The Form N-6 Files Dataset packages every Form N-6 and Form N-6/A registration statement filed on EDGAR by insurance company separate accounts that issue variable life insurance contracts. One record corresponds to a single EDGAR accession — a complete N-6 or N-6/A submission, including the Statement of Additional Information, and the lettered Part C exhibits — together with a metadata.json descriptor that mirrors the EDGAR submission header. The depositor (the issuing life insurance company) files on behalf of the separate account, which is the named registrant. Coverage starts in July 2002, when Form N-6 was adopted as the dedicated variable life insurance registration form, and continues through the present, with monthly ZIP containers that hold TXT, JSON, HTML, and PDF files extracted from each filing.
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.
Download Entire Dataset:
Download a single container file (e.g. monthly archive) from the dataset.
Download Single Container:
The dataset is built from Form N-6, the SEC-prescribed registration statement for separate accounts of insurance companies organized as unit investment trusts (UITs) that issue variable life insurance contracts. The filing is a dual-purpose registration: it simultaneously registers the variable-life policy as a security under the Securities Act of 1933 (file-number prefix 333-) and registers the separate account as an investment company under Section 8(b) of the Investment Company Act of 1940 (file-number prefix 811-). Form N-6 was adopted in April 2002 (Release No. 33-8088) to break variable-life disclosures out of the previously shared Form N-8B-2 / S-6 regime, and it became the required form for variable life beginning July 2002 — which is why the dataset's earliest records date from that month.
The substantive content delivered through Form N-6 is, in legal effect, a prospectus for a variable life insurance policy combined with a Statement of Additional Information (SAI) and a battery of exhibits documenting the insurer's corporate authority, the separate account's organization, and every contractual relationship the separate account has with the underlying mutual fund families whose portfolios serve as the variable investment options. The "/A" suffix denotes an amendment — most commonly a Pre-Effective Amendment (under Rule 472) or a Post-Effective Amendment (under Rule 485(a) or Rule 485(b)), used to update the prospectus, add new policy classes, refresh financial statements, or amend exhibits such as participation agreements.
The dataset covers the full Form N-6 and N-6/A population from July 2002 onward. Records are distributed as monthly ZIP containers; inside each container, accession folders hold the SEC-filed text and markup documents (TXT, JSON, HTML, and PDF) that constituted the original submission. Image binaries (GRAPHIC attachments) and standalone XBRL technical artifacts are referenced by URL in the metadata but are not bundled into the containers.
A single record corresponds to one EDGAR accession — one Form N-6 or Form N-6/A submission filed by an insurance company separate account. Each record is materialized as a folder named with the 18-digit accession number with hyphens stripped (for example 000110465925092884 for accession 0001104659-25-092884), nested under a YYYY-MM period directory inside a monthly ZIP container. The folder holds the SEC-filed text and markup documents that constituted the original submission — the primary registration statement and its exhibits — together with a metadata.json descriptor that mirrors the EDGAR submission header at the filing, entity, series/class, and document-inventory level. One record therefore encapsulates an entire registration-statement package as it was submitted to EDGAR, minus the binary attachments and the standalone XBRL technical artifacts.
Inside one accession folder, the contents fall into three structural layers:
metadata.json, a machine-readable header carrying the form type, accession number, filing timestamp, period of report, the filer entity list (one row per Act under which the filing is registered), the series and class/contract identifiers, an inventory of every document in the original submission (documentFormatFiles), and a parallel inventory of XBRL technical files (dataFiles)._n6.htm (for an initial N-6) or _n6a.htm (for an amendment). This file contains the EDGAR cover page, the prospectus body organized along the Form N-6 Item structure, and, when filed together, the SAI.<DOCUMENT> envelope. Each exhibit's filename encodes the SEC exhibit code in a filesystem-safe slug: an exhibit numbered 99.(h)(4)(iv) is stored as <prefix>_ex99-xhx4xiv.htm, where x separates and lowercases the parenthetical sub-identifiers and roman numerals are kept lowercase.A typical accession folder therefore looks like:
1
000110465925092884/
2
metadata.json
3
tm2526366d1_n6a.htm (sequence 1 — the registration statement)
4
tm2526366d1_ex99-xhx4xiv.htm (Exhibit 99.(h)(4)(iv) — participation agreement amendment)
5
tm2526366d1_ex99-xhx7xv.htm (Exhibit 99.(h)(7)(v))
6
tm2526366d1_ex99-xhx11xiii.htm (Exhibit 99.(h)(11)(iii))
7
tm2526366d1_ex99-xnx1.htm (Exhibit 99.(n)(1) — auditor consent)
8
tm2526366d1_ex99-xr.htm (Exhibit 99.(r) — Summary Prospectus)
Every non-primary file is wrapped in the SGML envelope EDGAR uses to demarcate documents within the original .txt submission, e.g.:
1
<DOCUMENT>
2
<TYPE>EX-99.(N)(1)
3
<SEQUENCE>5
4
<FILENAME>tm2526366d1_ex99-xnx1.htm
5
<DESCRIPTION>EXHIBIT 99.(N)(1)
6
<TEXT>
7
<HTML>... HTML body of the auditor consent letter ...</HTML>
8
</TEXT>
9
</DOCUMENT>
In modern filings the primary _n6.htm/_n6a.htm document is an Inline XBRL (iXBRL) XHTML document whose preamble declares the ix, dei, and vip (Variable Insurance Products) namespaces, so that filing-level concepts (dei:DocumentPeriodEndDate, dei:EntityInvCompanyType, VIP-taxonomy product and fee tags) and prescribed prospectus disclosures are tagged inline within the prospectus markup.
