The Form NRSRO-CE Files Dataset is a per-accession collection of Form NRSRO annual certifications and amendments filed to EDGAR by Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations (NRSROs) under Rule 17g-1(f) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Each record is one EDGAR submission — either a NRSRO-CE annual certification or a NRSRO-CE/A amendment — materialized as a single accession-number directory containing an EDGAR-derived metadata.json plus the Form NRSRO primary document and any attached Exhibits 1 through 13 as PDFs. The filer population is small and closed: only the ten credit rating agencies currently registered as NRSROs under Section 15E of the Exchange Act — including Moody's Investors Service, S&P Global Ratings, Fitch Ratings, Morningstar DBRS, Kroll Bond Rating Agency, A.M. Best, Egan-Jones, HR Ratings de Mexico, JCR, and Demotech — file these certifications, each due no later than 90 calendar days after the end of each calendar year. The dataset begins with the March 2016 EDGAR collection window and extends through the present, with filings clustered heavily in March of each year because of the calendar-driven deadline. Content is delivered as monthly ZIP containers holding PDF exhibit documents and JSON metadata.
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 captures the public, recurring disclosure stream that NRSROs furnish to the SEC under the Rule 17g-1 / Section 15E regime. Each record corresponds to one EDGAR submission of Form NRSRO filed as an annual certification (form type NRSRO-CE) or as a partial-update amendment to a previously filed annual certification (form type NRSRO-CE/A). Both share an identical per-accession folder structure and differ only in the form-type label, the description string, the primary document's type code, and (typically) the number of exhibit PDFs attached.
The substantive disclosure of any NRSRO-CE submission lives almost entirely in its Exhibits 1 through 13, which are fixed in number and meaning by the Form NRSRO instructions and each address one regulatory disclosure category — performance measurement statistics, methodologies, MNPI policies, organizational structure, code of ethics, conflicts of interest, analyst counts and qualifications, compliance officer disclosures, audited financial statements, revenue by source, and aggregate revenue concentration. The cover Form NRSRO document is thin; the exhibit body is heavy and carries the operational, methodological, organizational, and financial disclosure.
The dataset is delivered as monthly ZIP containers organized by year. The path pattern is form-nrsroce-files/YYYY/YYYY-MM.zip, and inside each ZIP the top-level folder is YYYY-MM/, under which sits one directory per accession number. Because Form NRSRO-CE has a calendar-driven 90-day deadline, March containers are dense (annual certifications cluster there) while most other months hold only a handful of amendment filings. The dataset spans March 2016 through the present and includes only PDF and JSON files; image files from the original EDGAR submission are excluded.
One record in the Form NRSRO-CE Files Dataset is a single EDGAR submission of Form NRSRO filed as an annual certification under Rule 17g-1(f) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, materialized on disk as one accession-number directory. Each directory carries an EDGAR-derived metadata.json describing the submission header and a set of PDF documents corresponding to the Form NRSRO update itself and to any Form NRSRO exhibits attached to that certification.
Form NRSRO is the registration and disclosure form for a nationally recognized statistical rating organization under Section 15E of the Exchange Act, added by the Credit Rating Agency Reform Act of 2006 and expanded by Sections 932 and 938 of the Dodd-Frank Act (the SEC's final NRSRO rulemaking became effective in 2014–2015). Rule 17g-1(f) requires each registered NRSRO to refile and re-certify its Form NRSRO no later than 90 days after the end of each calendar year. The "CE" suffix denotes that certification event: the filer reaffirms its registration, restates the certifications by qualified institutional buyers that supported its initial application, and updates any Form NRSRO exhibits whose contents have changed since the prior year.
A NRSRO-CE/A filing is a post-hoc amendment to a previously filed annual certification, typically attaching only the revised exhibit(s) plus a short "FORM NRSRO UPDATE" cover PDF rather than the full exhibit set.
Accession folders are named with the 18-digit no-dashes form of the EDGAR accession number (for example, 0001962109-25-000004 becomes 000196210925000004).
