The Form POS AM Files Dataset is a complete corpus of post-effective amendments to Securities Act registration statements filed on EDGAR under the form type [POS AM](https://www.sec.gov/info/edgar/forms/edgform.pdf). Each record is one EDGAR submission — a directory named with the 18-digit accession number that contains a metadata.json submission descriptor plus the amended registration statement and its textual exhibits as HTML documents. Filings are made by operating-company Securities Act registrants (issuers with effective S-1, S-3, S-4, S-8, S-11, F-1, F-3, or F-4 statements) to revise prospectus disclosures, refresh audited financials, change offering terms, add or remove selling stockholders, deregister unsold securities, or convert a registration to a different form type. The dataset spans from January 1994 — the start of mandatory EDGAR electronic filing for Securities Act registrants — through the present, and is distributed as monthly ZIP containers grouped under year folders.
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The dataset captures every Form POS AM submission accepted by EDGAR from January 1994 forward. Form POS AM is a post-effective amendment to a registration statement filed under the Securities Act of 1933 that does not become effective immediately upon filing and must instead be declared effective by the SEC under Rule 462(a), or be allowed to take effect under Rule 462(d) for narrowly scoped amendments. It is used to amend a registration statement already declared effective — most commonly an S-1, S-3, S-4, S-8, S-11, F-1, F-3, or F-4 — to revise prospectus disclosures, refresh audited financial statements, alter offering terms, add or remove selling securityholders, register additional securities, deregister unsold securities, or convert the surviving registration to a different form type.
Because the amendment is "post-effective," it carries the file number of the prior effective registration statement (for example 333-284137); that file number is the key cross-reference linking the amendment back to the parent prospectus it modifies. A single POS AM may amend more than one previously effective statement and may therefore carry multiple SEC file numbers on its cover.
For each accession number the dataset includes a metadata.json submission descriptor plus every textual document in the original EDGAR submission — the amended registration statement, the updated prospectus, and any attached textual exhibits. Image graphics are not extracted. The dataset is distributed as monthly ZIP containers; the file types catalogued across the historical span are TXT, JSON, HTML, PDF, and FRM, though in practice the on-disk content of a modern record consists of the JSON manifest and HTML documents while the other formats appear in the manifest rather than the extraction.
A single record in the Form POS AM Files Dataset is one complete Form POS AM submission to EDGAR, identified by its 18-digit accession number. On disk the record materializes as one directory whose name is the un-dashed accession number (for example 000149315225018867), grouped inside monthly ZIP containers organized under year folders. Each accession directory contains exactly one metadata.json describing the EDGAR submission together with one or more HTML documents constituting the amended registration statement and its textual exhibits. The accession folder is the atomic unit of the dataset: it pairs the canonical EDGAR submission descriptor with the textual payload that was filed under that accession.
The legal content of a POS AM is built from the same Regulation S-K and Regulation S-X building blocks as the underlying parent form. A POS AM typically contains an amendment-marked prospectus cover, an explanatory note describing the scope of the amendment, registrant identification (CIK, IRS EIN, state of incorporation, principal executive offices, SIC), the amended prospectus body (risk factors, use of proceeds, capitalization, dilution, plan of distribution, selling stockholder tables, description of securities, legal matters, experts, and financial statements as amended), Part II information not required in the prospectus (other expenses of issuance and distribution, indemnification of directors and officers, recent sales of unregistered securities, the exhibit index, and undertakings), the signature page, and the exhibits themselves. The most common exhibits on POS AM filings are EX-23 consents of independent registered public accounting firms, EX-5 legal opinions on the validity of the securities, EX-99 supplementary materials, and EX-107 filing-fee tables introduced by the SEC's filing-fee modernization rules.