The metadata file is the orienting index for the record. The fields that carry intentional structured meaning include:
formType — "N-6" or "N-6/A".accessionNo — the canonical hyphenated accession number, e.g. "0001104659-25-092884".filedAt — a full ISO-8601 timestamp with timezone offset, e.g. "2025-09-24T13:46:32-04:00".periodOfReport — usually the filing date itself for registration statements and amendments.description — the human-readable form description.linkToFilingDetails, linkToTxt, linkToHtml, linkToXbrl — direct EDGAR URLs to the index page, the complete-submission .txt, the primary HTML document, and (when present) the XBRL instance.id — the dataset's internal record identifier.documentFormatFiles[] — an ordered inventory of every document in the EDGAR submission, including ones not extracted into the ZIP. Each entry carries sequence, size (in bytes, as a string), documentUrl, description, and type (e.g. N-6/A, EX-99.(H)(4)(IV), GRAPHIC). The trailing entry with sequence " " is the complete-submission .txt. GRAPHIC entries are listed here even though the dataset does not extract their underlying .jpg/.gif/.png binaries.dataFiles[] — a parallel inventory for XBRL technical files: the taxonomy schema (EX-101.SCH), the label, definition, and presentation linkbases (EX-101.LAB/DEF/PRE), and the _htm.xml instance extracted from the inline XBRL. These are referenced by URL but not bundled into the container.entities[] — one entry per EDGAR-header entity. N-6 filings are dual registrations, so this array typically has two entries that differ only by act ("33" vs "40") and fileNo ("333-..." vs "811-..."). Each entry carries cik, companyName (with the parenthetical role such as "(Filer)"), irsNo (frequently "000000000" because separate accounts have no EIN of their own), stateOfIncorporation, fiscalYearEnd, filmNo, and type.seriesAndClassesContractsInformation — the N-6-specific structure that ties the filing to SEC-issued series and class/contract identifiers. series.series carries the S00… identifier and human-readable name of the separate account series; series.classesContracts[] carries one entry per marketed policy class, each with a C00… classContract ID and a name (the marketed product name).The primary HTM document opens with the EDGAR cover page disclosures: form type, file numbers under both Acts, the registrant name (the separate account), the depositor name (the issuing insurance company), state of organization, and contact information. In modern iXBRL filings, these cover-page facts are double-encoded as dei: tags. The body that follows is the Form N-6 prospectus, organized along the Item structure prescribed by the form instructions:
The Statement of Additional Information (Items 13–34, covering the depositor's directors and officers, investment advisory and other services, principal underwriters, purchase and pricing of contracts being offered, financial statements, and exhibits index) is generally bound into the same primary document or filed in close proximity.
Form N-6 exhibits live under the SEC's labelling scheme 99.(letter)(roman or arabic sub-id), and the dataset preserves the exact exhibit code in both the SGML <TYPE> tag and the HTM filename slug. The exhibit alphabet defined by the form instructions is:
EX-99.(H)(...) exhibits whenever the insurer adds a fund, replaces a sub-adviser schedule, or refreshes the list of supported separate accounts.Each exhibit sits in its own file inside the accession folder, wrapped in the EDGAR <DOCUMENT> envelope with <TYPE>, <SEQUENCE>, <FILENAME>, <DESCRIPTION>, and <TEXT> tags surrounding the HTML body.
The signature block is part of the primary registration document, not a separate exhibit. It carries the signature of the depositor (the insurance company), the signature of the registrant (the separate account, signed on its behalf by the depositor), and the signatures of the directors and principal officers of the depositor — typically executed under the powers of attorney filed as Exhibit (o).
