Form N-VPFS Files Dataset

The Form N-VPFS Files Dataset assembles every Form N-VPFS and Form N-VPFS/A submission lodged with EDGAR — the dedicated annual financial-statement filing for insurance company separate accounts that fund variable annuity and variable life insurance contracts. Each record is one complete EDGAR submission keyed by accession number, bundling the original filing attachments together with a structured metadata.json header that re-expresses the EDGAR submission envelope as machine-readable JSON. The legal filer is the registered separate account itself, while the depositor life insurance company performs the operational work of preparing, signing, and transmitting the submission. Form N-VPFS was created by SEC Release 33-10765 (adopted March 2020) as part of the variable-products disclosure modernization, and the dataset begins in March 2021 with the form's first compliance filings and continues to the present. Filings arrive in TXT, HTML/HTM, JSON, and PDF and are distributed as monthly ZIP containers.

Dataset APIs

Dataset Files

What This Dataset Contains

A single record in this dataset is one EDGAR submission of Form N-VPFS or Form N-VPFS/A — the annual financial-statement filing for an insurance company separate account that funds variable annuity contracts or variable life insurance contracts. The record unit is the entire accepted submission keyed by its EDGAR accession number, not an individual sub-account row, fund holding, contract class, or financial-statement line item. Each record bundles the original filing attachments lodged with EDGAR together with a structured metadata.json header.

Form N-VPFS is the dedicated annual financial-statement filing for separate accounts of insurance companies that are organized as unit investment trusts and registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940. These separate accounts hold the assets backing variable annuity and variable life insurance contracts; the underlying investments are typically shares of registered mutual funds, and contract-owner interests are tracked through accumulation units priced daily. The form was created by SEC Release 33-10765, adopted in March 2020 as part of the variable-products disclosure modernization rulemaking, and it consolidates and replaces the prior practice of filing separate-account financial statements as exhibits to, or post-effective amendments of, the underlying Form N-3, Form N-4, or Form N-6 registration statement (frequently packaged inside Form 485BPOS submissions). Form N-VPFS/A is the amended variant, used when a registrant restates, corrects, or supplements previously filed financial statements; amendments re-present the financial statements in full rather than as a redline, and they are linked to the original implicitly through matching periodOfReport, filer entity, and EDGAR series/class identifiers rather than through an explicit pointer to the prior accession number.

The filing's substantive payload is the audited annual financial statements of the separate account for a single fiscal year, accompanied by the report of the independent registered public accounting firm and, where applicable, the auditor's internal-control report referenced by Form N-CEN. The variable contract's prospectus, statement of additional information, and underlying-fund disclosures are filed separately on EDGAR; the N-VPFS report carries a notice that it must be accompanied by an effective prospectus but does not embed those documents. Within the dataset's ZIP packaging, each record is materialized as a single folder named after the accession number with the dashes stripped (for example, accession 0000034867-25-000003 becomes folder 000003486725000003). Folders are grouped under year-month directories such as 2025-06/ inside per-month ZIP containers organized as YYYY/YYYY-MM.zip. Every accession folder contains exactly one metadata.json plus one or more filing documents. The file types found in the dataset are TXT, HTML/HTM, JSON, and PDF; image files from the original EDGAR submission are excluded.

The dataset begins in March 2021 because Form N-VPFS did not exist before then. Before SEC Release 33-10765, separate-account financial statements were filed as exhibits to, or post-effective amendments of, the variable contract's underlying Form N-3, N-4, or N-6 registration statement (often inside Form 485BPOS submissions); those legacy presentations are not part of this dataset, which captures only the post-modernization, dedicated-form filings from the form's effective date forward. Because Form N-VPFS was introduced after EDGAR's transition to modern submission technologies, the record-level format has been stable from the dataset's inception. Filings have always arrived through the standard SGML submission envelope with attachments rendered as TXT, HTML/HTM, or PDF, and the internal organization of the financial-statement body — assets and liabilities, operations and changes in net assets, notes, financial highlights, auditor's report, and Form N-CEN internal-control report — has been consistent across the dataset's history.

Content Structure of a Single Record

A record contains two complementary structural layers.

1. A JSON header layer (metadata.json) capturing the EDGAR submission envelope: filer identification, document inventory, period and effectiveness dates, and the EDGAR series and class/contract identifiers that anchor variable-product disclosures.
2. A document layer carrying the filing attachments themselves. The primary document is the financial-statement report, wrapped in EDGAR's SGML <DOCUMENT> envelope; additional attachments may include cover correspondence or supplemental exhibits when the registrant submitted them. The concatenated complete-submission text file is also present as the final attachment.

