The Form PRER14A Files Dataset packages every revised preliminary proxy statement filed on EDGAR under Section 14(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 14a-6, with coverage starting January 1, 1994 and continuing through the present. Each record is one EDGAR accession — one complete PRER14A submission as the registrant originally filed it — bundled as a folder that pairs a metadata.json sidecar with the as-filed HTML proxy statement and any non-image attachments preserved in their original byte form. PRER14A is filed by the soliciting person, almost always the registrant, when a previously filed PRE 14A must be amended before a definitive proxy (DEF 14A) is mailed, typically in response to SEC staff comments. The dataset is distributed as ZIP containers partitioned by EDGAR acceptance month, with TXT, JSON, HTML, and PDF file types represented across the historical archive.
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Dataset Index JSON API
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The dataset is the file-level archive of Form PRER14A — the revised preliminary proxy statement filed under Section 14(a) of the Exchange Act and Rule 14a-6. A registrant uses PRER14A when it has already filed a PRE 14A and must amend the preliminary version, most often in response to SEC Division of Corporation Finance staff comments, but also to voluntarily correct, supplement, or restructure disclosure before locking in the definitive proxy. PRER14A therefore sits between PRE 14A and DEF 14A in the proxy-solicitation life cycle, and a single solicitation may produce more than one PRER14A iteration.
Substantively, a PRER14A is a Schedule 14A document. It uses the same content scaffolding as any other Schedule 14A filing — cover page, notice of meeting, body of the proxy statement, and annexes — with the cover page's "Preliminary Proxy Statement" box checked and revisions incorporated relative to the prior preliminary version. The matters being solicited span the full range of shareholder-vote topics: election of directors, ratification of auditors, advisory votes on executive compensation, equity-plan adoption or amendment, charter or bylaw amendments, reverse stock splits, name changes, authorized-share increases, merger or asset-sale approvals, going-private transactions, dissident or contested-election solicitations, and other extraordinary corporate actions.
Coverage spans every PRER14A accession filed on EDGAR from January 1994 to the present. The dataset is distributed as ZIP containers; file types found inside are TXT, JSON, HTML, and PDF, with the primary proxy document delivered as HTML (either SGML-wrapped HTML or inline-XBRL XHTML) and the metadata sidecar delivered as JSON. Image files referenced by the filing are deliberately stripped from the container, although they remain enumerated in the metadata file inventory.
A single record in the Form PRER14A Files Dataset is one EDGAR accession — one complete revised preliminary proxy statement submission as the registrant originally filed it. Physically, a record is a folder inside the dataset's ZIP container, named with the dashless accession number (the accession 0001140361-25-042748 becomes the folder 000114036125042748). The folder bundles two layers: a metadata.json sidecar describing the submission header, filer entities, and file inventory, and the actual EDGAR submission documents preserved in their original byte form — at minimum the primary PRER14A HTML document, plus any non-image exhibits that travelled with the submission. Image attachments (JPG, GIF, PNG) referenced by the filing are stripped from the dataset container, although they remain enumerated in the metadata file inventory.
Records are partitioned inside the ZIP archive into year-month subdirectories (YYYY/YYYY-MM/) keyed on the EDGAR acceptance timestamp, so a given monthly archive contains every PRER14A accession whose filedAt falls within that calendar month.
Each accession folder has two structural layers:
metadata.json) — a flat, machine-readable description of the EDGAR submission header, the filer entities, and the list of files originally uploaded to EDGAR.metadata.json is the only file in the folder guaranteed to follow a fixed name. The submission documents retain whatever filename the filer (or the filer's EDGAR agent) chose at submission, so document filenames vary widely across records.