A record decomposes into three structural layers:
0001493152-25-018867) is carried inside metadata.json as accessionNo.metadata.json — the EDGAR submission descriptor, always exactly one per folder. It carries filing-level facts (form type, filing timestamp, SEC URLs), the full document inventory of the original EDGAR submission, the XBRL data-file inventory, and one or more registrant entity records..htm files representing the POS AM body and its textual exhibits. The primary POS AM document may be either an inline-XBRL XHTML file or an SGML-wrapped HTML payload; exhibits are almost always SGML-wrapped HTML.The dataset preserves the EDGAR submission shape: every textual document the registrant filed is present on disk, and every non-textual document is catalogued inside metadata.json even when its binary payload is not extracted.
metadata.json field-by-fieldThe top-level keys of metadata.json are:
formType — always the literal "POS AM".accessionNo — dashed accession number, e.g., "0001493152-25-018867". The enclosing folder name is the un-dashed equivalent.description — fixed string "Form POS AM - Post-Effective amendments for registration statement".filedAt — ISO-8601 timestamp with EDGAR's Eastern Time offset (-04:00 in daylight time, -05:00 in standard time).linkToFilingDetails — direct URL on sec.gov to the primary POS AM HTML document, sometimes routed through the inline-XBRL viewer (/ix?doc=/Archives/...).linkToTxt — URL to the complete-submission SGML .txt bundle on EDGAR.linkToHtml — URL to the EDGAR *-index.htm page for the filing.linkToXbrl — URL to the XBRL viewer for the filing; empty string when no XBRL is attached.id — a 32-character hex identifier internal to the dataset.documentFormatFiles — array enumerating every primary document in the EDGAR submission. Each entry carries sequence (string-typed integer, with the trailing complete-submission .txt entry encoded as a single-space " "), size (string-typed byte count), documentUrl (absolute SEC URL), description (free-text label such as "POS AM", "EX-23.1", "GRAPHIC", "AMENDMENT NO. 1", "Complete submission text file"), and type (EDGAR document type such as "POS AM", "[EX-5.1](https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-17/chapter-II/part-229/subpart-229.600/section-229.601)", "[EX-23.1](https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-17/chapter-II/part-229/subpart-229.600/section-229.601)", "[EX-99.1](https://www.sec.gov/submit-filings/filer-support-resources/how-do-i-guides/understand-automated-conformance-rules-edgar-data-fields)", "EX-107", "GRAPHIC", or " " for the SGML complete-submission bundle).dataFiles — array, frequently empty, with the same item shape, used for XBRL artifacts: [EX-101.SCH](https://www.sec.gov/submit-filings/technical-specifications) (schema), [EX-101.CAL](https://www.sec.gov/submit-filings/technical-specifications) (calculation linkbase), [EX-101.DEF](https://www.sec.gov/submit-filings/technical-specifications) (definition linkbase), [EX-101.LAB](https://www.sec.gov/submit-filings/technical-specifications) (label linkbase), [EX-101.PRE](https://www.sec.gov/submit-filings/technical-specifications) (presentation linkbase), and any standalone XBRL instance documents.entities — array of one or more filer/registrant records. Each entry carries companyName (typically suffixed " (Filer)"), cik (numeric, string-typed, no leading zeros), fileNo (the SEC file number being amended — the bridge back to the original effective registration, e.g., "333-284137"), irsNo (IRS Employer ID Number, "000000000" when unavailable), type mirroring formType, sic (code plus textual label, e.g., "3823 Industrial Instruments For Measurement, Display, and Control"), act (the securities act number, "33" for the Securities Act of 1933 — invariant for POS AM), fiscalYearEnd (an MMDD string), stateOfIncorporation (EDGAR two-character code such as "DE", "E9", "U0"), filmNo (the SEC-assigned film number), and tickers (array of ticker symbols, possibly empty).seriesAndClassesContractsInformation — array reserved for investment-company series/class disclosures; effectively always empty on POS AM records because POS AM is an operating-company instrument rather than an investment-company instrument.The entities block is the structured surrogate for the filing's cover-page identification. When a POS AM is jointly filed by a parent registrant and one or more co-registrant guarantors, each appears as its own entity record with its own CIK, file number, IRS EIN, SIC, and state of incorporation; the principal registrant is conventionally the first entry.
Each accession folder ships the textual portion of the EDGAR submission as a set of .htm files. Two structural variants are observed.
