The Form POS 8C Files Dataset is a corpus of post-effective amendments to closed-end investment company registration statements, filed under Section 8(c) of the Securities Act of 1933. Each record is a single complete EDGAR submission — the amended Form N-2 registration statement, every attached exhibit, any prospectus supplements bundled in the same submission, and a structured metadata.json manifest — identified by EDGAR accession number and grouped into monthly ZIP containers keyed by filing date. The form is filed by the registrant itself: listed (exchange-traded) closed-end funds, business development companies (BDCs), and interval or tender-offer funds whose Form N-2 has already been declared effective. The dataset begins with EDGAR's mandatory electronic filing for investment companies in September 1996 and continues through the present, capturing the evolution of closed-end fund prospectuses, fee tables, leverage policies, and exhibit sets across thirty years of regulatory change. The distribution format is ZIP, and the underlying file types are HTML, JSON, TXT, and PDF; embedded image files are deliberately excluded.
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Dataset Index JSON API
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The dataset assembles every EDGAR submission of Form POS 8C — a post-effective amendment to a registration statement filed by a closed-end investment company under Section 8(c) of the Securities Act of 1933. The function of a POS 8C is to update or modify the contents of a registration statement that has already been declared effective, most commonly a Form N-2 registration statement used by closed-end funds and business development companies to register the offer and sale of their shares. The amendment may be filed under the Securities Act of 1933 alone or, for registered closed-end funds, jointly under the 1933 Act and the Investment Company Act of 1940. When filed jointly, the EDGAR submission carries two file numbers — a 333-prefixed Securities Act registration file number and an 811-prefixed Investment Company Act file number — and produces two filer rows in the EDGAR header (one per Act), even though there is one underlying registrant CIK.
The substantive content delivered through a POS 8C is the amended registration statement itself: a refreshed prospectus, an updated statement of additional information when applicable, revised fee and expense tables, restated investment objectives and principal investment strategies, an updated risk-factor section, refreshed (or incorporated-by-reference) financial statements, and a re-attached set of Item-numbered N-2 exhibits such as charter and bylaw documents, opinions of counsel, consents of independent auditors, and powers of attorney. Because a POS 8C is by nature an amendment, the document also typically carries an explanatory note describing what is being amended (additional shares being registered, an updated prospectus, replaced exhibits, corrected disclosures) and explicit cross-references to the original registration statement.
Records are distributed as monthly ZIP containers (<YYYY>/<YYYY-MM>.zip), and each accession folder is named with the dash-stripped, zero-padded 18-digit form of its accession number (for example 000182912625009674 for accession 0001829126-25-009674). The dataset preserves the textual and structured content of each filing — HTML, JSON, TXT, and PDF — but omits embedded artwork, logos, charts, and signature scans.
One record in the Form POS 8C Files Dataset is a single complete EDGAR submission of a Form POS 8C filing, identified by its EDGAR accession number and materialized on disk as a per-accession folder. The folder bundles a structured metadata.json manifest together with the non-image documents that constitute the post-effective amendment: the primary POS 8C document (an amended N-2 registration statement), every exhibit attached to that submission, any prospectus supplements included in the same submission, and any XBRL or auxiliary text/PDF files that accompanied the filing.
Records are distributed inside monthly ZIP archives. The top of each archive is a single year-month folder (<YYYY-MM>/), under which each accession folder is a flat directory of files — there is no nested item or exhibit hierarchy. Inside an accession folder, exactly one metadata.json is always present, sitting alongside the primary POS 8C HTML document and one HTML file per filed exhibit. Where the registrant supplies XBRL instance data, the corresponding linkbase, schema, and extracted instance files (.xsd, _def.xml, _lab.xml, _pre.xml, _htm.xml) may also appear; ancillary attachments occasionally appear as .txt or .pdf. Image files (JPG, PNG, GIF) referenced inside the prospectus or exhibits as graphics are deliberately excluded — the dataset preserves the textual and structured content of the filing but omits embedded artwork, logos, charts, and signature scans.