metadata.jsonA flat JSON object that mirrors the EDGAR submission header. Top-level fields are:
formType — always the literal string "PRER14A" for this dataset.accessionNo — the canonical dashed EDGAR accession number (e.g. "0001140361-25-042748").filedAt — the EDGAR acceptance timestamp as an ISO 8601 string with timezone offset (e.g. "2025-11-28T16:59:00-05:00"), reflecting Eastern Time.linkToFilingDetails — absolute SEC.gov URL of the primary PRER14A document on EDGAR.linkToTxt — absolute URL to the complete submission text bundle (<accession>.txt) on EDGAR, which concatenates every document in the submission inside SGML envelopes.linkToHtml — absolute URL to the EDGAR filing-index page (<accession>-index.htm), the human-browseable landing page for the filing on SEC.gov.linkToXbrl — the URL of an XBRL instance when one exists; typically empty for PRER14A filings because proxy statements carry only cover-page iXBRL facts rather than an external XBRL instance.description — a human-readable form description, typically "Form PRER14A - Preliminary Proxy Soliciting materials".id — an opaque 32-character hexadecimal record-level identifier.documentFormatFiles — an array enumerating every file in the original EDGAR submission (including files that were filtered out before packaging). Each element carries a sequence ordinal (string "1", "2", …, with a trailing element of sequence: " " representing the complete submission text bundle), a size in bytes (string-encoded), an absolute documentUrl pointing to SEC.gov, a type (EDGAR document type: typically "PRER14A" for the proxy itself, "GRAPHIC" for images, and " " for the submission text bundle), and an optional free-text description (e.g. "PRER14A", "GRAPHIC", "Complete submission text file", "REVISED PRELIMINARY PROXY STATEMENT").dataFiles — an array of XBRL/structured-data files; effectively always empty for PRER14A submissions.seriesAndClassesContractsInformation — an array carrying investment-company series/class identifiers, used when a registered investment company solicits proxies; typically empty for operating-company PRER14As.entities — an array of one or more entity objects describing parties associated with the filing. Per-entity fields include companyName (with the role appended in parentheses, e.g. "enVVeno Medical Corp (Filer)", (Subject Company), (Issuer)), cik (Central Index Key), irsNo (IRS Employer Identification Number), fileNo (EDGAR file number, e.g. "001-38325"), filmNo (EDGAR film number), type (the form code mirrored at entity level), act (Exchange Act code, typically "34"), sic (SIC code plus label, e.g. "3841 Surgical & Medical Instruments & Apparatus"), stateOfIncorporation (two-letter US state or foreign-country code), fiscalYearEnd (four-digit MMDD), and tickers (an array of ticker symbols that may include multiple share classes and warrant tickers).For contested or third-party solicitations, the entities array can carry more than one record — for example a Filer plus a Subject Company — disambiguated by the role suffix on companyName.
Each accession folder includes the primary PRER14A submission as an HTML file. Filenames are not standardised — common patterns include the generic formprer14a.htm produced by templated filing agents and filer-specific slugs such as tm2531287d3_prer14a.htm, ny20059625x1_prer14a.htm, or ea0264913-prer14a_ispecimen.htm, typically composed of a filing-agent tag, a registrant identifier, and the form code.
Two internal-format variants appear in the dataset:
<DOCUMENT> envelope at the head of the file. The wrapper carries <TYPE>PRER14A, a <SEQUENCE> integer, a <FILENAME> line repeating the on-disk filename, a <DESCRIPTION> (commonly PRER14A or REVISED PRELIMINARY PROXY STATEMENT), and a <TEXT> block that contains the full HTML body of the proxy statement, terminated by </TEXT></DOCUMENT>.<?xml ... ?> declaration and an <html ...> element that declares the ix, xbrli, dei, and occasionally us-gaap namespaces, with iXBRL facts tagging cover-page items such as the entity name, CIK, ticker, and file number, satisfying the cover-page tagging requirements under Rule 405 of Regulation S-T.Inside either wrapper, the body is the revised preliminary proxy statement itself. Its internal structure typically follows the Schedule 14A convention in roughly this order:
Because the filing is a revised preliminary, the substantive content reflects edits made relative to the originally-filed PRE 14A. Filers sometimes include explanatory language summarising the changes, but EDGAR does not require redlining; a PRER14A is typically a clean, integrated replacement document rather than a marked-up amendment. To recover the specific edits, the record must be diffed against the immediately preceding PRE 14A (or earlier PRER14A) for the same registrant and meeting.