Every accession folder contains:
metadata.json — a structured JSON object derived from the EDGAR submission header. Always present.dt_formnrsro.pdf, formnrsro.pdf, or nrsro.pdf. For amendments the document is often labeled "FORM NRSRO UPDATE".Ex1_20250717.pdf, ex2.pdf, Exhibit3.pdf, Performance_Statistics.pdf).The file-types found in the dataset are PDF and JSON. Image files from the original EDGAR submission are excluded, and no SGML wrapper, HTML, or XBRL files are stored locally. Where a downstream consumer needs the original SGML submission text or the EDGAR index page, the relevant URLs are exposed inside metadata.json.
The authoritative mapping from a PDF on disk to its regulatory role is the documentFormatFiles array inside metadata.json: each entry's documentUrl ends in the local file's name, and each entry's type field identifies the document as the Form NRSRO itself or as a specific numbered exhibit.
metadata.json shapemetadata.json is a single flat object mirroring the EDGAR submission header for the accession. Its top-level fields are:
formType — "NRSRO-CE" for an annual certification or "NRSRO-CE/A" for an amendment.accessionNo — EDGAR accession number in dashed canonical form NNNNNNNNNN-YY-NNNNNN.description — EDGAR submission description string, e.g., "Form NRSRO-CE/A - [Amend]".filedAt — ISO-8601 timestamp with US Eastern timezone offset capturing EDGAR's accept time.linkToFilingDetails — direct URL to the primary document on www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/....linkToTxt — URL of the full submission as a single SGML .txt wrapper on EDGAR.linkToHtml — URL of the EDGAR filing index page (-index.htm).linkToXbrl — empty string for this form type.id — opaque 32-character hex identifier, stable per filing.seriesAndClassesContractsInformation — array, empty for NRSRO certifications (the field exists for cross-dataset schema consistency with fund-series filings).dataFiles — array of structured data attachments, empty for NRSRO certifications.documentFormatFilesAn array describing every attachment listed in the EDGAR submission header. Each element has:
sequence — string-valued integer ("1", "2", …) for actual documents. The synthetic "complete submission" line uses a single space " " and should be filtered out when sorting numerically.size — byte size as a numeric string.documentUrl — direct EDGAR download URL. Its final path segment is the on-disk filename inside the accession folder.description — filer-supplied human-readable label, e.g., "FORM NRSRO UPDATE", "EXHIBIT 1 REVISED", "PERFORMANCE STATISTICS", "EXHIBIT 2".type — SEC document type code. For NRSRO submissions the values are:
NRSRO-CE or NRSRO-CE/A — the primary Form NRSRO document.EX-99.E1 NRSRO through EX-99.E13 NRSRO — Exhibits 1 through 13 to Form NRSRO.type: " " and description: "Complete submission text file" referring to the EDGAR SGML wrapper, which is not stored locally.entitiesAn array of header parties. For NRSRO-CE there is normally a single entry: the filer NRSRO itself. Per-entity fields include companyName with a role suffix such as "(Filer)", cik (numeric string, no padding), fileNo (NRSROs use the 110-XXXXX file-number series), filmNo, type mirroring the submission's form type, act (typically "34" for the 1934 Exchange Act under which Section 15E governs NRSROs), fiscalYearEnd as MMDD, irsNo (IRS employer identification number, digits only), and stateOfIncorporation as a two-letter state code.
The primary PDF in each accession folder is the Form NRSRO document itself. It carries the registrant identification block (legal name, address, contact, NRSRO file number in the 110-XXXXX series), the certification language confirming continued eligibility for registration as an NRSRO, the credit-rating class designations for which the NRSRO is registered (financial institutions, insurance companies, corporate issuers, asset-backed securities, government securities, and so on), an inventory of which exhibits are being submitted with the certification, and the signature and date block for the duly authorized officer executing the certification.
Exhibits 1 through 13 are fixed in number and meaning by Form NRSRO and Rule 17g-1, and any subset may be re-submitted in a given certification or amendment. The EX-99.E1 NRSRO through EX-99.E13 NRSRO type codes map to the following content:
Exhibit content is overwhelmingly narrative and legal (Exhibits 2, 3, 5, 6, 7), partially tabular (Exhibits 1, 8, 12, 13), and accounting-document in form (Exhibit 11). Each exhibit is filed as its own PDF, and presentation, pagination, table formatting, and chart styling vary widely across NRSROs and across years for the same NRSRO.