The metadata layer is the cleanest machine-readable index of who filed, on behalf of which separate-account series and contract classes, for what fiscal period. The document layer carries the audited per-sub-account financial detail in narrative-plus-tabular form, which must be parsed from the document body rather than from metadata.json.

metadata.json shape

metadata.json is the parsed EDGAR header for the submission. Its fields include:

• formType — N-VPFS for an original filing or N-VPFS/A for an amendment; the canonical discriminator between initial and amended submissions.
• accessionNo — the canonical dashed accession number (e.g. 0000034867-25-000003).
• filedAt — ISO 8601 timestamp with timezone offset for EDGAR acceptance.
• effectivenessDate — the date the filing became effective.
• periodOfReport — the fiscal year-end date covered by the financial statements (e.g. 2024-12-31).
• description — the EDGAR description line as supplied by the filer; on amendments this often signals the nature of the change.
• linkToFilingDetails, linkToTxt, linkToHtml, linkToXbrl — URLs to the primary document, the complete submission text file, the EDGAR filing index page, and any XBRL instance.
• documentFormatFiles — the authoritative attachment inventory. Each entry contains sequence, size (bytes, as a string), documentUrl, description, and type. The first entry is the primary financial-statement document; the last entry is invariably the "Complete submission text file" — the concatenated SGML wrapper for the whole submission. Sequence numbers align with the <SEQUENCE> lines in the SGML envelope.
• dataFiles — an array reserved for supplemental data files; for N-VPFS this is generally empty.
• entities — an array of filer entities. Each entry includes cik, companyName (typically with a role suffix such as (Filer)), fileNo (the Investment Company Act file number, e.g. 811-02570), irsNo, stateOfIncorporation, fiscalYearEnd in MMDD form (e.g. 1231), act (40, indicating the Investment Company Act of 1940), filmNo, and type (the form type as filed by that entity).
• seriesAndClassesContractsInformation — the variable-products identification block. Each element identifies one EDGAR series with its series ID (e.g. S000020814), a human-readable name, and a classesContracts array of { name, classContract } pairs where classContract is the EDGAR class/contract ID (e.g. C000058145). One series typically corresponds to a separate account; each class/contract under it corresponds to a sub-account or contract class whose unit values, expense ratios, and total returns appear in the financial statements.
• id — an opaque dataset-level record identifier.

Primary document anatomy

The primary document is the audited annual report for the separate account, delivered as a plain-text file, an HTML/HTM document, or a PDF, and always encapsulated in EDGAR's SGML document envelope:

          1
          <DOCUMENT>
        

          2
          <TYPE>N-VPFS
        

          3
          <SEQUENCE>1
        

          4
          <FILENAME>...
        

          5
          <DESCRIPTION>...
        

          6
          <TEXT>
        

          7
          ... financial statement body ...
        

          8
          </TEXT>
        

          9
          </DOCUMENT>
        

Only <FILENAME>, <DESCRIPTION>, and the inner <TEXT> body vary across filings; the wrapper itself is invariant, and the <TYPE> line carries N-VPFS or N-VPFS/A mirroring formType. Inside <TEXT> the body of an N-VPFS report typically runs through the following sections, in this order:

1. Cover and identification block — the legal name of the separate account, the descriptor "(A Unit Investment Trust)", the sponsoring insurance company, address, the title and period of the report (e.g. "Annual Report, December 31, 2024"), and a notice that the report must be accompanied by an effective prospectus.
2. Statement of Assets and Liabilities as of the period-of-report date — a tabular schedule listing, for each underlying mutual fund or share class held by the separate account, the number of shares, share value, total value, and cost basis, followed by aggregate lines for total investments, funds held by the insurance company, total assets, total liabilities, and "Total Net Assets Attributable to Variable Annuity Contract Owners".
3. Net Assets Attributable to Variable Annuity Contract Owners — a breakdown by sub-account or accumulation-unit class showing the number of accumulation units outstanding, the unit value, and the total value, plus any payout-annuity reserves where applicable.
4. Statements of Operations and Changes in Net Assets — a two-year comparative presentation (current fiscal year versus prior fiscal year) for each sub-account, with line items such as reinvested dividends, mortality and expense charge, net investment income, net realized gain (loss) on investments, net unrealized gain (loss) on investments, increase (decrease) in net assets from operations, contract-owner transactions (transfers, purchases, redemptions, surrender charges), net increase (decrease) in net assets, and beginning/ending net assets.
5. Notes to Financial Statements — narrative disclosures covering the organization of the separate account, the relationship to the sponsoring insurance company, the summary of significant accounting policies (basis of presentation, fair-value methodology, dividend and capital-gain recognition, federal income tax treatment), the mortality-and-expense and administration charges deducted at the contract level, related-party arrangements, and a per-sub-account financial highlights table presenting accumulation unit values at the beginning and end of period, expense ratios (excluding and including expenses of underlying funds), and total returns for each investment division.
6. Report of Independent Registered Public Accounting Firm — the auditor's PCAOB-form opinion on the financial statements, identifying the auditor, the period audited, the auditor's tenure ("auditor of record since…"), and the signing office and date.
7. Report of Independent Registered Public Accounting Firm on Internal Controls Required by the SEC under Form N-CEN — where applicable, the auditor's report on internal control over financial reporting, supplied to satisfy the internal-control attestation that registrants reference on Form N-CEN.