When the original EDGAR submission included separately-filed non-image attachments — for example a supplemental proxy supplement, a press release exhibit, or a side letter — those files (HTML, plain text, or PDF) appear alongside the primary document in the accession folder. The complete inventory of the original submission, including any files filtered out at packaging, is always recoverable from the documentFormatFiles array in metadata.json. Standalone exhibits attached to a PRER14A are uncommon in practice because the proxy statement body and its annexes are normally bundled into the single primary document.
A record includes, with full fidelity to the original EDGAR upload:
metadata.json sidecar with the submission header, filer-entity descriptors, and original document inventory.GRAPHIC-type entries in documentFormatFiles (with their original SEC.gov URLs preserved), but their bytes are not packaged inside the ZIP.<accession>.txt) hosted on EDGAR is referenced from linkToTxt rather than included locally; its content is already represented by the individual document files retained in the folder.Schedule 14A — and therefore PRER14A — has accumulated layers of required disclosure as SEC rulemaking has evolved. Records filed in the mid-1990s reflect a leaner Schedule 14A with the 1992 executive-compensation tables but without later additions. Records filed in subsequent years absorb successive disclosure expansions, including:
Because the dataset preserves filings as submitted, the layered evolution of these disclosures is directly visible across records as they move forward in time.
PRER14A filings from the earliest part of the EDGAR window (1994 through the late 1990s) were typically submitted as plain ASCII text inside an SGML <DOCUMENT> envelope, with tables rendered through monospaced spacing. From the late 1990s onward, EDGAR began accepting HTML inside the same SGML envelope, and that convention became dominant — an HTML document wrapped by the legacy SGML markers (<DOCUMENT><TYPE>PRER14A<SEQUENCE>...<FILENAME>...<DESCRIPTION>...<TEXT>...</TEXT></DOCUMENT>). More recently, a fraction of filings are submitted as inline-XBRL XHTML documents that omit the SGML envelope and instead begin with an XML declaration and an <html> root declaring the ix, dei, and related namespaces, primarily to satisfy cover-page tagging requirements. PDF representations sometimes appear as supplemental attachments but are not the format of the primary proxy document.
The file-types found in the dataset are TXT, JSON, HTML, and PDF; in practice modern records consist almost exclusively of the metadata.json sidecar plus one HTM/HTML document per accession.
entities array can describe multiple parties when the filing involves contested solicitations or third-party filers. The role suffix appended to companyName ((Filer), (Subject Company), (Issuer)) is the disambiguator and should be parsed off before using the legal name.documentFormatFiles is authoritative for the original EDGAR submission inventory. Reconciling that array against the folder contents is the way to detect which graphic attachments were filtered out before packaging; the GRAPHIC-type entries always retain their SEC.gov documentUrl for direct retrieval if needed.<html> (or <HTML>) start tag. Inline-XBRL variants do not carry the wrapper and parse cleanly as XHTML.filedAt timestamp reflects EDGAR's acceptance time in Eastern Time, and the YYYY/YYYY-MM/ folder bucketing is keyed on that timestamp; filings accepted late in a month may be partitioned differently from the calendar date a reader would expect for a meeting timeline.<DOCUMENT> header lines and in narrative text on the Schedule 14A cover. The metadata.json sidecar is the most reliable, uniform source for these identifiers across both variants and across the full historical range of the dataset.PRER14A is filed by the soliciting person in a proxy solicitation governed by Section 14(a) of the Exchange Act of 1934 and Regulation 14A. In most cases the filer is the registrant (the issuer whose securityholders are being solicited); in contested matters, an opposing soliciting person (dissident shareholder, activist, or competing bidder) may also file.