Each accession folder includes:
metadata.json descriptor..txt file when present, containing the SGML-wrapped concatenation of all documents.The file types found in the dataset are TXT, JSON, HTML, and PDF. In modern filings the overwhelming majority of payload bytes are HTM/HTML, with the JSON descriptor, occasional TXT exhibits or complete-submission files, and the rare PDF exhibit (typically a scanned policy form or board resolution) making up the remainder.
Two categories of material that appear in the original EDGAR submission are intentionally not extracted into the accession folder:
type GRAPHIC and extensions .jpg, .gif, or .png, typically logos, signature scans, or chart images embedded in the prospectus. They remain enumerated in documentFormatFiles[] with their original documentUrl, so they can be retrieved directly from EDGAR if needed.EX-101.SCH), label/definition/presentation linkbases (EX-101.LAB, EX-101.DEF, EX-101.PRE), and the extracted _htm.xml instance document. These are listed in dataFiles[] with full URLs but are not bundled into the container; the inline XBRL tagging itself is preserved within the primary HTM document, so concept-level extraction remains possible from the included files.This exclusion policy keeps containers compact and text-focused while preserving full retrievability of omitted artifacts via the URLs in the metadata.
The substantive content of an N-6 record has evolved across the dataset's twenty-plus-year span:
EX-99.(R) document. Exhibit (r) is essentially universal in post-2022 N-6 records._n6.htm/_n6a.htm document is filed as Inline XBRL (XHTML with xmlns:ix, xmlns:dei, and xmlns:vip namespaces) and tags Item 3 fee-table entries, cover-page identifiers, and other prescribed concepts directly in the prospectus markup.S00… and C00…) became required for variable-contract filings in the late 2000s, and the seriesAndClassesContractsInformation block in metadata.json reflects their presence in modern records but may be sparser or absent in the earliest 2002–2007 records.The presentational format of the underlying filings has shifted in tandem with EDGAR-wide modernization:
.txt was the canonical artifact; per-document HTML, when present, was relatively unstyled.EX-101.SCH/LAB/DEF/PRE and _htm.xml) appear as separate entries in the EDGAR submission (recorded in dataFiles[]) even though the meaningful tagging is embedded inside the primary HTM. Filer-specific taxonomy schemas typically follow the convention ck<CIK>-<filing-date>.xsd, with companion lab/def/pre linkbases.formType field distinguishes initial N-6 filings from N-6/A amendments, but the precise nature of the amendment (Pre-Effective vs. Post-Effective; Rule 485(a) vs. 485(b); designation of effective date) is encoded inside the cover-page text of the primary document rather than in metadata.json. Reconstructing the lifecycle of a registration generally requires grouping records by the 333- and 811- file numbers in entities[].fileNo across multiple accessions.entities[] array typically contains two rows for the same separate account, differing only by act and fileNo. They are not separate filers; treating them as distinct would double-count.C00… class/contract identifier corresponds to a marketed insurance policy product. A single separate account (one S00… series) may host many policies, and a single accession may register or amend several. Joining N-6 records to other variable-product datasets (such as N-VPFS financial statements) is most reliably done on the class/contract ID rather than on the depositor's CIK.xhx4xiv for (h)(4)(iv)) is consistent but lossy: the leading 99. prefix is preserved in the SGML <TYPE> tag but stripped from the filename, and parenthesization is replaced by x separators. For programmatic use, the SGML <TYPE> field inside each document envelope is the authoritative exhibit identifier.ix:nonNumeric, ix:nonFraction, and context elements with the dei and vip namespaces in scope. The standalone taxonomy linkbases referenced in dataFiles[] can be fetched from EDGAR if label or presentation context is needed.<img> references in the HTM. Textual disclosures and tables are unaffected.EX-99.(H) per fund family; others split each schedule amendment into its own sub-exhibit). The structural skeleton (Items 1–34, exhibits (a)–(r)) is nonetheless reliably present in every modern record.A Form N-6 record is a registration statement filed by an insurance company separate account organized as a unit investment trust under the Investment Company Act of 1940 that issues variable life insurance contracts. The separate account is the named registrant, but it has no employees or board of its own; it is a segregated pool of assets on the books of a life insurer, walled off from the general account, treated as a distinct investment company solely for federal securities purposes.
The insurance company itself acts as depositor and sponsor. It is typically a state-chartered life insurer (stock, mutual, or fraternal) authorized by its domiciliary regulator to issue variable life products. The depositor establishes the separate account by board resolution under state insurance law, files Form N-6 on the account's behalf, and is the practical issuer of the contracts. Many insurance groups maintain multiple separate accounts (e.g., "Separate Account A," "VLI Separate Account"), each with its own CIK and its own N-6 filing series.