Variant A — SGML <DOCUMENT> wrapper. This is the form used by most exhibits and by many primary POS AM documents. The file opens with an EDGAR document header — <DOCUMENT>, <TYPE>, <SEQUENCE>, <FILENAME>, <DESCRIPTION>, <TEXT> — and then embeds the actual HTML payload (<HTML><HEAD>...</HEAD><BODY>...</BODY></HTML>). The header values are the per-document slice of the EDGAR submission envelope and mirror the matching entry in metadata.json → documentFormatFiles exactly: <TYPE> equals the entry's type, <FILENAME> equals the file name on disk, <SEQUENCE> equals the entry's sequence.
Variant B — Inline-XBRL XHTML. When the primary POS AM carries financial or cover-page tagging, the document is XHTML with an XML prolog, namespace declarations for xmlns:ix="http://www.xbrl.org/2013/inlineXBRL", xmlns:dei, xmlns:us-gaap, and an entity-specific extension namespace, and an <ix:header> containing an <ix:hidden> block that carries DEI tags such as dei:AmendmentFlag, dei:EntityCentralIndexKey, dei:DocumentType (value "POS AM"), dei:DocumentPeriodEnd, and registrant-identity facts. The visible body that follows is the human-readable amendment: the cover page (registration numbers, registrant identity, IRS EIN, state of incorporation, address, SIC, and the large-accelerated/non-accelerated/smaller-reporting-company/emerging-growth-company status boxes), the explanatory note describing what is being amended, the amended prospectus body (risk factors, use of proceeds, capitalization, dilution, selling stockholders, plan of distribution, description of securities, legal matters, experts, and financial statements as amended), Part II non-prospectus items including the exhibit index and undertakings, the signature page with the principal executive officer, the principal financial officer, and a majority of the directors, and — when applicable — powers of attorney.
Exhibits typically observed inside POS AM accession folders include EX-5.x legal opinions on the legality of the securities being registered; EX-23.x consents of independent registered public accounting firms (frequently the single most common exhibit, because the principal purpose of many post-effective amendments is to refresh consents covering newly issued audit reports); EX-99.x supplementary materials such as press releases or financial statement exhibits incorporated by reference; and EX-107 filing-fee tables.
File-name conventions for the .htm files are filer-agent-specific rather than SEC-prescribed. Common patterns include formposam.htm and ex23-1.htm style names; d<id>dposam.htm patterns; tm<id>d<n>_posam.htm and tm<id>d<n>_ex23-1.htm patterns; ef<id>_posam.htm patterns; and ea<id>-posam<n>_<slug>.htm patterns. Consumers should rely on metadata.json → documentFormatFiles[].type and [].description to identify each document by role rather than parsing file names.
Each record physically includes:
metadata.json carrying the full EDGAR submission descriptor;The metadata layer additionally catalogues — but does not extract — every other document in the EDGAR submission. The documentFormatFiles and dataFiles arrays therefore function as a complete manifest of the EDGAR submission even when the binary or XML payloads are not stored on disk.
Image graphics referenced inside the prospectus (logos, signatures, charts in .jpg or .png format) are not extracted; the prospectus HTML retains its <img> references but the bitmap files themselves are not in the ZIP. The SGML complete-submission .txt bundle that EDGAR generates as the canonical machine-readable wrapper for the entire filing is omitted (its URL is preserved in metadata.json → linkToTxt). XBRL data files — the .xsd schema, the calculation/definition/label/presentation linkbases, and any standalone XBRL instance documents — are catalogued under dataFiles but not extracted. Any PDFs or .frm files referenced by documentFormatFiles are likewise listed but not present on disk.
POS AM has been a stable Securities Act form since the inception of EDGAR, so the form's basic role — amending an already-effective registration statement under Securities Act Rules 462(a)/(d) — has not changed. What has changed, and what is reflected in record content over the historical span, is the body of Regulation S-K and Regulation S-X disclosures the amended prospectus must carry:
documentFormatFiles entry of type = "EX-107" is a reliable marker of post-modernization filings.The cover-page and signature-block conventions for POS AM have been stable across decades; the principal evolution is the growth of cross-referenced disclosure surfaces and the migration of fee disclosure into a dedicated exhibit.