The filer population covers issuers with a class of securities registered under Section 12 of the Exchange Act, including:
Director nominees, named executives, transaction counterparties, and advisors are subjects of disclosure within the proxy statement, not filers.
PRER14A is event-driven, not periodic. It exists only after a prior PRE 14A has been filed and is triggered when those preliminary materials must be revised before the registrant proceeds to a definitive proxy (DEF 14A). Typical triggers:
There is no statutory deadline for each revision. The practical deadline is set by the meeting date, record date, mailing schedule for definitive materials, and the pace of staff review. Once comments are cleared, the registrant files the DEF 14A (or DEFM14A, DEFC14A, or similar variant) and mails definitive materials.
PRER14A has been carried as a distinct EDGAR form type since proxy filers were phased onto mandatory EDGAR filing in the early 1990s. The dataset's earliest records are from January 1994. Pre-EDGAR paper-era revised preliminary proxies exist in SEC paper archives but are outside this dataset.
Form PRER14A sits inside a tightly clustered family of Section 14 proxy and information statement filings. Distinctions across this family turn on three axes: preliminary vs definitive status, routine vs merger vs contested subject matter, and solicitation vs written-consent notification. PRER14A occupies a narrow slot: the revised, not-yet-final, not-yet-mailed preliminary proxy statement.
The direct predecessor. PRE 14A is the first preliminary proxy filed under Rule 14a-6(a) when matters fall outside the routine items that allow skipping straight to definitive. PRER14A is its amendment, typically driven by SEC staff comment letters, updated financials, revised fairness opinions, or shifting deal terms. The two often pair one-to-one (or one-to-many) on the same EDGAR file number. Use PRE 14A as the baseline and PRER14A as the diff target when studying disclosure evolution; use neither when only the final position matters.
The operative, mailed-to-shareholders document accompanying the proxy card. PRER14A is never mailed and is not the document on which votes are solicited. DEF 14A is vastly more populous because routine-business issuers skip preliminary filing entirely. Use DEF 14A for population-level governance, compensation, or director-nominee research; PRER14A only when iteration history or staff-comment responses are the object of study.
The post-definitive counterpart to PRER14A. Both are "revised," but they sit on opposite sides of the preliminary/definitive line. PRER14A revises a draft still under staff review; DEFR14A revises a document already declared definitive and often already mailed. Triggers differ accordingly: PRER14A responds to staff comments pre-mailing, while DEFR14A typically reflects post-mailing corrections, supplemental merger-litigation disclosure, or material late changes. Treat them as complementary windows on the same revision process, not as substitutes.
The "M" suffix flags Rule 14a-6(a)(4) transactions: mergers, consolidations, sales of substantially all assets, and similar extraordinary matters. The "R" in PRER14A, by contrast, denotes revision status, not subject matter. In practice, merger-deal revisions often appear as PREM14A amendments rather than PRER14A, so PRER14A skews toward non-merger matters (charter amendments, equity plan changes, reverse splits, reincorporations). For M&A disclosure research, rely on PREM14A/DEFM14A first; PRER14A is a supplementary source for non-merger preliminary revisions.
The "C" suffix marks non-management filings: dissident shareholders, activists, and competing slates in proxy contests. PRER14A is overwhelmingly a management filing. To reconstruct a full contest, both tracks are required; PREC14A and DEFC14A together with PRER14A alone gives only the issuer side.
The parallel regime when corporate action is approved by majority written consent without proxy solicitation. Disclosure content overlaps heavily with Schedule 14A, but the trigger is different: Rule 14c-2 requires notification rather than solicitation. A merger approved by a controlling holder appears in Schedule 14C, not 14A. PRER14A is a solicitation document; PRER14C is a notification document. Building a complete picture of shareholder-approved actions requires both regimes.
This is a files dataset: per accession, the as-filed EDGAR submission is preserved in native TXT, HTML, and PDF, with a JSON metadata sidecar, excluding only image files. It is faithful and exhibit-complete, but unstructured at the field level.