The file-types found in the dataset are HTML, JSON, TXT, and PDF; image formats are not retained.
metadata.json schemaThe manifest is a single JSON object describing the whole EDGAR submission, and it is the structural index for everything else in the folder. Its top-level fields are:
id — internal 32-character hexadecimal record identifier.accessionNo — EDGAR accession number with dashes, e.g. 0001829126-25-009674.formType — always the literal POS 8C for this dataset.description — the human-readable form label, Form POS 8C - Post-effective amendments filed by certain investment companies [Section 8(c)].filedAt — ISO-8601 filing timestamp with EDGAR's Eastern-time offset, e.g. 2025-12-03T21:57:57-05:00.linkToFilingDetails, linkToHtml, linkToTxt, linkToXbrl — direct URLs back to the canonical primary document, the EDGAR -index.htm submission landing page, the concatenated complete-submission .txt SGML stream, and the XBRL instance (empty string when no XBRL is present).documentFormatFiles — array of submission documents. Each entry has sequence, size (string-encoded byte count), documentUrl, description, and type. The list always includes the primary POS 8C, every exhibit, any graphics referenced by the filing (whose underlying bytes are excluded from the dataset itself), and the trailing complete-submission text file as a final entry (its sequence is conventionally a single space).dataFiles — array describing XBRL data files when the filing carries Inline XBRL. Entries cover the schema (EX-101.SCH), the definition, label, and presentation linkbases (EX-101.DEF, EX-101.LAB, EX-101.PRE), and the extracted XML instance (XML). Empty when the filing has no XBRL.entities — array with one entry per Act-level filer registration on the submission. Each entry carries cik, companyName (with a role suffix like (Filer)), type (the form type as recorded for that entity), act (33 for the Securities Act of 1933, 40 for the Investment Company Act of 1940), fileNo (a 333- or 811-prefixed file number depending on Act), filmNo, irsNo, fiscalYearEnd (MMDD), stateOfIncorporation, and tickers (array of trading symbols). A single POS 8C registrant routinely produces two entity rows — one for each Act — that share the same CIK but report different file numbers; this is the natural manifestation of the dual-Act registration pattern in the EDGAR header.seriesAndClassesContractsInformation — array of series/class/contract identifiers used by multi-series trusts. For typical single-series closed-end funds it is an empty array.There is a sharp structural distinction between the primary POS 8C document and the exhibits.
The primary document is the amended registration statement and is generally delivered as a clean, modern HTML file (commonly Inline-XBRL-tagged) without the EDGAR SGML envelope. It is the single largest file in the folder and contains the full substantive narrative of the amendment.
Exhibits are stored one per file and are wrapped in the EDGAR SGML document envelope. The wrapper opens with <DOCUMENT> and a small set of header lines — <TYPE> (the EDGAR exhibit code, e.g. EX-99.(N) for an auditor consent or EX-99.(S) for a power of attorney), <SEQUENCE> (the integer sequence number within the submission, mirroring documentFormatFiles[].sequence), <FILENAME> (the on-disk filename, mirroring the URL leaf in documentFormatFiles[].documentUrl), and <DESCRIPTION> — followed by <TEXT>, the embedded <HTML> body, and the closing tags. The header tags inside each exhibit file therefore line up one-to-one with the corresponding documentFormatFiles entry, which makes it straightforward to enumerate, classify, and extract exhibits programmatically. Common exhibit types observed for POS 8C filings include legal opinions of counsel, consents of independent registered public accounting firms, powers of attorney, subscription agreements, and prospectus supplements.
The amended N-2 carried by a POS 8C follows the disclosure architecture of Form N-2. A typical document moves, in order, through:
Modern POS 8C primary documents are Inline-XBRL HTML files that embed structured tags directly in the prospectus markup. The xmlns:ix, xmlns:xbrli, and xmlns:cef namespace declarations on the root element signal that the document carries facts conforming to the SEC's closed-end fund (cef) reporting taxonomy, which the Commission introduced specifically to capture standardized data points for closed-end funds and BDCs (fee-table line items, returns, senior securities, capital structure, share-price data). When XBRL is present, the same facts are also available through the EDGAR-extracted _htm.xml instance plus the schema and linkbase files referenced in metadata.json.dataFiles. When the filing predates the relevant XBRL mandate or is not in scope (for example because it does not include the data points subject to tagging), linkToXbrl is empty, dataFiles is empty, and only the HTML primary document is present.
