The Form U-1 Files Dataset is a closed historical archive of applications and declarations submitted to the SEC by registered public utility holding companies and their subsidiaries under the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 (PUHCA). Each record represents one EDGAR submission — either an original Form U-1 application-declaration or a Form U-1/A amendment — bundling a structured metadata.json manifest together with the original submission documents (HTML, TXT, PDF) in their native formats. The dataset spans January 1994, when EDGAR coverage of U-1 filings began, through February 8, 2006, when PUHCA was repealed by the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and Form U-1 was discontinued. Records are distributed as monthly ZIP containers organized in a YYYY/YYYY-MM.zip layout, and the corpus will not grow because no Form U-1 filings exist or can be created after the repeal.
Programmatically retrieve the full list of dataset archive files, download URLs and dataset metadata.
Dataset Index JSON API
Download the entire dataset as a single archive file.
Download Entire Dataset:
Download a single container file (e.g. monthly archive) from the dataset.
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The dataset captures the full population of Form U-1 and Form U-1/A submissions that arrived on EDGAR during the final twelve years of the PUHCA 1935 transactional pre-clearance regime. Form U-1 was the procedural vehicle through which a registered holding-company system requested SEC authorization for transactions governed by PUHCA: organization or acquisition of subsidiaries, intra-system financings, securities issuances, intercompany loans and advances, service-company arrangements, dividends out of capital or unearned surplus, reorganizations, and similar matters. Form U-1/A is the amendment vehicle for a previously filed U-1, used to add or revise exhibits, respond to staff comments from the SEC Office of Public Utility Regulation, refresh financial data, or modify the proposed transaction terms.
Each record corresponds to a single EDGAR accession number and is materialized on disk as a folder named after that 18-digit accession number (no dashes). The folder contains the metadata.json manifest plus the individual document files that originally rode inside the submission. File types found in the dataset are TXT, JSON, HTML, and PDF; image attachments (GIF, JPG, and similar binary graphics) are excluded by dataset design. Records are grouped at the dataset level inside ZIP containers organized by year and year-month.
A single record in the Form U-1 Files Dataset is one EDGAR submission identified by its 18-digit accession number, materialized on disk as a folder named after that accession number (no dashes). Each folder bundles a structured manifest (metadata.json) together with the original EDGAR documents that comprised the submission, in their native formats. A record corresponds to either an original Form U-1 application-declaration or a Form U-1/A amendment to a previously filed application-declaration; the form distinction is recorded in the manifest. Records are grouped at the dataset level inside ZIP containers organized by year and year-month (for example, 2006/2006-02.zip), and each archive expands to a YYYY-MM/ directory under which the per-accession folders sit.
Form U-1 was the application-declaration filed by registered public utility holding companies and their subsidiaries under PUHCA 1935. Each U-1 is keyed to a PUHCA file number in the 070-NNNNN series (the EDGAR fileNo field), and that file number is reused across the original application and all subsequent amendments. Because PUHCA was repealed by the Energy Policy Act of 2005 effective February 8, 2006, the population of U-1 filings is closed.
Inside each ZIP, the folder tree follows a strict three-level convention:
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YYYY-MM/
2
<18-digit accession number>/
3
metadata.json
4
<primary U-1 or U-1/A document>.<htm|txt|pdf>
5
<exhibit document(s)>.<htm|txt|pdf>
6
...
Every per-accession folder is self-contained: the manifest sits alongside the raw EDGAR documents it describes, with exactly one manifest per record. In practice U-1 records are dominated by HTM/HTML for the form body and exhibits, with the JSON manifest always present and TXT and PDF appearing on a minority of older or scanned submissions. The complete .txt SGML submission wrapper that EDGAR produces — the concatenation of every document in the submission into a single file — is not redistributed inside the folder; only its URL is recorded in the manifest. A record therefore consists of the structured manifest plus the individual document files (HTM/HTML, TXT, PDF) that originally rode inside that submission.
metadata.json manifestmetadata.json is the structured spine of every record. It captures the EDGAR submission at three layers: the submission as a whole, the documents that comprise it, and the filer entities behind it.