The mix of narrative and tabular content is characteristic: the statements themselves and the financial-highlights table are densely tabular, while the notes and auditor's reports are narrative. For separate accounts that offer many investment divisions, the per-sub-account tables can extend to dozens of columns or repeat as parallel blocks, one per division.

Initial filings versus N-VPFS/A amendments

N-VPFS and N-VPFS/A records share the same accession-folder layout, the same metadata.json schema, and the same SGML-wrapped primary document. The discriminator is the formType field in metadata.json and the matching <TYPE> line inside the SGML envelope. N-VPFS/A submissions amend a previously filed N-VPFS for the same periodOfReport; they may correct typographical or numerical errors, restate financial statements after a re-audit, add or replace the auditor's report or internal-control report, or supplement the notes. The substantive document re-presents the financial statements in full. The amendment's relationship to the original is established by matching periodOfReport and the entities/seriesAndClassesContractsInformation identifiers, not by an explicit prior-accession pointer.

Included content

Each record contains the full set of submission documents lodged with EDGAR — the primary financial-statement document, any cover letter or supplemental exhibits, and the concatenated complete-submission text file — together with the metadata.json header. Primary documents are preserved in their original format (TXT, HTML/HTM, or PDF) inside the SGML wrapper.

Excluded or separate content

Image files referenced by or embedded in the original EDGAR submission are excluded from the dataset copy. Documents that are structurally separate from the N-VPFS filing — the variable contract's prospectus and statement of additional information, the underlying Form N-3/N-4/N-6 registration statement, Form N-CEN annual census report, Form 24F-2 notice of securities sold, and any underlying mutual fund's own N-CSR or N-PORT filings — are not part of an N-VPFS record.

Interpretation and extraction notes

• The seriesAndClassesContractsInformation block is the cleanest machine-readable index of which separate-account series and which contract classes a filing covers; the per-sub-account financial detail itself sits inside the SGML-wrapped statement document and must be parsed from the document body rather than the metadata.
• Plain-text primary documents sometimes carry EDGAR text-rendering artifacts such as trailing * markers at wrapped line ends; these are presentation overhead from the SGML/text pipeline, not part of the underlying disclosure.
• documentFormatFiles is the authoritative attachment inventory: the first entry is the primary financial-statement document, the final entry is the concatenated complete-submission text file, and sequence values correspond to the <SEQUENCE> lines in the SGML envelope.
• Identifying the auditor, opinion type, audit date, and auditor tenure requires text extraction from the auditor's-report section of the primary document; these attributes are not surfaced as fields in metadata.json.
• For separate accounts that have undergone reorganizations, name changes, or sponsor changes, entities and seriesAndClassesContractsInformation reflect the registrant identity as filed, which can differ from prior-year filings even when the underlying separate account is continuous. The stable join keys for linking records across years are the EDGAR series ID inside seriesAndClassesContractsInformation and the Investment Company Act fileNo on the filer entity, rather than the human-readable company or series name.
• Each filing covers one fiscal year for one separate account, but a single separate account may carry many sub-accounts and many contract classes; the financial-statement body therefore expands horizontally (more columns or repeated per-division blocks) rather than producing multiple records per separate account per year.

Who Files or Publishes This Dataset, and When

Who files the record

The legal filer is an insurance company separate account registered with the SEC as an investment company under the Investment Company Act of 1940 that funds variable annuity contracts, variable life insurance contracts, or both. The submission is made under the separate account's own CIK. The depositor life insurance company that established the separate account performs the operational work — preparing the financial statements, engaging the auditor, signing, and transmitting the EDGAR submission — but the disclosure obligation legally attaches to the registered separate account, not to the insurer itself. Researchers mapping filings to an insurance group must traverse the separate-account-to-depositor relationship.