Policy owners are not filers; they are the investors who receive the prospectus. The underlying investment options are usually shares of insurance-dedicated mutual funds that file their own Form N-1A registration statements. Form N-6 covers only the variable life contract wrapper and the separate account.
Form N-6 is structurally a dual registration that serves simultaneously as:
The 1940 Act registration is a one-time act that becomes perpetual. The 1933 Act registration must be kept evergreen because the contracts are continuously offered.
Form N-6 is the dedicated form for variable life insurance, covering both scheduled premium variable life and flexible premium variable life (variable universal life, or VUL). It is not used for variable annuities or managed separate accounts:
Insurer general-account products (fixed annuities, traditional whole life) are not registered under the federal securities laws and produce no N-6 records.
Initial registration. The initial Form N-6 (1933 Act file prefix 333-; 1940 Act file prefix 811-) is filed when an insurer launches a new variable life product through a new or existing separate account. Pre-effective amendments designated N-6/A may follow in response to staff comments before effectiveness.
Post-effective amendments under Rule 485. Once effective, the registration statement is kept current through post-effective amendments on Form N-6/A under Rule 485 of the 1933 Act, the dedicated post-effective amendment mechanism for insurance product separate accounts. Two paragraphs dominate this dataset:
Pre-effective amendments to the initial N-6 do not use Rule 485; they are conventional pre-effective amendments under Section 8(a) of the 1933 Act.
Annual updates under Section 10(a)(3). Because variable life contracts are continuously offered, the prospectus must comply with Section 10(a)(3) of the 1933 Act, which requires that information used more than nine months after effectiveness be reasonably current (financial statements generally no more than sixteen months old). Separate accounts therefore file an annual updating amendment on N-6/A, almost always under Rule 485(b), to refresh financials and performance. These annual updates are the largest single source of recurring N-6/A records.
Material mid-cycle changes. Outside the annual cycle, an N-6/A is triggered by any material change to the contract or its infrastructure, including:
Material mid-cycle changes generally proceed under Rule 485(a). Non-material updates and sticker supplements may go under Rule 485(b) or via Rule 497 supplements (which are not N-6 records).
Rule 498A summary prospectus regime. Under Rule 498A of the 1933 Act, variable life and variable annuity issuers may satisfy prospectus delivery by sending an initial summary prospectus or updating summary prospectus while posting the full statutory prospectus and SAI online. The full statutory documents continue to be filed inside the Form N-6 / N-6/A registration statement; Rule 498A does not eliminate the N-6 obligation but reshapes the disclosure documents that ride inside it and frequently produces additional N-6/A activity as registrants conform to layered disclosure.
Because the separate account has no board of its own, signing falls to the insurance company depositor. Form N-6 must be signed by the registrant (the separate account, signed on its behalf by the depositor), by the depositor itself, by the depositor's principal executive officer, principal financial officer, and principal accounting officer or controller, and by a majority of the depositor's board of directors (often via power of attorney filed as an exhibit). The depositor's officers and directors are the practical accountable signatories behind every N-6 filing.
Form N-6 sits inside a tightly defined family of insurance-product and investment-company registration forms. Its closest neighbors are the other variable-product registration forms (N-3, N-4), the underlying-fund registration form (N-1A), the historical UIT registration form (S-6), the general-purpose Securities Act forms (S-1, S-3), and the periodic and notice filings made by N-6 registrants after effectiveness (24F-2, N-CSR, N-VPFS). The comparisons below isolate exactly what each form contains and why none substitutes for an N-6 filing when the research question concerns variable life insurance contracts.
Form N-4 is the structural twin of N-6: both register interests issued by an insurance-company separate account organized as a unit investment trust, and both use a purpose-built item-by-item disclosure framework rather than Regulation S-K. The divergence is the underlying product — annuities on N-4, life insurance on N-6 — which drives concrete disclosure differences:
The N-4 dataset cannot proxy for variable life data; contract economics, mortality assumptions, and lapse dynamics differ categorically.
Form N-3 covers variable annuities where the separate account is itself organized as a managed open-end investment company rather than a UIT. Because the separate account is internally managed, N-3 includes a full investment-adviser disclosure regime, advisory contracts, and adviser-level financial statements at the separate-account level. N-6 separate accounts, by contrast, are pass-through UITs that invest in shares of underlying mutual funds, so there is no separate-account-level adviser. N-3 is also rare in modern practice while N-6 is an active population. The form is not a substitute for N-6: it is annuity rather than life insurance, and its separate-account governance disclosures answer a different set of questions.