An initial annual NRSRO-CE filing for a given calendar year typically attaches a substantial set of exhibits — often the full Exhibit 1 through Exhibit 13 sequence, or whichever subset the filer is updating relative to the most recent on-file version. The accession folder for such a filing is correspondingly large and may contain a dozen or more PDFs in addition to the primary Form NRSRO document.
A NRSRO-CE/A amendment is structurally narrower. It almost always attaches a short "FORM NRSRO UPDATE" PDF plus only the specific revised exhibit(s) being amended, with descriptions like "EXHIBIT 1 REVISED" flagging the targeted disclosure. The differences from an initial certification are confined to a small set of signals:
formType switches from "NRSRO-CE" to "NRSRO-CE/A".type field and the primary document's documentFormatFiles[].type field switch in the same way.description gains an "[Amend]" token (e.g., "Form NRSRO-CE/A - [Amend]").documentFormatFiles is correspondingly shorter, typically a primary document plus one or two revised exhibits plus the synthetic complete-submission row.Apart from these signals the per-accession folder layout, the metadata schema, the file-naming conventions, and the exhibit-numbering scheme are identical to the initial certification.
Each record packages the EDGAR header metadata as metadata.json, the primary Form NRSRO PDF for that certification or amendment, and the PDF attachments for every Form NRSRO exhibit that was filed in the submission. Together these capture the entire substantive disclosure of the annual certification or its amendment as it was filed.
Image files from the original EDGAR submission are excluded from the on-disk record. The SGML "complete submission text file" referenced by the trailing documentFormatFiles row with type: " " is also not stored locally; only its EDGAR URL is exposed via linkToTxt. The EDGAR filing index page is similarly external and reached via linkToHtml. The seriesAndClassesContractsInformation and dataFiles arrays exist for cross-dataset schema consistency but are empty for NRSRO certifications, and linkToXbrl is an empty string because the regulatory regime for Form NRSRO does not impose XBRL tagging.
Prior-period filings are also outside the record: each NRSRO-CE accession is a fresh annual certification submitted as a standalone EDGAR submission and does not incorporate the prior year's exhibits by reference inside the dataset. Reconstructing a longitudinal view of an NRSRO's disclosures therefore requires joining multiple annual records by filer CIK.
Form NRSRO-CE has been a stable form type across the dataset's coverage. The 90-day post-year-end deadline, the two-form-type structure (NRSRO-CE and NRSRO-CE/A), and the Exhibit 1 through Exhibit 13 numbering and content scheme have all remained intact from 2016 to the present, so the per-record anatomy does not show the section-by-section evolution that older long-running form datasets exhibit. The only meaningful presentation variation across years is filer-driven: individual NRSROs change exhibit naming conventions, page layouts, table formatting, and chart styling from one annual certification to the next, while the regulatory anatomy of the record is constant.
Form-wise, NRSRO-CE filings have been submitted to EDGAR consistently as PDF documents wrapped in the standard EDGAR SGML envelope. The dataset stores the PDFs and the parsed header; there is no ASCII-text-to-HTML transition relevant to this form.
documentFormatFiles[*].documentUrl and join against the local filenames; the type field on the matched row identifies which exhibit (or the primary form document) the PDF represents. Filer-chosen filenames are not a reliable signal on their own.sequence is a string and includes a synthetic single-space value for the SGML "complete submission" row that does not correspond to any locally stored file, so numeric sorting must coerce types and filter that row.documentFormatFiles instead.formType, by the [Amend] token in description, and by the typically much smaller documentFormatFiles array; consumers reconstructing the "as-current" certification for a filer must overlay each NRSRO-CE/A on the most recent prior NRSRO-CE for the same CIK.The filer is always the registered NRSRO legal entity itself. It is not the issuers, obligors, or instruments that the NRSRO rates, and not unregistered affiliates within the same corporate group. NRSRO-CE/A amendments are filed by the same registered NRSRO that filed the original certification.
The population is unusually small. Only ten credit rating agencies currently hold NRSRO status, and only these entities can file Form NRSRO-CE:
Each NRSRO is registered in one or more of the five rating classes defined by Section 3(a)(62) of the Exchange Act: (1) financial institutions, brokers, or dealers; (2) insurance companies; (3) corporate issuers; (4) issuers of asset-backed securities; and (5) issuers of government, municipal, or foreign-government securities. The annual certification covers only the classes for which the firm is registered.