EDGAR POS AM filings from 1994 through roughly 2001–2002 were submitted predominantly as ASCII text inside the SGML complete-submission bundle, frequently with no HTML rendering at all; for records of that vintage the on-disk document set is sparse and the substantive text lives inside the (non-extracted) .txt SGML envelope referenced by linkToTxt. HTML adoption became the norm during the early 2000s, after which the primary POS AM document is delivered as SGML-wrapped HTML (Variant A). Inline-XBRL adoption for registration-statement DEI tags began phasing in for operating companies around 2019–2021, after which the primary POS AM is increasingly delivered as inline-XBRL XHTML (Variant B) — recognizable by the XML prolog, the xmlns:ix declaration, and the <ix:header> block at the top of the document. EX-107 filing-fee table exhibits appear only from 2022 onward, reflecting the SEC's fee-modernization rulemaking. The metadata.json descriptor itself is consistent in shape across the historical span; older records simply carry shorter documentFormatFiles arrays, empty dataFiles arrays, and an empty linkToXbrl.
000149315225018867); metadata.json → accessionNo carries the dashed form (0001493152-25-018867). Either form is a stable record key, but joins against accession-keyed datasets must reconcile the punctuation.entities[].fileNo is the bridge from a POS AM back to the original effective registration statement (the S-1/S-3/S-4/S-8/F-x). When a POS AM amends multiple parent statements, multiple file numbers appear on the HTML cover; the structured entities block typically carries the principal file number, while any additional file numbers usually appear only in the cover text.entities[] record with its own CIK, IRS EIN, SIC, and state of incorporation. The first entity is generally the principal registrant; the rest are co-registrants and need not share state of incorporation, SIC, or fiscal year-end with the principal.<ix:header> and inline <ix:nonNumeric> / <ix:nonFraction> elements are not visible text but carry the DEI cover-page facts; stripping inline-XBRL markup yields a clean human-readable prospectus body, while preserving it allows the cover facts to be lifted as structured data.<!DOCTYPE html> or <html> at the start must first skip the EDGAR <DOCUMENT>/<TYPE>/<SEQUENCE>/<FILENAME>/<DESCRIPTION>/<TEXT> header before reaching the embedded <HTML> payload..htm files in the accession folder; the rest are pointers to prior filings.<img> references; the URLs in metadata.json → documentFormatFiles entries with type = "GRAPHIC" allow consumers to fetch the missing assets directly from EDGAR.documentFormatFiles[].type, documentFormatFiles[].description) plus the embedded SGML <TYPE> header on Variant A files. File names are filer-agent-specific and should not be relied on as a structured signal.entities[].act is consistently "33" for POS AM records, reflecting the form's Securities Act of 1933 lineage; this field is not a useful discriminator within the dataset but is a useful sanity check when filtering mixed-form corpora.The filer is the Securities Act registrant — the issuer named on the cover of the registration statement — whose registration statement has already been declared effective and now requires substantive amendment that cannot be made immediately effective. POS AM is a Securities Act of 1933 filing, not an Exchange Act periodic report.
The filing population includes:
The registrant signs and files the POS AM; selling stockholders described in the prospectus are not filers. Investment Company Act investment companies file their post-effective amendments under Rule 485 on form types 485APOS or 485BPOS and are excluded from this dataset.
A POS AM is event-driven, not periodic. It is filed when an amendment to an effective registration statement is required and is not eligible for an immediately effective alternative under Rule 462. Typical triggers:
A POS AM does not become effective upon filing. It remains pending until the Commission declares it effective, and the registrant generally cannot use the amended prospectus for affected offers and sales during that pendency. This is the operational line between POS AM and the Rule 462 family, which becomes effective immediately on filing.
Principal sources of authority:
The POS AM is signed by the registrant and the persons required to sign the underlying registration statement (typically the principal executive officer, principal financial officer, principal accounting officer, and a majority of the board), and Sections 11 and 12 liability attach to the amendment as to the original registration statement.