For every accession number, the record includes: the metadata.json manifest; the primary POS 8C document; every exhibit attached to the submission; any prospectus supplement filed in the same submission; and any non-image data files referenced by the submission (XBRL schema, linkbases, extracted instance, ancillary .txt or .pdf attachments). For modern filings this typically means a small handful of HTML documents alongside metadata.json.
metadata.json.documentFormatFiles for traceability..txt. The full SGML stream that EDGAR stores as the canonical complete submission is referenced through linkToTxt rather than materialized inside the record, since its content is already redundantly present across the individual document files.The substantive disclosure framework of POS 8C is inherited from Form N-2, and its content has evolved with the SEC's broader updates to closed-end fund disclosure. Two regulatory shifts are particularly visible across records.
First, the 2020 modernization of closed-end fund and BDC offering rules and Form N-2 reorganized prospectus content, formalized the use of a summary prospectus, refined fee-table presentation, expanded financial highlights and senior-securities tables, and introduced a structured set of data points (fee-table elements, share-price information, capital structure, senior-securities history, returns) required to be reported in Inline XBRL using the closed-end fund taxonomy. Records filed after the relevant compliance dates therefore carry a richer, more standardized body of tagged data than older records.
Second, exhibit numbering and consents practice tracked changes to the Form N-2 instructions, which is why EX-99.(N) (auditor consent) and EX-99.(S) (power of attorney) appear consistently in modern records, while older submissions may use slightly different exhibit code formats reflecting earlier instructions.
The dataset spans EDGAR submissions from September 1996 onward, and the file-format presentation of POS 8C records evolved with EDGAR itself. Earlier filings were submitted as plain ASCII inside the SGML envelope, with the entire submission expressible as one concatenated .txt and individual exhibits represented as <DOCUMENT> blocks containing <TEXT> runs of monospaced text. As EDGAR began accepting HTML in the late 1990s and through the 2000s, the primary document and exhibits transitioned to HTML, while retaining the SGML wrapper around exhibit blocks. From the 2020s onward, in line with the closed-end fund Inline XBRL mandate, the primary document became an Inline-XBRL HTML file that embeds machine-readable facts directly in the rendered prospectus, and the corresponding XBRL schema, linkbases, and extracted instance became part of the submission's data-file inventory.
Several nuances matter when reading or extracting from these records.
entities array routinely contains two rows for the same CIK on a single POS 8C — one with act: 33 and a 333-prefixed fileNo, one with act: 40 and an 811-prefixed fileNo. This duplication is meaningful: it is how the joint Securities Act / Investment Company Act registration is represented in the EDGAR header and should not be deduplicated naively.documentFormatFiles mirror the <SEQUENCE> headers inside the SGML-wrapped exhibit files, providing a reliable join key between the manifest and on-disk content. The trailing complete-submission text entry uses a single-space sequence.ix: tags and the closed-end fund taxonomy concepts they reference. The extracted instance and linkbases listed in dataFiles are the canonical entry point for the structured layer.<DOCUMENT>, <TYPE>, <SEQUENCE>, <FILENAME>, <DESCRIPTION>, <TEXT>) when ingesting exhibit files, and should strip them before passing the inner <HTML> body to a strict HTML parser.documentFormatFiles enumerates graphics that are not materialized on disk, code that reconstructs a filing from the manifest should expect dangling image references and treat the absence of the underlying bytes as expected behavior rather than corruption.Form POS 8C is filed by the registrant itself: a closed-end investment vehicle whose Securities Act registration statement on Form N-2 has already been declared effective. The legal filer is the trust, corporation, partnership, or LLC identified on EDGAR by its own CIK. Investment advisers, sub-advisers, sponsors, distributors, and underwriters do not file POS 8C in their own name, even when they prepare or coordinate the submission.