Form N-1A registers the open-end mutual funds whose shares the N-6 subaccounts purchase. The two datasets are complementary but disjoint. N-1A discloses fund investment objectives, strategies, portfolio managers, advisory fees, 12b-1 fees, and fund-level financial statements. N-6 discloses the insurance contract that wraps those funds — premium structure, COI, surrender charges, death benefits, riders, and contract-level taxation. A complete all-in cost picture requires both: contract-level charges from N-6 plus underlying-fund expense ratios from each fund's N-1A. An N-6 filing summarizes the menu of available subaccounts but does not contain full underlying-fund prospectuses, which are typically incorporated by reference or attached as appendices.
Form N-2 registers closed-end management investment companies and is the most distant of the investment-company forms relative to N-6. N-2 issuers sell a fixed pool of shares that trade on an exchange or are offered as interval/tender-offer funds; there is no insurance wrapper, separate account, mortality charge, or death benefit. N-2's leverage, distribution, and repurchase disclosures have no analog in N-6, and a researcher looking for variable life data will find none in the N-2 population.
S-1 and S-3 are the generic Securities Act registration statements used by operating companies and most non-investment-company issuers, governed by Regulation S-K and Regulation S-X. Form N-6 is deliberately carved out of this regime: it operates under its own item structure (Items 1 through 34, covering cover-page information, fee tables, principal risks of investing in the policy, the insurance company, the separate account, charges, the death benefit, premiums, surrenders and withdrawals, loans, taxes, and additional information) and satisfies registration under both the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 8(b) of the Investment Company Act of 1940 in a single filing. A variable life contract cannot be registered on Form S-1 or Form S-3, and S-K's disclosure architecture does not apply.
Form S-6 shares structural lineage with N-6: both register interests in unit investment trusts. S-6 is used for non-insurance UITs — typically equity, fixed-income, or strategy-based unit trusts sold by sponsors such as broker-dealers — and discloses portfolio deposit, sponsor compensation, and termination mechanics. N-6 layers an insurance contract on top of the UIT structure, subordinating UIT mechanics to insurance-product disclosure (mortality charges, death benefits, policy loans). The populations do not overlap: an S-6 filing has no insurance-contract content, and an N-6 filing has no equity-UIT-style portfolio deposit schedule.
Form 24F-2 is filed annually by N-6 registrants (and other open-end and UIT registrants relying on Rule 24f-2) to report aggregate dollar securities sold during the fiscal year and to pay the associated registration fee. It is a short notice filing, not a disclosure document. Use 24F-2 to track gross sales of variable life contracts at the registrant level; use N-6 for contract design, fee tables, or contract terms.
Rule 498A permits insurance companies to satisfy prospectus delivery for variable annuity and variable life contracts by sending a concise initial summary prospectus or updating summary prospectus, with the full statutory prospectus available online. Within an N-6 filing, the summary prospectus is typically filed as Exhibit (r) and the full statutory prospectus remains the core of the registration statement. The summary prospectus is therefore a document inside the N-6 filing, not a separate dataset. Researchers wanting only the layered summary disclosures should extract Exhibit (r) from N-6 submissions.
N-CSR is the certified shareholder report filed by registered management investment companies, including the open-end funds underlying N-6 subaccounts. N-VPFS (variable product financial statements) is used by insurance-company separate accounts to file the financial statements required for variable contract registrants. Both are periodic financial reports, not registration statements. They contain audited financials, statements of operations, and schedules of investments — content absent from an N-6 prospectus. N-6 references these statements (and underlying-fund N-CSRs by incorporation), but the contract-design and fee-table disclosure defining the N-6 dataset appears nowhere in N-CSR or N-VPFS. Use N-CSR/N-VPFS for separate-account or underlying-fund financial performance; use N-6 for contract terms.
The SAI is not a separate filing. For Form N-6, the SAI is Part B of the registration statement and is included inside the N-6 submission alongside the Part A prospectus and Part C exhibits. It contains expanded disclosure about the insurance company, the separate account's history, valuation procedures, principal underwriter relationships, and additional tax discussion. There is no standalone "SAI dataset" — extracting it requires parsing the N-6 filing and identifying the Part B document.
The Form N-6 Files Dataset is the only SEC dataset that captures the full registration content of variable life insurance contracts issued through UIT separate accounts. Its boundaries are sharp:
For any research question about variable life contract design, charges, death benefit mechanics, or rider availability, N-6 is the required source; the adjacent forms cover a different product, structural wrapper, reporting purpose, or layer of the insurance-investment stack.
Variable life sits at the intersection of insurance regulation, federal securities law, and asset management distribution, so a narrow form serves a wide professional base. Different roles read different slices of the record — the prospectus, the SAI, participation and reinsurance agreements, and the iXBRL-tagged data points under the Variable Insurance Products (VIP) taxonomy.