There is no periodic deadline. Practical cadences:
Post-effective amendments have existed since the Securities Act of 1933, but pre-EDGAR filings were submitted on paper and are not in this dataset. Mandatory electronic filing for Securities Act registrants was phased in between 1993 and mid-1996. The earliest POS AM filings here begin in January 1994, consistent with that phase-in, and the dataset includes all POS AM submissions from that point forward.
Form POS AM sits inside a dense cluster of Securities Act registration filings that all update, supplement, or amend a registration statement. The forms below are its closest neighbors. Each differs from POS AM along three axes: lifecycle stage (pre- vs. post-effective), effectiveness mechanism (immediate vs. requiring SEC action), and content scope (full registration vs. prospectus-only vs. exhibit-only vs. share-capacity-only).
S-1/A, S-3/A, S-4/A, S-11/A and F-1/A, F-3/A, F-4/A (pre-effective amendments). These amend a registration statement that has not yet been declared effective, typically to address staff comments, refresh financials, or expand disclosure so the registration can go effective. They share structural elements with POS AM (marked-up registration, revised exhibits, updated financials) but operate on the opposite side of the effectiveness line. POS AM is filed only after the registration has already been declared effective. A single offering may produce several "/A" amendments before effectiveness and one or more POS AM filings months or years later as the offering remains live. Foreign private issuers use the same POS AM form for post-effective amendments to F-series registrations, so this dataset covers both domestic and foreign issuers.
424B1 through 424B8 (prospectus supplements under Rule 424). 424B filings supplement an already-effective prospectus with pricing, plan-of-distribution updates, Rule 430A/430B information, or shelf take-down terms without re-opening the registration statement. They are the most common filing users mistake for POS AM. Key distinctions: a 424B is prospectus-only, requires no SEC action, and is the routine vehicle for shelf take-downs; POS AM amends the registration statement itself, can include revised Part II information and exhibits, and is reserved for substantive changes that exceed what a supplement can carry (fundamental changes, Item 512(a) undertakings, conversions between form types, deregistration of unsold securities).
POS EX (post-effective amendment to add exhibits, under Rule 462(d)). A narrow cousin of POS AM that becomes effective immediately upon filing and is permitted only when the sole change is the addition of exhibits (commonly legal or tax opinions, underwriting agreements). POS AM is the default post-effective amendment whenever the change goes beyond exhibit additions or affects disclosure, financials, or offering terms.
POS 462B (Rule 462(b) post-effective amendment). Used to register additional securities of the same class, up to 20 percent of the maximum aggregate offering price of an effective registration. It becomes effective immediately upon filing. POS AM does not register new securities; it amends disclosure or terms of the existing registration and is generally not immediately effective. The two are sometimes filed in sequence for a single offering.
POS 462C (Rule 462(c) post-effective amendment). A specialized immediately-effective post-effective amendment used in conjunction with a Rule 462(b) abbreviated registration, typically to incorporate the contents of the Rule 462(b) filing into the base registration. Procedurally narrower than POS AM and immediate in effect, whereas POS AM is the general-purpose, not-immediately-effective amendment.
S-1MEF and S-3MEF (Rule 462(b) abbreviated registrations). New, immediately-effective registration statements that register up to 20 percent more shares of the same class as an existing registration, incorporating the original by reference. They overlap functionally with POS 462B but are technically new registration statements rather than amendments. POS AM differs from both in that it neither registers new securities nor takes effect on filing.
485APOS and 485BPOS (post-effective amendments for registered investment companies under Rule 485). The registered-fund analog of POS AM, filed by open-end funds, UITs, and similar Investment Company Act registrants to update Form N-1A, Form N-2, or Form N-3 registrations. 485APOS amendments take effect on delay (typically 60 or 75 days) to allow staff review; 485BPOS amendments take effect immediately and are limited to specified non-material updates. The two regimes are mutually exclusive: registered funds use the 485 series, operating companies use POS AM. Investment companies registered on Form N-2 that operate as closed-end interval or tender-offer funds can, in some structures, still appear in POS AM filings, but the typical operating-company vs. registered-fund split holds.
RW (registration withdrawal request). Filed to withdraw a registration statement, usually before effectiveness. RW terminates a filing; POS AM keeps it alive and updates it. The two are useful complements when studying offering survival.