Three registrant categories make up essentially the entire filing population:
Operating companies, foreign private issuers, open-end mutual funds, and most ETFs do not use POS 8C. Operating companies and foreign private issuers amend Securities Act registration statements through POS AM (on Form S-1/F-1 or S-3/F-3); open-end mutual funds and most ETFs use the Rule 485 regime and file as 485APOS or 485BPOS.
POS 8C is event-driven, not periodic in the calendar sense. A registrant files whenever an effective N-2 must be updated, corrected, or augmented after effectiveness. Common triggers:
POS 8C has no single fixed deadline. Its timing is governed by Securities Act rules, Item 34 undertakings in the N-2, and the offering calendar:
Form POS 8C occupies a narrow slot: post-effective amendments to closed-end investment company registration statements, filed under Section 8(c) of the Securities Act of 1933. The most useful comparisons sit in three rings around it — the closed-end fund's own registration lifecycle, the parallel post-effective regimes used by other registrant types, and ongoing investment-company disclosures with overlapping content.
Form N-2 (initial closed-end registration statement). N-2 is the underlying statement that POS 8C amends. It establishes the registration; POS 8C maintains it. To reconstruct the operative prospectus on a given date, both the original N-2 and every subsequent POS 8C are usually required. POS 8C captures shelf takedowns, refreshed financials, revised fee tables, new risk factors, and exhibit replacements that occur after effectiveness.
Form N-2/A (pre-effective amendment to N-2). The pre-effective sibling. N-2/A amends an N-2 before SEC effectiveness, typically in response to staff comments. POS 8C amends after effectiveness, once the offering is live. Document content can look similar (redlined prospectus, updated fee tables, refreshed exhibits), but N-2/A reflects staff negotiation while POS 8C reflects ongoing maintenance, market events, or new takedowns.
Forms 485APOS and 485BPOS (Rule 485 post-effective amendments). The structural analogue for open-end funds and unit investment trusts under Rule 485. 485APOS becomes effective on a delayed basis (60 or 75 days) when changes warrant staff review; 485BPOS becomes effective immediately for routine annual updates. POS 8C performs the same maintenance role but is restricted to closed-end funds, which sit outside Rule 485. Filer populations do not overlap: 485 filings are dominated by mutual funds and ETFs; POS 8C by closed-end funds, interval funds, tender offer funds, and BDCs.
Form POS AM (general post-effective amendment). The catch-all post-effective amendment for operating companies updating S-1, S-3, S-11, and similar registrations. Mechanically identical to POS 8C — amend after effectiveness — but the disclosure content differs entirely: POS AM carries operating-company items (MD&A, business description, executive compensation), while POS 8C carries investment-company items (investment objective, advisory fees, portfolio strategy, 1940 Act compliance). No registrant overlap with closed-end funds.
Form POSASR (post-effective amendment to automatic shelf registration). Filed by well-known seasoned issuers to amend S-3ASR or F-3ASR statements, effective immediately under Rule 462(e). Both POSASR and POS 8C avoid staff-review delay, but POSASR is a creature of Rule 415 / 462(e) automatic-shelf mechanics for WKSIs, while POS 8C operates under Section 8(c) for closed-end funds. No registrant overlap.
Form POS EX (exhibit-only post-effective amendment). Used solely to file or refile exhibits without touching the prospectus body. A closed-end fund adding a legal opinion or consent without disclosure changes might file POS EX instead of POS 8C. POS EX is exhibit-only; POS 8C is mixed prospectus and exhibit content.
Form 497 (definitive prospectus and supplements). 497 filings (including 497AD for advertising-as-prospectus and 497K summary prospectuses) deliver the definitive prospectus or sticker authorized by an existing effective registration. POS 8C, by contrast, amends the registration statement itself. A 497 sticker can update disclosure quickly without amending the registration; a POS 8C changes the registration document of record. Tracking a closed-end fund's operative documents typically requires both: POS 8C for substantive registration changes, 497 for the definitive prospectuses and supplements that follow.