Filing population

Separate accounts that file Form N-VPFS are:

• Variable annuity separate accounts registered on Form N-4 (UIT structure) or, less commonly, Form N-3 (managed investment company structure).
• Variable life insurance separate accounts registered on Form N-6.
• Separate accounts supporting combination variable annuity/variable life products under the applicable form regime.

Depositors are state-regulated U.S. life insurance companies (stock, mutual, or fraternal) that issue variable insurance products. The separate account is a segregated pool of assets isolated from the insurer's general account, as required by state insurance law and the 1940 Act.

Entities outside this filing path include:

• Open-end and closed-end management investment companies (file Form N-CSR and Form N-CEN).
• Underlying mutual funds held by sub-accounts (report on their own schedule on Form N-CSR).
• Insurance company general accounts (not registered investment companies).
• Fixed annuity and fixed life products (not securities under the 1933 Act).
• Market-value-adjusted annuities and registered index-linked annuities registered on Form S-1 or Form S-3 rather than under the 1940 Act separate-account regime.

Triggering event and schedule

Form N-VPFS is a periodic annual filing triggered solely by the close of the separate account's fiscal year. There is no event-driven, transaction-driven, or materiality-driven trigger. The filing is due within 90 days after fiscal year-end. Because depositors typically maintain multiple separate accounts that share a fiscal year-end (commonly December 31), an insurer often files several N-VPFS submissions in the same window, one per separate-account CIK.

Form N-VPFS/A amendments are filed as needed to correct, restate, or supplement a prior N-VPFS — for example, clerical corrections, audit reissuance, omitted sub-account schedules, or EDGAR submission cures. Amendments have no fixed deadline and do not constitute new annual reporting events.

Regulatory framework

Form N-VPFS was adopted in SEC Release No. 33-10765 / IC-33814, Updated Disclosure Requirements and Summary Prospectus for Variable Annuity and Variable Life Insurance Contracts (March 2020), with first filings appearing on EDGAR in March 2021 after the transition period. Three statutory anchors govern the form:

• Investment Company Act §30. Registered separate accounts are subject to periodic reporting under §30; Form N-VPFS is the vehicle for their annual audited financial statements to the Commission.
• Securities Act §10(a)(3). Variable contracts are securities whose registration statements on Forms N-3, N-4, and N-6 must be kept current with audited financials. Release 33-10765 restructured how those financials are delivered.
• Variable-contract summary prospectus regime. The 2020 rulemaking authorized the Initial Summary Prospectus and Updating Summary Prospectus for variable contracts (analogous to Rule 498 for mutual funds). Detailed audited financial statements were unbundled from the statutory prospectus and N-3/N-4/N-6 registration statements and moved to a standalone annual filing on Form N-VPFS, consistent with the SEC's broader layered-disclosure approach.

Before Release 33-10765, separate-account audited financials were embedded in N-3, N-4, and N-6 registration statements and post-effective amendments. Form N-VPFS replaces that bundled presentation with a dedicated filing channel. No pre-2021 N-VPFS records exist.

Important distinctions

• Legal filer vs. operational preparer. The separate account is the filer of record; the depositor insurer prepares and submits the filing under the separate account's CIK.
• Separate account vs. underlying funds. N-VPFS financials are those of the separate account (sub-account investments, accumulation unit values, per-unit data), not the underlying mutual funds, which file their own Form N-CSR reports.
• N-3 vs. N-4/N-6 structure. Both file N-VPFS, but managed separate accounts (N-3) hold securities directly while UIT separate accounts (N-4, N-6) hold shares of underlying funds, producing different financial statement layouts.
• Multiple accounts per insurer. Insurers commonly maintain distinct separate accounts by product line, generation, or distribution channel; each files its own N-VPFS under its own CIK.
• Amendments are not new annual events. Counting unique annual reporting events requires deduplicating N-VPFS/A against the underlying N-VPFS by separate-account CIK and fiscal period.
• No foreign-issuer analog. U.S. variable-contract separate accounts are maintained by U.S.-domiciled insurers; there is no foreign-private-issuer use of N-VPFS.
• Relationship to Form N-CEN. Registered separate accounts also file Form N-CEN annually for census-type registrant data. N-CEN and N-VPFS are complementary, not substitutes: N-CEN reports operational/census information; N-VPFS delivers the audited financial statements.

How This Dataset Differs From Similar Datasets or Filings

Form N-VPFS sits between investment-company financial reporting and insurance-product disclosure. Its closest neighbors are the certified shareholder reports of other registered funds, the variable-contract registration statements that previously carried these financial statements inline, the contract-level summary prospectus, the entity's census filing, portfolio-holdings reports, the parent insurer's 10-K, and statutory filings made to state regulators. Each overlaps on one axis (issuer, subject matter, accounting framework, or audience) and none is a substitute.