Actuaries at competing life carriers treat N-6 as primary competitive intelligence on variable life pricing. They target the prospectus fee table, COI rate scales and tables in the appendices, surrender-charge schedules, M&E risk charges, administrative loads, and rider charges (no-lapse guarantees, GMDB, chronic-illness and overloan riders). They pull the SAI for any disclosed reserve, persistency, or experience data. Workflow: extract fee tables and COI grids from the latest N-6 or N-6/A into pricing models and benchmark load structure, surrender-charge slope, and rider pricing against the peer set, tracking how peers reprice across successive amendments.
Product managers for VUL, PPVL, and COLI/BOLI read N-6 filings to understand contract architecture, not just price. They focus on the policy-benefit narrative, the subaccount menu and allocation rules, dollar-cost averaging and rebalancing features, loan and partial-withdrawal mechanics, and rider availability matrices. Output is a feature-comparison grid for an upcoming launch and board memos justifying contract design with reference to peer filings.
In-house disclosure counsel and outside securities lawyers use the dataset when drafting initial registration statements, post-effective amendments, and Rule 485(a)/485(b) filings. They focus on cover-page legends, risk factors, depositor and separate-account descriptions, tax disclosure, the legal-proceedings section, and the SAI. They check Item 26 exhibits, particularly (d) contracts, (e) sales agreements, (h) participation agreements, (k) legal opinions, and (r) consents. Workflow: model new disclosure language on a comparable issuer's most recent N-6/A and track shifts in risk-factor drafting following SEC staff comment trends.
Wholesalers and variable life sales desks at insurance broker-dealers build internal shelf-of-products grids for advisor distribution. They extract the fee table, rider menu, subaccount line-up, contractual maximums on charges, and preferred-versus-standard class differentiation, then normalize across carriers into side-by-side comparisons covering target-premium ranges, COI structures, no-lapse guarantee mechanics, loan rates, and rider availability. Compliance overlays confirm wholesaler talking points track the filed prospectus.
Fee-only and dual-registered advisors evaluating in-force or proposed VUL policies use N-6 as the authoritative reference for charges and contract mechanics. They pull the fee table, surrender-charge schedule, COI scales for the insured's age and class, loan provisions, and partial-withdrawal rules. Workflow: confirm an in-force illustration matches contractual maximums in the filed prospectus, surface hidden cost layers, and stress-test 1035 exchange recommendations by comparing the proposed contract's N-6 against the in-force contract's older N-6 in the historical archive going back to 2002.
Product and distribution teams at asset managers whose funds serve as variable life subaccount options monitor exhibit (h) participation agreements and the disclosed investment-option list. They track which carriers distribute their funds, which competitor funds appear alongside theirs on each platform, and how participation-agreement terms (revenue-sharing acknowledgements, substitution rights, mixed-and-shared funding representations) evolve through amendments. The output supports relationship management with carrier platform teams and competitive analysis of subadvisory mandates.
Researchers studying disclosure, fee evolution, and consumer behavior around complex insurance products treat the dataset as a longitudinal corpus of variable life prospectuses from 2002 forward. They study fee-table evolution, risk-factor and tax-disclosure readability, and the rise of no-lapse guarantee designs. Workflow: bulk text extraction, panel construction at the contract or separate-account level keyed by series and class IDs, and econometric analysis of how charge levels and rider availability respond to interest-rate cycles and regulatory action. The metadata.json identifiers and iXBRL-tagged data points make panel construction tractable at scale.
Plaintiff-side securities and insurance attorneys and consumer-finance advocacy organizations use the dataset when investigating fee creep, surrender-charge abuses, and unsuitable replacement transactions. They reconstruct the trajectory of charges within a single contract series across successive N-6/A amendments, mine the SAI for conflicts and revenue-sharing disclosures, and read the legal-proceedings section. Workflow: build a charge-history timeline for the specific contract a client purchased, compare against point-of-sale representations, and quantify damages or build the factual record for arbitration, class actions, or regulatory complaints.
Examination staff at state insurance departments, the SEC's Division of Investment Management and Division of Examinations, and broker-dealer examination programs (including FINRA) use the dataset for horizontal reviews of disclosure quality. They run cross-issuer comparisons of fee-table presentation, risk-factor coverage of specific topics (cybersecurity, climate, tax-law changes), conflict-of-interest disclosure, and prospectus-versus-SAI consistency. The workflow supports sweep examinations, comment-letter prioritization, and identification of outliers in charge structures or rider mechanics.