Non-registered credit rating agencies, deregistered or withdrawn NRSROs, and unregistered affiliates of NRSROs do not file Form NRSRO-CE.
Form NRSRO-CE is a periodic, calendar-driven certification with one fixed trigger and one event-driven trigger.
The annual certification is mandatory, not discretionary. Failure to furnish Form NRSRO-CE within the 90-day window is a violation of Rule 17g-1(f) and Section 15E. Under Section 15E(d), the Commission may, after notice and hearing, censure an NRSRO, place limitations on its activities, suspend its registration for up to 12 months, or revoke its registration for failure to comply with Section 15E or the rules thereunder. Loss of NRSRO status eliminates the regulatory recognition that allows the firm's ratings to be used in SEC and other federal rules that reference NRSRO ratings, which can effectively end the firm's business. Late or deficient filings also commonly produce Office of Credit Ratings examination findings, deficiency letters, and Division of Enforcement referrals; recent SEC enforcement actions against NRSROs have resulted in multi-million-dollar civil penalties.
Form NRSRO-CE belongs to a small filing family used by NRSROs under Section 15E of the Exchange Act and the Rule 17g series. The closest comparison targets are the other Form NRSRO variants tied to different points in the registration lifecycle, plus Form ADV as an outside-the-regime structural analog.
Form NRSRO in its base form is the one-time application a credit rating agency files to become registered. It uses the same form template and exhibit structure as NRSRO-CE — performance statistics, ratings counts, financial statements, organizational and procedural disclosures — which is the main source of confusion. The difference is purely lifecycle: the initial Form NRSRO establishes registration once at entry; NRSRO-CE is the annual Rule 17g-1(f) certification that re-attests the same exhibit set every calendar year. What makes NRSRO-CE different: it is the recurring annual snapshot, not the one-time entry record.
Form NRSRO-UPD filings are event-driven amendments triggered when previously reported Form NRSRO information becomes materially inaccurate. They are submitted promptly after the triggering event, on no fixed schedule, and update only the specific exhibits affected (e.g., a code-of-ethics revision, a credit analyst headcount change, a procedural disclosure update). What makes NRSRO-CE different: it is calendar-driven (due within 90 days of year-end), comprehensive across all exhibits, and confirmatory rather than reactive. NRSRO-UPDs capture intra-year deltas; NRSRO-CE captures the end-of-year consolidated state.
Form NRSRO-FR is the other annual NRSRO filing but is financial-only: audited financial statements, unaudited revenue reports, schedules of credit-ratings revenue, and reports on internal controls and compliance. It runs on the Rule 17g-3 schedule, not the Rule 17g-1(f) certification deadline. NRSRO-CE does include a financial-statements exhibit, but it is materially shallower than NRSRO-FR and contains no audited financials or internal-controls reporting. What makes NRSRO-CE different: it covers ratings volumes, procedural frameworks, and organizational structure — the operational and qualitative disclosures NRSRO-FR omits. The two are complementary, not substitutes.
NRSRO-WCR is the one-time termination filing used when an NRSRO exits the regime. It is procedural and carries essentially none of the substantive exhibit content — no performance statistics, no ratings counts, no operational disclosures. What makes NRSRO-CE different: it is the source for the running annual exhibit content while the registrant is active; NRSRO-WCR only marks the exit event.
Supplemental Form NRSRO filings carrying category-specific ratings statistics overlap with NRSRO-CE on ratings counts and performance statistics but are narrower, more tabular, and targeted to a specific statistical disclosure rather than the full exhibit package. What makes NRSRO-CE different: it bundles the complete Form NRSRO exhibit set — including non-numeric procedural, organizational, and methodology disclosures — as a single annual recertification, where supplemental filings isolate one slice of tabular data.
Form ADV is the closest structural analog outside the credit-rating regime: both are annual, comprehensive, certification-style filings due within 90 days of year-end in which an SEC registrant refreshes a master disclosure document. The substantive content has no overlap. Form ADV is filed by investment advisers under the Advisers Act and covers AUM, client types, custody, and adviser-specific disclosures; NRSRO-CE is filed by credit rating agencies under Section 15E and covers ratings outstanding, performance statistics, and ratings methodologies. What makes NRSRO-CE different: different statute, different registrant population, and exhibit content with no Form ADV counterpart. The comparison is useful as a model for understanding the annual-recertification mechanic, not as an alternative data source.