Form POS AM is the general-purpose, not-immediately-effective, post-effective amendment to an operating-company Securities Act registration statement (domestic S-series or foreign F-series). The dataset is the right source for substantive post-effective updates to live registrations: prospectus revisions, form conversions, deregistration of unsold shares, fundamental changes triggering Item 512(a) undertakings, and material updates to ongoing shelf or resale registrations. It is not a substitute for 424B (pricing and take-down supplements), pre-effective "/A" datasets (path to initial effectiveness), POS EX or POS 462B/C and MEF datasets (narrow, immediately-effective mechanics), 485APOS/485BPOS (registered investment companies), or RW (withdrawals).
Form POS AM filings are post-effective amendments that require staff review, so they typically carry substantive prospectus updates, shelf clean-ups, form conversions, and post-de-SPAC resale refreshes. A focused set of legal, capital-markets, audit, compliance, and research roles use the dataset, each pulling on different parts of the record.
Disclosure counsel and registration-statement attorneys use the dataset to study how peers structure post-effective amendments: form conversions (S-1 to S-3), deregistration of unsold securities, additions of selling stockholders, Section 10(a)(3) financial-statement updates, and post-business-combination resale cleanups. They work from the explanatory note, the amended prospectus body, the cover page, the conformed signatures, and the original registration number carried in metadata.json. The dataset feeds precedent libraries and clause banks for non-routine post-effective drafting.
Equity and debt capital-markets analysts track POS AMs to detect shelf refreshes, S-3 eligibility maintenance, and resale registrations that signal an imminent takedown. They focus on the amended plan-of-distribution, selling-stockholder tables, and the EX-107 filing-fee table to read maximum offering amounts and fee-offset carryforwards. Output: pipeline trackers and competitive intel on issuer readiness.
Transaction advisors working on business combinations rely on POS AMs to update S-1 resale registrations post-closing. They focus on the explanatory note describing the combination, pro forma financials, warrant and lock-up disclosures, and revised selling-stockholder tables. The dataset supports comparable-deal diligence on sponsor economics and post-closing registration timing.
In-house disclosure teams and outside drafters mine the amended prospectus body for risk factors, use of proceeds, dilution, plan of distribution, tax considerations, and legal proceedings, comparing pre- and post-amendment language to track evolving market practice and staff comments. The dataset functions as a working corpus for clause-level retrieval.
Opinion-committee attorneys and audit-firm national office personnel use EX-5 legality opinions and EX-23 auditor consents to benchmark reliance language, jurisdictional carve-outs, qualifications, and the form of consent for newly registered, repriced, or additional securities. Both exhibits are refreshed in most POS AMs and form a precedent corpus for opinion and consent drafting.
Fee-administration staff use the EX-107 filing-fee table to verify carryforward of unused fees, compute net fees due on additional securities, and reconcile fee-offset claims across a registrant's S-x and POS AM history. They focus on EX-107 rows: security class, amount registered, proposed maximum offering price, and fee-offset references.
Corporate compliance officers monitor whether peer issuers keep effective registration statements current under Rule 3-12 of Regulation S-X and Section 10(a)(3). They focus on the explanatory note, the dating of audited financials in the amendment, and the EX-23 consent confirming the audit firm has reconsented. The dataset supports peer-benchmarking and internal calendar tracking.
Filing-agent operations teams validate exhibit indexing, header tags, and EX-107 formatting against the corpus. They focus on the EDGAR TXT envelope, metadata.json fields (accession number, CIK, filing date, document list), and exhibit reference structure. Use case: template validation and QC of outgoing POS AM submissions.
Special-situations analysts track POS AMs for changes in float, registered resale capacity, and overhang from selling stockholders, especially in small caps, PIPE recipients, and former SPAC targets. They focus on selling-stockholder tables, share counts registered for resale, lock-up references, and updated risk factors. Output: overhang models and event-driven trade ideas.
Engineering teams at financial data vendors, index providers, and credit rating agencies ingest POS AMs to keep share-count, registered-security, and shelf-capacity fields current. They focus on metadata.json fields and structured EX-107 content, feeding ETL pipelines and corporate-actions feeds.