Forms N-CSR and N-CSRS (certified shareholder reports). Annual and semi-annual periodic reports under the Investment Company Act of 1940, containing certified financial statements, schedules of investments, and MD&A. Content overlap with POS 8C is limited to financials and portfolio data. The regimes differ: Form N-CSR/Form N-CSRS are calendar-driven 1940 Act reports; POS 8C is event-driven 1933 Act registration maintenance. Use N-CSR for holdings and financials; use POS 8C for prospectus-level disclosure changes, fee structure changes, and offering exhibits.
POS 8C is the only form that combines all four attributes: post-effective, registration-statement-level, closed-end investment company, Section 8(c). Open-end equivalents live in 485APOS/485BPOS; operating-company equivalents in POS AM and POSASR; pre-effective closed-end activity in N-2/A; definitive-prospectus and sticker activity in 497; periodic closed-end reporting in N-CSR/N-CSRS; exhibit-only refilings in POS EX. The dataset is the right source whenever the question concerns how a closed-end fund's effective registration statement evolves over time, and it is not interchangeable with any of the surrounding prospectus, periodic-report, or operating-company amendment datasets.
POS 8C amendments carry an updated Form N-2 registration statement, a refreshed fee table, revised investment policies, and a defined exhibit set. The professionals below each pull a different slice of that record.
In-house counsel at closed-end fund, BDC, and interval fund sponsors, plus outside 1940 Act counsel, draft these amendments and benchmark peers. They diff successive filings for the same registrant to track refreshes to the cover page, fee table (Item 3 of N-2), risk factors, plan of distribution, and undertakings, and read exhibits — legality opinion (l), tax opinion, accountant consent (n), subscription agreements, and dealer manager or distribution agreements — to compare drafting conventions on Rule 415 continuous offerings, leverage and senior securities, distribution policies, and tender or repurchase mechanics.
Administrators and CCOs at closed-end fund and BDC sponsors use cik, entities[], filedAt, accessionNo, and periodOfReport to reconcile internal filing calendars against EDGAR and confirm that every series and class identifier is attached for master-feeder structures. They also pull peer POS 8Cs to compare fee table line items (management, incentive, AFFE, interest on borrowings, expense caps), repurchase offer disclosure, and leverage language; output is a controls checklist feeding their own prospectus refreshes.
Reviewers consult the chronology of filedAt timestamps and successive amendment text to verify that disclosure evolves in line with prior comment letters and Section 8(c) and Form N-2 requirements, particularly on principal risks, level 3 valuation, distribution sources including return of capital, and BDC incentive fee mechanics. (SEC Division of Investment Management.)
Buy-side and sell-side analysts covering listed CEFs, non-listed BDCs, and interval and tender-offer funds extract management fee, incentive fee structure (hurdle, catch-up, look-back), expense cap, leverage limits, and distribution policy from the amended prospectus to model managed distribution sustainability. They diff filings to flag fee changes, offering expansion, new share classes, and modified repurchase programs — inputs to ratings, recommendations, and screens.
Due diligence teams at wirehouses, independent broker-dealers, RIA aggregators, and bank trust platforms maintain approved-product lists for interval funds and non-listed BDCs. They focus on the cover page, share class menu with sales loads and 12b-1 components, repurchase schedule, suitability and investor-qualification language, and the dealer manager relationship in the plan of distribution. A queue keyed on filedAt triggers redline review against the prior effective prospectus and updates internal product profiles and shelf availability.
Fund-of-funds, family offices, insurance allocators, and outsourced CIO teams investing in non-listed BDCs and credit-oriented interval funds track leverage policy revisions (asset coverage elections, credit facility capacity, preferred share authority), incentive fee waterfall changes, and offering size increases. The fee table, senior securities table, borrowings description, and amended subscription or distribution exhibits drive risk monitoring and rebalancing on private credit sleeves.