A structured PRER14A dataset would expose parsed fields (meeting date, vote items, nominee tables, summary compensation values, ownership tables, textual deltas against PRE 14A). It is easier to query and join at scale but loses document fidelity and any content outside its extraction schema.
Choose the files dataset for full-text search, NLP, exhibit-level analysis, or legal-evidentiary completeness. Choose a structured equivalent when tabular fields across many filings are the goal and engineering a parsing pipeline is not desirable.
PRER14A is distinct on every relevant axis: narrower than DEF 14A (final-stage), earlier than DEFR14A (post-definitive), broader on subject matter than PREM14A/DEFM14A (merger-specific), management-side relative to PREC14A/DEFC14A (contests), and a solicitation rather than information statement relative to Schedule 14C. Within that slot, it is the most direct source for studying how proxy disclosure evolves under SEC staff review and pre-mailing revision. For population-level governance, compensation, or M&A questions, the neighboring datasets are usually better starting points; PRER14A is essential only when revision history itself is the object of study.
PRER14A filings show what an issuer changed in its preliminary proxy after SEC staff review. The dataset's value is the redline between PRE 14A and PRER14A, so users tend to be specialists who care about disclosure deltas in proxy votes, M&A deals, and executive pay.
Transactional lawyers running merger, asset-sale, and going-private votes diff PRER14A against the prior PRE 14A to see what peers added or rephrased in background-of-the-merger sections, fairness opinions, projections, conflicts disclosures, appraisal rights notices, and Q&A inserts. Used to anticipate staff comments and calibrate projection disclosure on their own deals.
Securities lawyers reverse-engineer staff comment letters from the revisions themselves, identifying recurring focus areas (golden parachutes, non-GAAP measures, projection assumptions, related-party items, Item 402 tables). Output: internal precedent banks and pre-filing risk memos.
Solicitation advisors study how vote-item phrasing, board recommendation language, and supplemental Q&A were rewritten between drafts, especially for close M&A votes, charter amendments, say-on-pay, and contested elections. Informs framing of disputed items and timing of supplemental mailings.
In-house teams preparing their own proxy use the dataset to benchmark peers by industry and meeting type, then study executive compensation tables, pay-versus-performance disclosure, director bios, and shareholder proposal opposition statements. The PRE 14A-to-PRER14A delta flags what tends to draw staff scrutiny so internal drafts can pre-empt it.
Buy-side governance teams monitor mid-cycle revisions to director nominee disclosures, equity plan share reserves, anti-takeover provisions, and management responses to shareholder proposals. Used to keep voting positions consistent and to flag issuers whose revised disclosures materially change the basis for a recommendation.
Analysts producing vote recommendations and governance scores update models when an issuer revises pay structure, equity plan terms, or board composition mid-cycle. Focus: CD&A, summary compensation table, plan run-rate and dilution, and director independence determinations.
Merger-arb desks treat a PRER14A as a signal on deal probability and timing. They read revised projections, refreshed financial advisor analyses, updated regulatory approval discussions, termination-fee changes, and any new disclosure of competing bids. Revisions feed directly into spread and vote-date assumptions.
Teams supporting contested campaigns track how target boards rewrote opposition statements, nominee bios, board-skills matrices, and defensive narratives between drafts. Supports drafting of dissident materials, fight-letter rebuttals, and disclosure-adequacy litigation.
Comp consultants compare PRE 14A and PRER14A to see what level of methodological detail staff accepts in CD&A narrative, peer-group rationale, performance-metric definitions, severance and change-in-control tables, clawback descriptions, and Item 402(t) golden-parachute tables.
In appraisal and breach-of-fiduciary-duty matters, revisions to financial projections, sensitivity analyses, synergy estimates, and fairness opinion inputs become evidence of what management knew and disclosed at successive points. The full revised text and exhibits support citation and exhibit assembly.