NRSRO-CE is the once-per-year, all-exhibits recertification in the NRSRO regime. It is structurally distinct from NRSRO-UPD (event-driven, narrow), substantively distinct from NRSRO-FR (financials-only under a different rule), lifecycle-distinct from the initial Form NRSRO (registration) and NRSRO-WCR (withdrawal), broader than supplemental ratings-statistics filings, and outside the registrant population of Form ADV. For the canonical year-end snapshot of an NRSRO's ratings activity, organizational structure, procedural framework, and compliance posture, NRSRO-CE is the authoritative source; the other filings in the series are complements, not substitutes.
Form NRSRO-CE annual certifications are the only regular, comparable, public window into how registered rating agencies operate, what they rate, how their ratings perform, how they are funded, and how they manage conflicts. Because every NRSRO repeats the same exhibit structure each year, a defined set of professional users mines it for cross-agency, multi-year comparisons.
Credit analysts at asset managers, insurance general accounts, pension plans, and credit hedge funds work behind the ratings they consume. They pull Exhibit 1 default and transition statistics by asset class (corporate, financial, insurance, sovereign, structured) to decide which agency's rating binds in internal credit policy, calibrate expected-loss models, and justify notching overrides. Exhibit 2 methodology disclosures explain rating-action waves.
Banks reference NRSRO ratings for risk-weighted assets, HQLA classification, and repo collateral eligibility. Treasury and capital teams use Items 6 and 7 to confirm each agency's registration scope covers the asset classes they rely on, watch Exhibit 2 for methodology changes that could move RWA, and cite Exhibits 9 and 10 to evidence that the agencies they reference remain in good regulatory standing.
Strategists publishing client-facing notes benchmark agencies using Exhibit 1 (performance, defaults, transitions by asset class), Exhibit 2 (methodology comparisons), Exhibit 12 (rating vs. non-rating revenue and top-client concentration), and Exhibit 13 (analyst and supervisor headcount as a capacity proxy). Outputs include annual rating-agency reviews, sector primers on relative agency severity, and structured-finance market-share dashboards.
In-house compliance teams at the agencies use prior-year filings, their own and peers', as a drafting reference for Exhibit 8 (conflicts), Exhibit 9 (compliance program), and Exhibit 10 (designated compliance officer). Issuer-side compliance officers whose offering documents, indentures, or covenants reference NRSRO ratings use the filings to verify continued registration in the relevant class and to document agency due diligence.
Researchers studying rating-agency competition, issuer-pays conflicts, and rating accuracy build long panels from Exhibit 1 (performance, procyclicality), Exhibit 12 (revenue and client concentration), Exhibit 13 (analyst workload), and Exhibits 8 and 9 (qualitative coding of governance). Outputs are working papers and rule-comment submissions on rating-agency reform.
OCR examiners treat each NRSRO-CE certification, with its senior officer attestation, as the agency's own representation about how it operated during the prior calendar year. Annual Section 15E examinations compare Exhibit 1 against internal performance data, Exhibits 8 and 9 against observed conflicts and compliance practice, Exhibit 10 against the org chart, and Exhibits 11 and 12 against books and records. Discrepancies support deficiency findings or enforcement referrals.
Forensic accountants and testifying experts in rating-related disputes (structured-finance securities class actions, indenture and covenant disputes, issuer-agency contract claims) reconstruct what an agency disclosed at a specific point in time. The NRSRO-CE/A amendment trail anchors what the agency knew and stated in a given year; Exhibit 1 statistics and Exhibit 2 methodology language are routinely quoted in expert reports.
Treasurers, capital-markets bankers, and IR teams selecting or rotating rating agencies compare Exhibit 1 transition and default behavior in their sector, Exhibit 2 methodology disclosures to anticipate driving factors, Exhibit 13 headcount as a proxy for analytical attention per issuer, and Exhibit 12 revenue concentration to gauge commercial dependence on their industry. The comparison feeds the decision memo to the CFO or treasurer.