Data engineering teams at financial data vendors, fintech platforms, robo-advisor backends, and prospectus aggregators ingest the dataset programmatically. They drive ETL from cik, entities[], accessionNo, and filedAt into normalized fund-reference databases, parse the primary HTML for fee tables, share class tables, repurchase schedules, and effective dates, and index exhibits for legal-text retrieval.
Engineers building financial document assistants ground retrieval systems on CEF and BDC prospectus content. Stable accession-level identifiers and consistent HTML, TXT, and PDF formats support chunking, embedding, and evaluation pipelines, and the chronology from 1996 onward provides training and evaluation depth on amendment language.
Researchers study closed-end fund discounts, fee dispersion, continuous-offering design, repurchase program prevalence in interval funds, and post-effective amendment dynamics. They use filedAt, entities[], parsed fee tables, and risk sections for panel studies; the accountant consent exhibit also marks audit firm relationships across vintages.
The dataset's combination of metadata.json, the amended N-2 primary document, and SGML-wrapped exhibits supports a small set of concrete workflows.
Tracking fee-table evolution across amendments. Pull the Inline-XBRL cef:-tagged fee-table facts from the primary POS 8C document (or the extracted _htm.xml instance referenced in dataFiles) for each accession of the same cik, ordered by filedAt. The result is a per-fund time series of management fee, incentive fee, AFFE, interest on borrowings, and expense-cap line items that feeds CEF and BDC fee-trend screens and managed-distribution sustainability models.
Building a peer-comparable risk-factor and leverage-language corpus. Group records by entities[].cik and registrant type (interval fund, tender-offer fund, listed CEF, non-listed BDC), then extract the prospectus risk-factor section and senior-securities/leverage discussion from the primary document. The resulting corpus drives drafting benchmarks for outside 1940 Act counsel and redline reviews by wealth-platform gatekeepers against a fund's prior effective prospectus.
Auditor-relationship and counsel mapping from exhibits. Enumerate documentFormatFiles for each accession, isolate EX-99.(N) (auditor consent) and the legality/tax opinion exhibits, and parse the signature block and firm name from the SGML-wrapped HTML. Joining on cik and filedAt yields a longitudinal map of audit-firm changes, opinion counsel relationships, and consent-refresh cadence across the closed-end fund universe.
Reconciling dual-Act registration footprints. Use the two-row pattern in entities[] (act: 33 with a 333- file number and act: 40 with an 811- file number sharing one CIK) to build a registrant table that links each Securities Act registration file to its Investment Company Act file. Fund administrators and CCOs use this to reconcile internal filing calendars and to confirm series/class coverage via seriesAndClassesContractsInformation for master-feeder and multi-series trusts.
Detecting shelf takedowns and offering-size increases. Filter the corpus on the explanatory note and cover-page language of the primary document for additional-shares-registered or carry-forward statements, and cross-check the plan-of-distribution and dealer-manager exhibit set. The output is an event feed of continuous-offering takedowns and capacity increases that private credit and BDC allocators use for risk monitoring and rebalancing.
Grounding RAG systems on closed-end fund prospectus content. Use the stable accessionNo and per-file sequence join keys between metadata.json and the on-disk HTML to chunk the primary document by Form N-2 item (cover, fee table, investment objective, risks, plan of distribution, undertakings) and to index exhibits separately. Embeddings keyed to accession and item produce a retrieval surface that answers fund-level prospectus questions without conflating POS 8C registration changes with 497 stickers or N-CSR financials.
The Form POS 8C Files Dataset is available through three access methods: a JSON index API for programmatic discovery, a full archive download, and per-month container downloads.
Dataset Index JSON API: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-pos-8c-files.json
Returns dataset-level metadata (name, description, earliest sample date of 1996-09-01, last update timestamp, total records and size, form types, container format, and file types) along with the list of all monthly container files. Each container entry includes its download URL, key, size, record count, and last-updated timestamp. Use this endpoint to monitor which containers were refreshed in the latest run and decide which monthly partitions to re-download. This endpoint does not require an API key.