Data engineers, RAG and LLM application developers, and product teams building variable-insurance comparison tools use the dataset as raw input to structured-extraction pipelines. They rely on metadata.json identifiers (CIK, accession number, series ID, contract/class IDs, filing date, form type), iXBRL-tagged elements under the VIP taxonomy for fee-table line items, and consistent exhibit naming inside each accession. Workflow: ingest the ZIP archive, parse iXBRL facts into a normalized fee and feature schema keyed by contract/class ID, fall back to text or layout extraction for untagged narrative, and serve structured records to comparison interfaces, suitability engines, and chat-based research assistants. The 2002-onward archive also supports training and evaluation of extraction models on a stable form type.
Corporate development professionals, transaction lawyers, and reinsurance structuring teams evaluating block transactions, separate-account transfers, or full carrier acquisitions use the dataset during diligence. They examine depositor disclosure, separate-account financial statements in the SAI, participation agreements in exhibit (h), disclosed reinsurance arrangements, and the amendment trail showing how the seller managed COI redeterminations and rider closures. The output drives in-force block valuation, policyholder-litigation exposure assessment, and post-close planning for prospectus updates the acquirer will file as new depositor.
The use cases below are concrete workflows that operate directly on the contents of an N-6 accession folder — the primary _n6.htm/_n6a.htm document, the metadata.json descriptor, and the lettered Part C exhibits.
Pricing actuaries at a life carrier select a peer set of VUL issuers, group records by seriesAndClassesContractsInformation.series.classesContracts[].classContract (the C00… IDs), and pull the most recent N-6 or N-6/A per contract. They extract the Item 3 fee table, the Item 5 charges narrative, and the COI rate appendices and surrender-charge schedules at the back of the prospectus into a normalized grid keyed by issue age, sex, rate class, and policy year. Output: a peer COI-per-thousand and surrender-charge-amortization comparison feeding repricing decisions and board pricing memos.
Product teams at fund families whose portfolios serve as variable investment options pull every EX-99.(H) exhibit (filenames matching *_ex99-xh*.htm) across the dataset, plus the Item 4 portfolio-company list inside each prospectus. They build a carrier-by-fund-family matrix tracking which insurers offer their funds, which competitor funds sit alongside on each platform, and how participation-agreement schedules (substitution rights, mixed-and-shared funding representations, revenue-sharing acknowledgements) change across successive (h) sub-exhibits. Output: a platform-coverage map driving wholesaler outreach and a redline log of participation-agreement evolution per carrier.
Data engineering teams parse the inline XBRL embedded in each modern _n6.htm/_n6a.htm, scoping ix:nonNumeric and ix:nonFraction elements under the vip and dei namespaces. They emit one structured row per contract/class ID per filing date covering transaction expenses, periodic charges, optional benefit charges, and the high/low range of total annual portfolio company operating expenses, joined to the C00… identifier from metadata.json. Output: a normalized fee panel powering comparison UIs, suitability engines, and longitudinal fee-evolution dashboards without touching prose extraction.
Compliance and disclosure counsel monitor the population of EX-99.(R) exhibits across post-2022 N-6 records to confirm that each marketed contract has a current Initial or Updating Summary Prospectus on file. They diff the fixed-sequence sections (Important Information, Overview, Benefits Available, Buying the Policy, Lapse, Withdrawals, Additional Information About Fees, Appendix of Portfolio Companies) against the full statutory prospectus in the same accession to flag inconsistencies. Output: a Rule 498A coverage register and a list of summary-prospectus disclosures that fall out of sync with the statutory document at amendment time.
Plaintiff-side attorneys and in-force advisors building a charge history for a single contract group all accessions sharing the same 333-… and 811-… fileNo values in entities[] and order them by filedAt. They walk the cover page of each _n6a.htm to classify the amendment (Pre-Effective under Rule 472, Post-Effective under Rule 485(a) or 485(b), with or without designated effective date), then diff Items 3, 5, 8, and 9 across the sequence to surface every COI redetermination, rider closure, and surrender-charge revision the depositor has made since issue. Output: a dated charge-and-feature timeline used in suitability reviews, 1035-exchange analysis, and arbitration exhibits.
Diligence teams running pre-acquisition reviews of a target depositor's variable-life block pull every EX-99.(N)(1) consent across the target's N-6 history, capture the auditor name, signature date, and the specific audit report referenced, and follow the Item 12 incorporation-by-reference language to the underlying depositor financial statements (typically Form N-VPFS). Output: a consent-and-financial-statement provenance log used to verify that each effective registration is supported by a current auditor consent and to identify any auditor changes during the review window.