Form N-CSR / N-CSRS (certified shareholder reports)

The structural twin. Both carry audited (annual) or unaudited (semi-annual) 1940 Act financial statements: assets and liabilities, operations, changes in net assets, and schedules of investments.

• Filer population. N-CSR is filed by management investment companies (mutual funds, ETFs, closed-end funds). N-VPFS is filed by insurance separate accounts funding variable annuity and variable life contracts.
• Statement structure. N-CSR reports per-share NAV and shareholder transactions. N-VPFS reports per-unit accumulation values, expense ratios, and total returns by sub-account or investment division.
• Required content. N-CSR includes Sarbanes-Oxley CEO/CFO certifications, proxy voting disclosure, and advisory-contract approval narratives. N-VPFS does not.
• When to use which. Use Form N-CSRS for a mutual fund or ETF; use N-VPFS when the reporting entity is an insurance separate account.

Forms N-3, N-4, N-6 (variable-contract registration statements)

N-3 (variable annuities funded by management-company separate accounts), N-4 (variable annuities funded by UIT separate accounts), and N-6 (variable life contracts) historically embedded the separate-account financials inside Part B / SAI or as an exhibit. Release 33-10765 (March 2020) extracted those financials into the standalone N-VPFS so registration statements can be updated less frequently.

• Content split going forward. N-3/N-4/N-6 carry the prospectus, SAI, fee tables, and contract-level disclosures. N-VPFS carries the audited financial statements.
• Time-series implication. Pre-March 2021 separate-account financials live inside N-3/N-4/N-6 amendments; March 2021 forward they are in N-VPFS. A long historical series requires both sources.

Form N-VP (variable contract summary prospectus)

Companion form from the same 2020 modernization. Form N-VP is the layered, plain-English summary prospectus delivered to contract owners; N-VPFS is the audited financial backstop filed with the SEC.

• Audience and register. N-VP is retail-facing narrative and summary tables on features, fees, risks, and investment options. N-VPFS is GAAP financial statements with auditor opinions.
• Content overlap. Effectively none. Use N-VP to see what contract owners received; use N-VPFS for the underlying financial data.

Form N-CEN (annual census report)

Many separate accounts that file N-VPFS also file N-CEN, but the two cover different content types.

• N-CEN. Structured XML census data: identifiers, board composition, auditor, custodians, transfer agents, securities-lending activity, service providers.
• N-VPFS. Financial statements describing position and activity.
• Use together. Link by registrant CIK to pair operational metadata (who audits, who advises) with financial outcomes (returns, per-unit values) for the same separate account.

Form N-PORT (monthly portfolio holdings)

The boundary is sharp and frequently misunderstood.

• Most variable separate accounts do not file Form N-PORT. N-4 UIT separate accounts hold only sub-account interests in underlying funds; the underlying mutual funds file N-PORT for their own portfolios. N-3 management-company separate accounts may have N-PORT obligations on their own holdings.
• Granularity. N-PORT is security-level, position-by-position, monthly (third month publicly released). N-VPFS is aggregate, per-division, annual.
• Workflow. For actual security holdings behind a variable contract, identify the underlying funds (via the N-4 prospectus or N-VP) and pull their N-PORT filings. N-VPFS will not provide security-level positions.

Form 10-K of the insurance company depositor

Parent-versus-segregated-pool relationship.

• Form 10-K. Consolidated GAAP financials of the entire insurer: general account balance sheet, income statement, reserves, surplus, all lines of business.
• N-VPFS. Only the legally segregated separate account, whose assets are not available to general creditors of the insurer.
• Why both matter. Contract owner economic exposure runs through the separate account (N-VPFS). The insurer's ability to honor guarantees, riders, and general-account-funded features runs through the depositor (10-K).

Statutory annual statements (NAIC "Yellow Book")

Filed with state insurance regulators, not the SEC.

• Accounting basis. SAP, not GAAP.
• Audience and purpose. Regulator solvency supervision, not investor disclosure.
• Scope. Captures all separate accounts of the insurer, including non-registered and non-variable. N-VPFS covers only SEC-registered variable separate accounts.
• Distribution. State regulators or NAIC, not EDGAR.
• When to use which. N-VPFS for the SEC, GAAP, investor-facing view; statutory statements for the state, SAP, solvency view.

