phase. CORRESP is functionally analogous issuer correspondence but only on publicly filed registration statements and Exchange Act reports — it kicks in once a filing goes public. UPLOAD is the staff side of the conversation: comment letters issued by Division of Corporation Finance staff. Reconstructing a complete comment-and-response history typically requires joining DRSLTR with UPLOAD on CIK and time order, then splicing in CORRESP for the post-public phase.
DRSLTR submissions are nonpublic at acceptance and become publicly visible on EDGAR only after the issuer publicly files the registration statement. If a confidential submission is withdrawn and never publicly filed, the associated DRSLTR records typically remain non-public, so the visible DRSLTR population is biased toward issuers that progressed to a public registration.