Empirical researchers in accounting, finance, and law use the full 1994-onward history to study staff review intensity, comment-driven changes to compensation and deal disclosure, and revision effects on vote outcomes. Cover-page JSON paired with HTML and text bodies supports large-sample work across PRE 14A, PRER14A, DEFM14A, and DEF 14A.
Engineering teams ingest the TXT, HTML, PDF, and JSON files to power clause search, automated PRE-to-PRER redlines, compensation table extraction, vote-item classification, and deal-term extraction. Full historical coverage supports both retrieval indexes and supervised training for proxy-specific models.
Disclosure-policy analysts benchmark how registrants in a given industry or deal type respond to comments, surfacing recurring issue categories (projections, non-GAAP, conflicts, Item 402) that inform comment-letter calibration and rulemaking analysis.
The audience is narrow but concrete: anyone whose work depends on what changed between a preliminary and definitive proxy and why. Transactional and disclosure lawyers, governance and proxy-advisory analysts, arb desks, comp consultants, activist teams, litigation experts, and researchers use PRER14A as the source of truth for revised proxy disclosure.
The following workflows treat the PRER14A Files Dataset as the source of truth, driven by what changed between a preliminary proxy and its revised version.
Securities-disclosure counsel and LLM teams pair each PRER14A primary HTML with the same registrant's prior PRE 14A (matched on entities.cik plus EDGAR file number) and compute paragraph-level diffs. The output is a labelled corpus of inferred staff-comment responses across topics like golden parachutes, non-GAAP measures, fairness-opinion inputs, and Item 402 tables, used to seed precedent banks and pre-filing risk memos.
Event-driven desks watch the monthly YYYY/YYYY-MM/ partitions for new PRER14A accessions tied to pending mergers, then extract revised projections, refreshed financial-advisor analyses, termination-fee changes, and updated regulatory-approval discussions from the proxy body and annexes. The deltas feed spread, deal-probability, and vote-date assumptions on the position book.
Proxy-contest analysts filter records where the entities array carries a non-management Filer or a (Subject Company) role, then diff opposition statements, board-skills matrices, and nominee biographies between PRER14A iterations. The output supports dissident fight-letter drafting, rebuttal materials, and disclosure-adequacy claims.
Comp consultants and corporate-secretary teams extract CD&A narrative, Summary Compensation Tables, pay-versus-performance disclosure (Item 402(v)), and equity-plan share-reserve / dilution sections from PRER14A bodies, grouped by SIC code from entities.sic. They compare against the matching PRE 14A to see which methodological details (peer-group rationale, performance-metric definitions, clawback descriptions) survived staff review, then calibrate their own client drafts accordingly.
Forensic accountants and litigation teams pull the full revised proxy text and annexed merger agreements, fairness opinions, and projection schedules for a target registrant, preserving the original EDGAR submission bytes. The unmodified HTML and metadata.json provide citable, timestamped evidence of what management disclosed at each revision step.
Empirical researchers ingest the full 1994-onward archive, join PRER14A records to their PRE 14A and DEF 14A counterparts on CIK and file number, and code revisions by topic (projections, conflicts, Item 402, anti-takeover provisions). The dataset supports regressions of revision intensity on vote outcomes, staff-review duration, and deal completion.
Data-engineering teams parse the SGML-wrapped HTML and inline-XBRL XHTML variants, normalise cover-page identifiers from metadata.json, and index proposal sections, Q&A blocks, and annex text into vector stores. The retrieval layer powers proxy-drafting copilots that surface staff-tested precedent language for charter amendments, reverse splits, equity-plan adoptions, and say-on-pay disclosure.
The Form PRER14A Files Dataset is distributed as ZIP container files organized into year-month directories. Each container holds per-accession folders containing a metadata.json file and the revised preliminary proxy statement HTML documents along with supporting exhibits from the original EDGAR submission. The dataset covers filings from January 1994 onward and is refreshed regularly as new PRER14A submissions are received by EDGAR.