VUL product managers building a feature grid for an upcoming launch extract the Item 2 risk/benefit summary, the Item 5 rider-charge subsections, and the policy-form exhibits under EX-99.(D) (contract and rider forms) for each peer contract. They tabulate availability and pricing of no-lapse guarantees, GMDB variants, chronic-illness, long-term-care, and overloan-protection riders, normalized by C00… class ID. Output: a peer rider-availability and rider-charge matrix supporting the design memo and the legal exhibit list for the new registration.
The Form N-6 Files Dataset is available through three access methods: a JSON metadata index, a full dataset archive download, and per-container downloads. Containers are distributed in ZIP format and contain TXT, JSON, HTML, and PDF files extracted from N-6 and N-6/A filings.
Dataset Index JSON API: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-n6-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 contained file types), the full dataset download URL, and the list of individual container files with their size, record count, updated timestamp, and download URL. It can be polled to detect which containers were modified in the latest refresh run, so only the changed containers need to be re-downloaded. This endpoint does not require an API key.
Example response:
1
{
2
"datasetId": "1f13365b-9ae0-6993-a07d-f240bacd2d8d",
3
"datasetDownloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-n6-files.zip",
4
"name": "Form N-6 Files Dataset",
5
"description": "Form N-6 is a registration statement filed by insurance company separate accounts organized as unit investment trusts that offer variable life insurance policies.",
6
"updatedAt": "2026-04-28T03:12:44.000Z",
7
"earliestSampleDate": "2002-06-14",
8
"totalRecords": 11811,
9
"totalSize": 397937045,
10
"formTypes": ["N-6", "N-6/A"],
11
"containerFormat": "ZIP",
12
"fileTypes": ["TXT", "JSON", "HTML", "PDF"],
13
"containers": [
14
{
15
"downloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-n6-files/2026/2026-04.zip",
16
"key": "2026/2026-04.zip",
17
"size": 8421334,
18
"records": 42,
19
"updatedAt": "2026-04-28T03:12:44.000Z"
20
}
21
]
22
}
Download Entire Dataset: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-n6-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads the complete dataset as a single ZIP archive containing all monthly containers. This endpoint requires an API key.
Download Single Container: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-n6-files/2026/2026-04.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads one individual monthly container file using the containers[].key value from the dataset index. Use this method to fetch only specific time periods or to incrementally pull containers updated in the most recent refresh. This endpoint requires an API key.
The dataset covers Form N-6 and its amendments (Form N-6/A), the SEC-prescribed registration statement for separate accounts of insurance companies organized as unit investment trusts that issue variable life insurance contracts. Form N-6 is a dual registration under both the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 8(b) of the Investment Company Act of 1940.
One record corresponds to a single EDGAR accession — one Form N-6 or Form N-6/A submission. Each record is materialized as a folder named with the 18-digit hyphen-stripped accession number, holding the primary registration statement, the lettered Part C exhibits, and a metadata.json descriptor that mirrors the EDGAR submission header.
Form N-6 is filed by an insurance company separate account that issues variable life insurance contracts; the named registrant is the separate account, but the insurance company depositor signs and files on its behalf. The depositor's principal executive officer, principal financial officer, principal accounting officer or controller, and a majority of its board of directors must sign the registration statement.
The dataset begins in July 2002, when Form N-6 was adopted (Release No. 33-8088) as the dedicated variable life registration form, replacing prior reliance on Forms N-8B-2 and S-6. Coverage continues through the current monthly refresh; earlier variable life filings appear under N-4 or predecessor forms and are out of scope.
The dataset is distributed as monthly ZIP containers. Inside each container, accession folders contain TXT, JSON, HTML, and PDF files — predominantly the primary HTM/iXBRL registration document, HTM exhibits, the metadata.json descriptor, and occasional TXT or PDF attachments. Image binaries (GRAPHIC attachments) and standalone XBRL technical files are referenced by URL in metadata.json but are not bundled into the containers.
Form N-4 registers variable annuity contracts issued by UIT separate accounts, while Form N-6 registers variable life insurance contracts. Although both forms share the UIT-separate-account structure and an item-by-item disclosure framework, their fee tables, benefit disclosures, and rider regimes differ categorically: N-6 centers on cost of insurance, surrender charges, death benefit options, and policy loans, while Form N-4 dataset centers on mortality and expense risk charges, annuitization options, and GLB/GMDB riders.
Post-effective amendments are filed under Rule 485 of the 1933 Act: Rule 485(b) for routine annual updates and non-material changes (effective immediately), and Rule 485(a) for material changes requiring staff review (effective 60 days after filing). Annual updating amendments under Section 10(a)(3) — required to keep the prospectus current for continuous offerings — are the largest single source of recurring N-6/A records.