Empirical researchers use the multi-decade corpus to study amendment frequency relative to effective dates, SPAC resale patterns, dilution, and staff review intensity. They focus on filing-date distributions, registrant cross-sections, and the textual content of amended prospectus sections for panel and event-study work.
Legal-tech engineers use the corpus to train and evaluate models that classify amendment types, summarize changes between an effective registration statement and its POS AM, and extract selling-stockholder tables. They focus on full-text prospectus bodies, exhibit text, and structured EX-107 data, joined to metadata for filtering by date, registrant, and form lineage.
The same record components — metadata.json identifiers, the amended prospectus body, the explanatory note, selling-stockholder tables, EX-5 opinions, EX-23 consents, and the EX-107 fee table — serve distinct professional lenses: registration mechanics for counsel, offering readiness for bankers, fee reconciliation for treasury, opinion and consent precedent for law firms and audit firms, overhang signals for analysts, and structured input for data vendors, academics, and RegTech developers.
The dataset supports a small number of concrete workflows built around the amended prospectus body, the explanatory note, the EX-5/EX-23/EX-107 exhibits, and the metadata.json filing descriptor.
Detecting resale overhang from post-de-SPAC and PIPE issuers. Filter metadata.json records by registrant CIK and date, then extract the selling-stockholder tables and share counts from the amended prospectus body. Output feeds overhang models that quantify newly registered resale capacity and lock-up expirations for small-cap and former-SPAC names.
Tracking shelf refreshes and S-3 eligibility maintenance. Join POS AM filings to their parent registration via entities[].fileNo to identify Section 10(a)(3) annual updates, deregistration of unsold securities, and form conversions (S-1 to S-3). Use the explanatory note plus the EX-23 consent date to flag issuers whose shelves have just been brought current, signaling potential near-term takedowns.
Reconciling filing-fee carryforwards across an issuer's registration history. Parse the EX-107 filing-fee tables (present from 2022 onward, marked by documentFormatFiles[].type = "EX-107") to extract security class, amount registered, proposed maximum offering price, and fee-offset references. Roll forward unused fees across S-x and POS AM accessions per CIK to verify net fees due and identify reconciliation gaps.
Building a precedent corpus of EX-5 legality opinions and EX-23 auditor consents. Pull every textual exhibit with type matching EX-5.x or EX-23.x from the accession folders. Index by registrant SIC, state of incorporation, audit firm, and counsel to retrieve comparable jurisdictional carve-outs, reliance language, and consent forms when drafting opinions for repriced securities, additional registrations, or post-business-combination resales.
Benchmarking explanatory-note language and amendment types. Extract the explanatory note section from the amended prospectus body across the multi-decade corpus to classify amendment purpose (deregistration, form conversion, selling-stockholder additions, fundamental change, post-closing resale update). Output supports precedent libraries for disclosure counsel and labeled training data for amendment-classification models.
Training and evaluating change-summarization models. Pair each POS AM accession with its parent registration via entities[].fileNo to generate before/after document pairs for risk factors, use of proceeds, plan of distribution, and selling-stockholder tables. Use the resulting diffs as input to RAG pipelines and fine-tuning datasets for prospectus-change summarization.
Cross-jurisdiction comparison of foreign private issuer amendments. Filter records where the parent registration is an F-1, F-3, or F-4 using entities[].fileNo prefix conventions and stateOfIncorporation codes (e.g., E9, U0). Compare amended cover-page disclosures, signature blocks, and EX-23 consent forms against domestic S-series POS AM peers to study disclosure differences for cross-listed issuers.
The Form POS AM Files Dataset is accessible through three endpoints on api.sec-api.io. All download endpoints require a valid sec-api.io API key, passed as the token query parameter.
Dataset Index JSON API: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-pos-am-files.json
Returns the dataset metadata (name, description, earliest sample date, total records and size, form types, container format, file types) along with the download URL for the full archive and a list of every container file. Each container entry includes its key, size, record count, last updated timestamp, and direct download URL. This endpoint does not require an API key and can be polled to detect which monthly containers were touched during the most recent refresh run, so you only re-download what changed.