Dataset Index JSON API: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-prer14a-files.json
Returns dataset metadata (name, description, last updated timestamp, earliest sample date, total record count, total size, form types, container format, and file types), the full dataset download URL, and a list of every container file with its key, size, record count, last updated timestamp, and individual download URL. This endpoint does not require an API key and can be polled to monitor which containers were updated in the most recent refresh, so consumers can incrementally download only the changed monthly archives.
Example response:
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{
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"datasetId": "1f13365b-9ae0-6928-a320-edb3b42f5dba",
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"datasetDownloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-prer14a-files.zip",
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"name": "Form PRER14A Files Dataset",
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"updatedAt": "2026-05-16T03:03:10.447Z",
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"earliestSampleDate": "1994-01-01",
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"totalRecords": 14772,
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"totalSize": 2056731496,
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"formTypes": ["PRER14A"],
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"containerFormat": "ZIP",
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"fileTypes": ["TXT", "JSON", "HTML", "PDF"],
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"containers": [
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{
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"downloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-prer14a-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": "2026-05-16T03:03:10.447Z"
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}
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]
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}
Download Entire Dataset: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-prer14a-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads the complete dataset as a single ZIP archive containing every monthly container from January 1994 to the present. This endpoint requires a sec-api.io API key passed as the token query parameter.
Download Single Container: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-prer14a-files/2026/2026-05.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads one monthly container ZIP, which unpacks into per-accession folders, each containing a metadata.json describing the filing and the PRER14A HTML documents and exhibits as submitted to EDGAR. Use the downloadUrl values from the index JSON containers array to target specific months. This endpoint requires a sec-api.io API key.
The dataset covers Form PRER14A, the revised preliminary proxy statement filed under Section 14(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 14a-6. It is the only form type in scope; related preliminary, definitive, merger, and contest variants (PRE 14A, DEF 14A, DEFR14A, PREM14A/DEFM14A, PREC14A/DEFC14A, PRER14C) are out of scope and live in their own datasets.
One record is one EDGAR accession — a complete PRER14A submission as the registrant originally filed it — packaged as a folder named with the dashless accession number. The folder contains a metadata.json sidecar mirroring the EDGAR submission header plus the primary PRER14A HTML document and any non-image attachments that travelled with the submission.
The filer is the soliciting person in a proxy solicitation, almost always the registrant whose securityholders are being solicited. In contested matters, an opposing soliciting person (dissident shareholder, activist, or competing bidder) may file its own revised preliminary materials. Foreign private issuers, voluntary filers, and Section 15(d)-only filers do not file PRER14A.
PRER14A is event-driven and exists only after a prior PRE 14A has been filed. The most common triggers are SEC Division of Corporation Finance staff comments on the preliminary proxy, material amendments such as updated financial statements or revised fairness opinions, changes to voting items (director nominees, shareholder proposals, equity plans), and revisions during M&A or contested situations. A single proxy event can produce multiple PRER14A iterations.
The dataset's earliest sample date is January 1, 1994, when proxy filers were phased onto mandatory EDGAR filing, and coverage extends to the present. Records are partitioned inside the archive into YYYY/YYYY-MM/ subdirectories keyed on the EDGAR acceptance timestamp.
The dataset is distributed as ZIP containers, one per acceptance month, with file types of TXT, JSON, HTML, and PDF appearing inside. In practice, modern records consist of the metadata.json sidecar plus one HTM/HTML document (either SGML-wrapped HTML or inline-XBRL XHTML) per accession; image files (JPG, GIF, PNG) referenced by the filing are stripped from the container but remain enumerated in the metadata file inventory.
DEF 14A is the operative, mailed-to-shareholders definitive proxy on which votes are actually solicited and is vastly more populous because routine-business issuers skip preliminary filing entirely. PRER14A is the not-yet-final, not-yet-mailed revised preliminary, valuable specifically when iteration history, staff-comment responses, or pre-mailing disclosure evolution is the object of study. For population-level governance, compensation, or director-nominee research, DEF 14A is the better starting point.