Boundary summary

N-VPFS is the only SEC dataset that isolates GAAP-audited annual financial statements for registered insurance company separate accounts as a standalone, post-2020 filing. It is narrower than N-CSR (different entity type), narrower than the depositor 10-K (segregated account only), more financial than N-CEN (statements rather than census fields), more aggregated than N-PORT (no security-level holdings), more technical than N-VP (audit-grade rather than summary disclosure), and more extractable than the financial statements previously buried in N-3/N-4/N-6. For separate-account financial performance, expense structure, and per-unit results from March 2021 forward, N-VPFS is the primary source; for any other slice of the variable-product ecosystem, the correct destination is one of the neighbors above.

Who Uses This Dataset

Users on both the insurance-product and investment-product sides mine the same N-VPFS records for sub-account NAV/AUV, expense ratios, M&E and rider charges, revenue-sharing footnotes, and statements of changes in net assets.

Variable-annuity research and due-diligence analysts at broker-dealers

Product-approval desks reconcile per-sub-account AUVs, total returns, and expense ratios in the audited statements against carrier-supplied fact sheets and marketing material. M&E, administrative, and rider-charge footnotes drive approved-product-list decisions, ongoing platform surveillance, and 1035-exchange replacement-suitability reviews.

Actuarial and product-development teams at insurance depositors

Pricing actuaries and product managers benchmark peer separate accounts on M&E loads, admin fees, and per-unit performance, and read statements of changes in net assets for surrender activity and net flows by sub-account. Outputs feed pricing models, profitability analyses, rider design, and competitive positioning of new contract series.

External auditors specializing in insurance separate accounts

Engagement teams use peer filings to calibrate scoping and methodology on unit-valuation policies, related-party transactions with the depositor, affiliated-fund holdings, and going-concern language. N-VPFS/A amendments and auditor reports inform engagement quality reviews and technical-committee positions.

Compliance and SEC reporting staff at insurance depositors

In-house reporting teams use prior N-VPFS and N-VPFS/A filings as drafting references for their own submissions, focusing on sub-account schedules, 1940-Act footnote conventions, restatement mechanics, and affiliated-fund disclosures. Supports filing-quality review, disclosure controls, and responses to staff comment letters.

ERISA fiduciaries and retirement-plan consultants

Consultants to defined-contribution, 403(b), and 457 plans extract total expense ratios, M&E charges, and underlying-fund expense layers to compute all-in sub-account costs against mutual fund alternatives. Revenue-sharing, sub-TA, and 12b-1 footnotes between the separate account, depositor, and underlying funds document ERISA 404(a) review and support fee studies, IPS reviews, and provider-search RFPs.

Securities and insurance regulator examination staff

Examiners and enforcement staff use the dataset to establish what an issuer disclosed and when on fees, performance, and rider mechanics. N-VPFS/A amendment history, charge footnotes, and auditor qualifications support sweep exams of variable-annuity sponsors and investigations into misstated performance or expense disclosure.

Litigation-support analysts and expert witnesses

In excessive-fee class actions, unsuitable-replacement arbitrations, and rider disputes, experts treat N-VPFS as the authoritative source for historical AUVs, expense ratios, and sub-account net assets. They reconstruct what holders paid versus what was disclosed, benchmark in-suit fees against peers, and trace restatements through N-VPFS/A to produce damages calculations and exhibits.

Academic researchers in insurance economics and household finance

Researchers build longitudinal panels of sub-account expense ratios, AUVs, total returns, and net assets to study fee dispersion, M&E impact on long-horizon outcomes, and distribution-channel pricing effects in insurance-wrapped vehicles.

Financial data vendors and ratings firms

Coverage teams ingest the filings to populate sub-account NAV histories, expense ratios, total returns, and net assets, reconciling audited figures against carrier interim feeds and back-correcting series when N-VPFS/A amendments arrive. Output drives commercial sub-account analytics, peer-group rankings, and downstream feeds to advisors, consultants, and recordkeepers.

Insurance-credit and counterparty analysts

Credit analysts on life and annuity writers read separate-account net-asset scale, surrender patterns in statements of changes in net assets, and depositor fee income from M&E and admin charges as inputs to revenue-durability and franchise-value views that complement statutory and holding-company filings.

LLM and RAG engineers building insurance and retirement-product retrieval

Engineering teams parse footnotes, expense and per-unit tables, and auditor reports into retrievable chunks keyed to accession numbers to power advisor search tools, compliance copilots, and structured extraction pipelines.

The dataset serves a narrow audience built around variable insurance products: manufacturers and their auditors and compliance staff, distributors and ERISA consultants who evaluate the contracts, regulators and litigators who police them, and data vendors and academics who measure them. Each role consumes a different slice of the same audited record, from per-unit performance grids to revenue-sharing footnotes to amendment history.