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{
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"datasetId": "1f13365b-9ae0-68ff-be8e-8bfbb03e365e",
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"datasetDownloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-pos-am-files.zip",
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"name": "Form POS AM Files Dataset",
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"updatedAt": "2026-05-16T03:03:00.352Z",
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"earliestSampleDate": "1994-01-01",
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"totalRecords": 92366,
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"totalSize": 3604919987,
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"formTypes": ["POS AM"],
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"containerFormat": "ZIP",
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"fileTypes": ["TXT", "JSON", "HTML", "PDF", "FRM"],
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"containers": [
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{
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"downloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-pos-am-files/2026/2026-05.zip",
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"key": "2026/2026-05.zip",
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"size": 13818783,
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"records": 154,
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"updatedAt": "2026-05-16T03:03:00.352Z"
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}
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]
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}
Download Entire Dataset: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-pos-am-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads the complete archive of all Form POS AM filings from January 1994 to the present in a single ZIP file. Requires an API key.
Download Single Container: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-pos-am-files/2026/2026-05.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads one monthly container instead of the full dataset. Take the key value from any container entry in the index JSON (for example 2026/2026-05.zip) and append it to the base path https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-pos-am-files/ to build the download URL. Requires an API key.
The dataset covers EDGAR submissions on form type POS AM — post-effective amendments to Securities Act of 1933 registration statements that are not immediately effective on filing and must be declared effective by the SEC under Rule 462(a) (or take effect under Rule 462(d) for narrowly scoped amendments). Form POS AM is used to amend a registration statement already declared effective, most commonly an S-1, S-3, S-4, S-8, S-11, F-1, F-3, or F-4.
One record is a single complete Form POS AM submission to EDGAR, identified by an 18-digit accession number. On disk it materializes as one directory (named with the un-dashed accession number, for example 000149315225018867) containing exactly one metadata.json describing the EDGAR submission and one or more HTML documents representing the amended registration statement and its textual exhibits.
The filer is the Securities Act registrant whose registration statement has already been declared effective — domestic operating issuers with effective S-1, S-3, S-4, S-8, or S-11 statements, foreign private issuers with effective F-1, F-3, or F-4 statements, and other non-investment-company registrants such as BDCs, REITs, and MLPs conducting continuous or delayed offerings. Investment companies file their post-effective amendments on 485APOS or 485BPOS under Rule 485 and are excluded from this dataset.
A POS AM is event-driven rather than periodic. Typical triggers include Section 10(a)(3) currency updates for prospectuses used more than nine months after effectiveness (commonly an annual refresh on S-1 resale shelves), fundamental changes under Item 512(a)(1)(ii) of Regulation S-K, form conversions (for example S-1 to S-3 after the issuer attains short-form eligibility), deregistration of unsold securities, material S-4 transaction changes, and adoption of an effective registration by a successor registrant after a merger or redomestication.
424B filings (424B1 through 424B8) supplement an already-effective prospectus with pricing, plan-of-distribution updates, Rule 430A/430B information, or shelf take-down terms without re-opening the registration statement, and they require no SEC action. A POS AM, by contrast, amends the registration statement itself, can include revised Part II information and exhibits, is reserved for substantive changes that exceed what a Rule 424(b) supplement can carry, and is generally not effective until the SEC declares it so.
The dataset is distributed as monthly ZIP containers grouped under year folders (for example 2026/2026-05.zip). Each container holds accession-numbered directories that contain a metadata.json submission descriptor and one or more .htm files. The file types catalogued across the historical span are TXT, JSON, HTML, PDF, and FRM, though in practice the on-disk content of a modern record is the JSON manifest and HTML documents; image graphics, the SGML complete-submission .txt bundle, and XBRL data files are catalogued in metadata.json but not extracted.
Poll the dataset index JSON at https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-pos-am-files.json (no API key required) and inspect the updatedAt timestamp on each container entry. Containers touched during the most recent refresh run can be downloaded individually by appending the container key (for example 2026/2026-05.zip) to the base path https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-pos-am-files/ with your token API key, avoiding a re-download of the full ZIP.