Credit-markets reporters and data vendors maintaining NRSRO market-share databases extract ratings outstanding by class and asset type (Exhibit on ratings outstanding), revenue by activity and geography (Exhibit 12), headcount trends (Exhibit 13), and year-over-year changes in conflicts and compliance disclosures (Exhibits 8, 9, 10). Outputs are league tables, competitive-landscape pieces, and subscription products tracking the industry.
Teams building retrieval-augmented systems for credit research, regulatory monitoring, and compliance Q&A ingest the full corpus to ground model answers in agency methodologies, performance histories, and governance disclosures. PDF exhibits plus JSON metadata from 2016 onward give a citation-ready corpus, with accession numbers serving as stable evidence anchors.
The dataset's value sits inside a stable handful of exhibits filed by every NRSRO each calendar year. The use cases below assume PDF extraction over the exhibits identified by the type codes (EX-99.E1 NRSRO through EX-99.E13 NRSRO) in metadata.json.
Pull Exhibit 1 PDFs (type = EX-99.E1 NRSRO) across every accession from 2016 forward, joined by filer CIK and the year derived from filedAt. Extract 1-, 3-, and 10-year transition and default rates by rating category and rated-entity class (corporate, financial, insurance, sovereign, ABS, government) into a single long-format table. The deliverable is a cross-agency, multi-year performance panel for calibrating expected-loss models, notching overrides in internal credit policy, or producing annual rating-agency review notes.
For a target NRSRO, walk its accession folders chronologically and diff Exhibit 2 PDFs (type = EX-99.E2 NRSRO) between consecutive annual NRSRO-CE filings, overlaying any NRSRO-CE/A amendments labelled EXHIBIT 2 REVISED in documentFormatFiles[].description. The output is a dated change-log of methodology revisions that buy-side credit and bank RWA teams use to anticipate rating-action waves and re-test internal capital models.
Parse Exhibit 12 (EX-99.E12 NRSRO) and Exhibit 13 (EX-99.E13 NRSRO) across all filers to assemble two time series per NRSRO: revenue split by credit-rating versus non-credit-rating activity (Exhibit 12) and aggregate revenue from the 20 largest issuer and subscriber clients (Exhibit 13). Combine with the analyst and supervisor headcounts from Exhibit 8 (EX-99.E8 NRSRO) to publish a competitive-landscape dashboard tracking commercial dependence, client concentration, and analytical capacity per agency.
Collect Exhibits 3, 6, 7, 9, and 10 (EX-99.E3 / E6 / E7 / E9 / E10 NRSRO) for each filer-year and index them as a citation-ready governance corpus. Compliance teams at NRSROs use it as a peer drafting reference; OCR examination staff use it to compare each agency's stated policies on MNPI, conflicts management, and the designated compliance officer against observed practice; litigation experts use it to anchor what an agency had on file at a given accession date.
For a disputed period, filter metadata.json to records where formType = "NRSRO-CE/A" (or description contains "[Amend]") for the target CIK, then overlay the revised exhibits onto the most recent prior NRSRO-CE to reconstruct the "as-current" certification on any specific date. The deliverable for forensic accountants and testifying experts is a time-stamped exhibit chain — accession numbers as evidence anchors — supporting expert reports in structured-finance, indenture, or issuer-agency disputes.
Ingest the entire on-disk record set: every PDF in each accession folder chunked, embedded, and tagged with the exhibit type, filer CIK, accessionNo, and filedAt lifted from metadata.json. The result is a retrieval index that grounds LLM answers about NRSRO methodologies, performance histories, conflicts policies, and revenue disclosures in primary-source text, with accession numbers serving as stable citations back to the EDGAR record.
Dataset Index JSON API: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-nrsroce-files.json
This endpoint returns metadata describing the Form NRSRO-CE Files Dataset, including the dataset name, description, last update timestamp, earliest sample date, total record count, total dataset size, form types covered (NRSRO-CE, NRSRO-CE/A), container format (ZIP), and content file types (PDF, JSON). It also provides the full dataset download URL and a list of individual container files, each with its own size, record count, last updated timestamp, and download URL. Use this endpoint to monitor which containers have been refreshed in the most recent update run and to decide which containers to download incrementally on a day-by-day basis. No API key is required to call this endpoint.