Specific Use Cases

The following workflows are built directly on Form N-VPFS records.

1. Building a sub-account expense-ratio benchmark for approved-product-list reviews

Variable-annuity research analysts at broker-dealers extract the per-sub-account financial-highlights tables from each year's N-VPFS primary document — accumulation unit values, expense ratios excluding and including underlying-fund expenses, and total returns — and join them on EDGAR series and class/contract IDs from seriesAndClassesContractsInformation. Output is a peer-comparison grid keyed by S000…/C000… that feeds APL admit/maintain/terminate decisions and 1035-exchange suitability memos.

2. Tracking restatements through N-VPFS/A amendment history

Compliance staff and litigation-support analysts assemble paired panels of original N-VPFS and subsequent N-VPFS/A filings by matching periodOfReport, filer CIK, and series ID. The description field on the amendment plus diffs of the restated Statements of Operations and Changes in Net Assets and the re-issued auditor's report isolate which sub-accounts, line items, or opinion paragraphs changed. Deliverable is a restatement log used for surveillance, damages reconstruction, and back-correction of vendor NAV/AUV time series.

3. Quantifying surrender activity and net flows by sub-account

Actuarial and product-development teams at insurance depositors parse the Statements of Operations and Changes in Net Assets — specifically the contract-owner transactions block (transfers, purchases, redemptions, surrender charges) and beginning/ending net assets — across all peer separate accounts filing N-VPFS for a given fiscal year. Output is a flow-and-persistency dashboard by contract class that feeds pricing models, M&E re-rating, and rider redesign.

4. Mining revenue-sharing and affiliated-fund footnotes for ERISA fee studies

Retirement-plan consultants and ERISA fiduciaries text-extract the Notes to Financial Statements covering related-party arrangements with the depositor, sub-TA payments, 12b-1 receipts, and affiliated underlying-fund relationships. Combined with the financial-highlights expense ratios, the result is an all-in cost decomposition (M&E + admin + rider + underlying-fund layer + revenue-sharing offsets) used in ERISA 404(a) reviews, IPS updates, and provider-search RFPs.

5. Building an auditor and audit-tenure registry for separate accounts

External auditors and regulators parse the Report of Independent Registered Public Accounting Firm and the Form N-CEN internal-control report from each primary document to capture auditor name, signing office, opinion type, "auditor of record since" tenure, and any qualifications. Joined with filer CIK and series ID, this yields an auditor-rotation and concentration registry used for engagement-quality calibration, peer scoping, and sweep-exam target selection.

6. Reconstructing historical AUV series for sub-account performance evidence

Litigation-support analysts and data vendors extract per-sub-account accumulation unit values at beginning and end of period, units outstanding, and total returns from the financial-highlights and Net Assets Attributable to Variable Annuity Contract Owners sections of each annual filing. Chained year over year via the stable EDGAR series/class IDs (and not the human-readable series name, which can change on reorganization), the output is a multi-year AUV and total-return panel used as the authoritative record in excessive-fee class actions, unsuitable-replacement arbitrations, and academic fee-dispersion studies.

7. Linking separate-account financial outcomes to operational metadata

Insurance-credit analysts and ratings firms join N-VPFS records to the same registrant's Form N-CEN by filer CIK and series ID, pairing net-asset scale, M&E and admin fee income, and surrender behavior from the N-VPFS Statements of Operations and Changes in Net Assets with N-CEN census fields on advisers, custodians, transfer agents, and securities-lending activity. Deliverable is a revenue-durability and franchise-value scorecard at the separate-account level, complementing the depositor's 10-K and statutory yellow-book data.

8. Powering RAG retrieval over variable-product financial disclosures

LLM and RAG engineers chunk the primary document by section — cover block, Statement of Assets and Liabilities, per-sub-account net-asset breakdown, Statements of Operations and Changes in Net Assets, individual Notes, financial-highlights table, auditor's report — and key each chunk to accession number, series ID, class/contract ID, and periodOfReport. Output powers advisor-facing search, compliance copilots that answer "what did this contract disclose about the M&E charge in 2023," and structured-extraction pipelines that emit machine-readable expense and performance tables.

Dataset Access

The Form N-VPFS Files Dataset is available through three access methods: a public JSON index, a full archive download, and per-container monthly downloads. The two download endpoints require an SEC API key passed as a token query parameter.