Example response:
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{
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"datasetId": "1f13365b-9ae0-6984-88fb-f3db364c265c",
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"datasetDownloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-pos-8c-files.zip",
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"name": "Form POS 8C Files Dataset",
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"updatedAt": "2026-04-15T11:50:30.363Z",
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"earliestSampleDate": "1996-09-01",
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"totalRecords": 8409,
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"totalSize": 547278110,
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"formTypes": ["POS 8C"],
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"containerFormat": "ZIP",
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"fileTypes": ["HTML", "TXT", "JSON", "PDF"],
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"containers": [
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{
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"downloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-pos-8c-files/2026/2026-03.zip",
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"key": "2026/2026-03.zip",
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"size": 13818783,
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"records": 154,
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"updatedAt": "2026-04-15T11:50:30.363Z"
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}
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]
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}
Download Entire Dataset: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-pos-8c-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads the complete dataset as a single ZIP archive covering all Form POS 8C filings from September 1996 to present. This endpoint requires authentication via your SEC API key passed as the token query parameter.
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curl -O "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-pos-8c-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY"
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wget "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-pos-8c-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY"
Download Single Container: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-pos-8c-files/2026/2026-03.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads a single monthly container instead of the full dataset. Containers are partitioned by YYYY/YYYY-MM.zip. This endpoint requires authentication via your SEC API key.
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curl -O "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-pos-8c-files/2026/2026-03.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY"
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wget "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-pos-8c-files/2026/2026-03.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY"
Inside each monthly container, files are organized as one folder per filing accession number. Every accession folder contains a metadata.json file describing the filing along with the original EDGAR submission documents (HTML, TXT, PDF) — including the primary amendment document, prospectus supplements, and exhibits. Image files are excluded.
The dataset covers Form POS 8C, a post-effective amendment to a registration statement filed by a closed-end investment company under Section 8(c) of the Securities Act of 1933. The amended registration statement is almost always a Form N-2, used by closed-end funds and business development companies to register the offer and sale of their shares.
One record is a single complete EDGAR submission of a Form POS 8C filing, identified by its EDGAR accession number and stored as a per-accession folder. The folder contains a metadata.json manifest, the primary amended N-2 document, every exhibit attached to the submission, any prospectus supplements bundled into the same submission, and any non-image data files (XBRL schema, linkbases, extracted instance, ancillary .txt or .pdf).
The legal filer is the registrant itself: a listed (exchange-traded) closed-end fund, a business development company (BDC), or an interval or tender-offer fund whose Form N-2 has already been declared effective. Investment advisers, sub-advisers, sponsors, distributors, and underwriters never file in their own name, even when they prepare the submission. Operating companies, foreign private issuers, open-end mutual funds, and most ETFs do not use POS 8C.
The dataset begins on 1996-09-01, which corresponds to EDGAR's mandatory electronic filing for investment companies, and continues through the present with new monthly containers as filings are made. Although Section 8(c) post-effective amendments existed in paper form since 1933, the electronic record begins in September 1996.
The dataset is distributed as monthly ZIP containers partitioned by filing date (<YYYY>/<YYYY-MM>.zip). Inside each container, files are HTML, JSON, TXT, and PDF; embedded image files (JPG, PNG, GIF) are deliberately excluded but remain enumerated in metadata.json.documentFormatFiles for traceability.
POS 8C and the 485 series both perform post-effective amendment maintenance, but for different filer populations and under different statutory regimes. 485APOS and 485BPOS apply to open-end funds and unit investment trusts under Rule 485 (delayed effectiveness for material changes, immediate effectiveness for routine annual updates). POS 8C applies to closed-end funds, interval funds, tender-offer funds, and BDCs under Section 8(c) of the Securities Act, which sit outside Rule 485. Filer populations do not overlap.
POS 8C amends the registration statement itself, while Form 497 (including 497AD and 497K) delivers the definitive prospectus or a sticker authorized by an already-effective registration. A 497 filing can update disclosure quickly without amending the registration document of record; a POS 8C changes the registration document of record. Tracking a closed-end fund's operative documents typically requires both — POS 8C for substantive registration changes, 497 for the definitive prospectuses and supplements that follow.