Example response:
1
{
2
"datasetId": "1f13365b-9ae0-69ff-bde6-493c8bfbd0c5",
3
"datasetDownloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-nrsroce-files.zip",
4
"name": "Form NRSRO-CE Files Dataset",
5
"updatedAt": "2026-04-15T18:19:23.448Z",
6
"earliestSampleDate": "2016-03-01",
7
"totalRecords": 1140,
8
"totalSize": 1983675133,
9
"formTypes": ["NRSRO-CE", "NRSRO-CE/A"],
10
"containerFormat": "ZIP",
11
"fileTypes": ["PDF", "JSON"],
12
"containers": [
13
{
14
"downloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-nrsroce-files/2026/2026-03.zip",
15
"key": "2026/2026-03.zip",
16
"size": 13818783,
17
"records": 24,
18
"updatedAt": "2026-04-15T18:19:23.448Z"
19
}
20
]
21
}
Download Entire Dataset: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-nrsroce-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads the complete Form NRSRO-CE Files Dataset as a single ZIP archive covering all filings from March 2016 to the present. This endpoint requires a valid API key.
Download Single Container: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-nrsroce-files/2026/2026-03.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads a single monthly container file instead of the full archive. Replace the year and month segments with any container key listed in the dataset index to retrieve filings for that period. This endpoint requires a valid API key.
The dataset covers Form NRSRO filed as annual certifications under form type NRSRO-CE and amendments to those annual certifications under form type NRSRO-CE/A. Both are submitted to EDGAR pursuant to Rule 17g-1(f) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The dataset does not include initial registration filings (Form NRSRO), event-driven material-change updates (NRSRO-UPD), annual financial reports under Rule 17g-3 (NRSRO-FR), or withdrawal filings (NRSRO-WCR).
One record is a single EDGAR submission, materialized on disk as one accession-number directory containing an EDGAR-derived metadata.json and the Form NRSRO primary document plus any attached Exhibits 1 through 13 as PDFs. An initial NRSRO-CE accession typically carries a large set of exhibits; an NRSRO-CE/A amendment is narrower and usually contains a short "FORM NRSRO UPDATE" PDF plus only the revised exhibit(s).
Every credit rating agency registered as a Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization under Section 15E of the Exchange Act must file Form NRSRO-CE. The current population is ten registered NRSROs, including Moody's Investors Service, S&P Global Ratings, Fitch Ratings, Morningstar DBRS, Kroll Bond Rating Agency, A.M. Best, Egan-Jones, HR Ratings de Mexico, JCR, and Demotech. Non-registered credit rating agencies, deregistered NRSROs, and unregistered affiliates do not file.
Rule 17g-1(f) requires each registered NRSRO to furnish its annual certification on Form NRSRO no later than 90 calendar days after the end of each calendar year, regardless of the registrant's fiscal year. The deadline is fixed and uniform across all NRSROs, with no accelerated-filer tiers. In practice, filings cluster in late February through March 31, which is why March monthly containers are the densest in the dataset. NRSRO-CE/A amendments can be filed in any month when previously furnished information becomes materially inaccurate or incomplete.
The dataset begins on 2016-03-01 — the earliest sample date, which falls within the first March certification wave captured under EDGAR-based collection — and extends through the present. Coverage is continuous; every Form NRSRO-CE and NRSRO-CE/A submission to EDGAR within that window is included.
The dataset is delivered as monthly ZIP containers organized by year, following the path pattern form-nrsroce-files/YYYY/YYYY-MM.zip. Inside each ZIP, accession folders contain a metadata.json file plus PDF documents for the Form NRSRO primary document and each filed exhibit. Image files from the original EDGAR submission are excluded, and the SGML wrapper, HTML index page, and XBRL data are not stored locally — their EDGAR URLs are exposed in metadata.json for downstream retrieval.
NRSRO-CE and NRSRO-FR are both annual filings under the Rule 17g series, but they serve different purposes. NRSRO-FR runs on the Rule 17g-3 schedule and is financial-only — audited financial statements, unaudited revenue reports, schedules of credit-ratings revenue, and reports on internal controls and compliance. NRSRO-CE, by contrast, is the Rule 17g-1(f) all-exhibits recertification that re-attests performance statistics, methodologies, organizational structure, conflict-of-interest policies, code of ethics, analyst headcount, compliance officer disclosures, and revenue concentration. The two are complementary, not substitutes.