Dataset Index JSON API: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-nvpfs-files.json

Returns dataset-level metadata (name, description, updatedAt, earliestSampleDate, total records, total size, covered form types, container format, and file types) along with the full list of container files. Each container entry includes its downloadUrl, key, size, records, and updatedAt timestamp. This endpoint does not require an API key.

Poll this endpoint on a daily schedule and compare each container's updatedAt value against the last value you saved locally to detect which monthly containers have changed in the most recent refresh run, then download only those containers.

Example response:

          1
          {
        

          2
            "datasetId": "1f13365b-9ae0-696c-8b64-6ed47e895b49",
        

          3
            "datasetDownloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-nvpfs-files.zip",
        

          4
            "name": "Form N-VPFS Files Dataset",
        

          5
            "updatedAt": "2026-05-16T03:02:58.248Z",
        

          6
            "earliestSampleDate": "2021-03-01",
        

          7
            "totalRecords": 4537,
        

          8
            "totalSize": 748796101,
        

          9
            "formTypes": ["N-VPFS", "N-VPFS/A"],
        

          10
            "containerFormat": "ZIP",
        

          11
            "fileTypes": ["HTML", "JSON", "TXT", "PDF"],
        

          12
            "containers": [
        

          13
              {
        

          14
                "downloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-nvpfs-files/2026/2026-05.zip",
        

          15
                "key": "2026/2026-05.zip",
        

          16
                "size": 13818783,
        

          17
                "records": 154,
        

          18
                "updatedAt": "2026-05-16T03:02:58.248Z"
        

          19
              }
        

          20
            ]
        

          21
          }
        

Download Entire Dataset: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-nvpfs-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY

Downloads the complete archive containing every Form N-VPFS and N-VPFS/A filing from March 2021 to present in a single ZIP file. Use this for an initial bulk load. Requires an SEC API key.

Download Single Container: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-nvpfs-files/2026/2026-05.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY

Downloads one monthly container ZIP. Replace the year and month in the path with any container key returned by the index API to fetch a specific month. Use this for incremental updates after the initial full download. Requires an SEC API key.

Frequently Asked Questions

What form does the Form N-VPFS Files Dataset cover?

The dataset covers Form N-VPFS and its amended variant Form N-VPFS/A — the dedicated annual financial-statement filing for insurance company separate accounts registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940 that fund variable annuity and variable life insurance contracts.

What does one record in the Form N-VPFS Files Dataset represent?

One record is a single EDGAR submission of Form N-VPFS or Form N-VPFS/A, keyed by accession number. Each record bundles the original filing attachments lodged with EDGAR (primary financial-statement document, any supplemental exhibits, and the concatenated complete-submission text file) together with a structured metadata.json header that re-expresses the EDGAR submission envelope as machine-readable JSON.

Who is required to file Form N-VPFS?

The legal filer is an insurance company separate account registered with the SEC as an investment company under the Investment Company Act of 1940 that funds variable annuity contracts, variable life insurance contracts, or both. The depositor life insurance company prepares and transmits the submission, but the disclosure obligation legally attaches to the registered separate account, which files under its own CIK.

When are Form N-VPFS filings due?

Form N-VPFS is a periodic annual filing triggered solely by the close of the separate account's fiscal year and is due within 90 days after fiscal year-end. There is no event-driven or materiality-driven trigger; N-VPFS/A amendments have no fixed deadline and are filed as needed to correct, restate, or supplement a prior N-VPFS.

What time period does the dataset cover?

The dataset begins in March 2021 — the first compliance filings under SEC Release 33-10765 (adopted March 2020) — and continues to the present. No pre-2021 N-VPFS records exist; before that rulemaking, separate-account financial statements were embedded in Form N-3, N-4, or N-6 registration statements rather than in a standalone filing.

What file formats are inside each record?

Each accession folder contains a metadata.json header plus one or more filing documents in TXT, HTML/HTM, or PDF. The primary document is always wrapped in EDGAR's SGML <DOCUMENT> envelope. Image files referenced by or embedded in the original EDGAR submission are excluded. The dataset is distributed as monthly ZIP containers organized as YYYY/YYYY-MM.zip.

How does Form N-VPFS differ from Form N-CSR?

N-CSR and N-VPFS are structural twins — both carry 1940 Act audited financial statements — but they cover different filer populations. N-CSR is filed by management investment companies (mutual funds, ETFs, closed-end funds) and reports per-share NAV and shareholder transactions, while N-VPFS is filed by insurance separate accounts and reports per-unit accumulation values, expense ratios, and total returns by sub-account or investment division. N-VPFS also omits the Sarbanes-Oxley CEO/CFO certifications, proxy voting disclosure, and advisory-contract approval narratives required on N-CSR.