formType — either U-1 or U-1/A.accessionNo — the canonical dashed accession number (e.g. 0000950134-06-001685).filedAt — an ISO-8601 timestamp with timezone offset reflecting the EDGAR acceptance time.description — the human-readable EDGAR description of the form, e.g. "Form U-1/A - Application or declaration under the act: [Amend]".linkToFilingDetails — URL of the primary filing document on sec.gov.linkToTxt — URL of the full SGML submission text file on EDGAR.linkToHtml — URL of the EDGAR filing index page (...-index.htm).linkToXbrl — XBRL instance URL when present; effectively unused for U-1 records.id — a stable 32-character hex internal identifier for the record.documentFormatFiles)Each element of the array describes one document carried in the original submission:
sequence — EDGAR ordering inside the submission, with sequence 1 reserved for the primary U-1 or U-1/A body and a single space (" ") used for the complete .txt submission entry that is referenced but not redistributed.size — byte length of the document, encoded as a string.documentUrl — canonical EDGAR URL for the document.description — free-text description supplied by the filer, often naming the exhibit and the PUHCA file number.type — the EDGAR document type code, drawn from the same vocabulary as the SGML <TYPE> header (e.g. U-1, U-1/A, EX-A, EX-B, EX-99.G15).A parallel dataFiles array exists for consistency with structured-data filings and is typically empty for U-1 records.
entities)Each element describes one filer or co-registrant. U-1 submissions frequently list multiple entities because holding-company applications are commonly filed jointly by the parent and one or more subsidiaries; the array preserves each filer's role:
companyName — registrant name with EDGAR role suffix, e.g. "EXELON CORP (Filer)".cik — 10-digit zero-padded CIK.irsNo — employer identification number.fileNo — the PUHCA 070-NNNNN docket number tying the application to its proceeding.filmNo — EDGAR film number for the submission.stateOfIncorporation — two-letter state code.fiscalYearEnd — MMDD.act — the governing securities-law act; "35" (the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935) is the canonical value for U-1 records.sic — SIC industry code with description, dominated by 4931 (electric and other services combined) and the broader 49xx utility codes.type — the filer's form designation for this submission (e.g. U-1/A).tickers — array of ticker symbols associated with the filer when known.Every non-metadata file in the record retains EDGAR's classic SGML <DOCUMENT> wrapper at the top of the file, ahead of the inner payload. The wrapper exposes four header tags before the content begins:
1
<DOCUMENT>
2
<TYPE>U-1/A
3
<SEQUENCE>1
4
<FILENAME>h32600a5uv1za.htm
5
<DESCRIPTION>EXELON CORPORATION - AMENDMENT NO.5 - 70-10294
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<TEXT>
7
<HTML>
8
... full HTML body of the U-1/A application/declaration ...
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</HTML>
10
</TEXT>
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</DOCUMENT>
TYPE identifies the EDGAR document type (the same vocabulary as documentFormatFiles[].type); SEQUENCE orders the documents within the submission; FILENAME matches the on-disk filename; DESCRIPTION carries the filer-supplied free-text description. The actual content sits between <TEXT> and </TEXT>. For HTML-bearing documents the inner content is a complete HTML document; for .txt documents the inner content is plain text or other SGML-style markup; for PDF attachments the wrapper precedes a uuencoded or base64-encoded payload depending on the era. Extraction tools should strip the wrapper before parsing the body, and should rely on the wrapper headers (rather than filenames alone) to classify documents.
On-disk filenames follow the conventions of the filing agent that prepared the submission rather than a uniform standard, but they typically encode three pieces of information: a project or job stub (e.g. h32600a5), a content tag (uv1za for "U-1/A", exv99wg15 for "EX-99.G15"), and the file extension. The authoritative document classification is the <TYPE> tag in the SGML wrapper and the type field in metadata.json, both of which use EDGAR's standardized exhibit-type vocabulary. For Form U-1, the recurring type codes include:
U-1 / U-1/A — the primary application-declaration body or its amendment.EX-A — corporate documents and instruments defining the rights of security holders (charters, indentures, articles).EX-B — voting trust agreements and related instruments.EX-C — copies of securities to be issued.EX-D — orders, opinions, and decisions of state regulatory commissions.EX-E — maps showing properties and interconnections of the holding-company system.EX-F — opinions of counsel as to the legality of the proposed transaction.EX-G / EX-99.G## — financial data schedules, pro forma financials, and supplemental financial exhibits, often numbered (G1, G15, etc.) when an application is amended multiple times.EX-H — proposed forms of notice and related procedural exhibits.EX-99 — generic catch-all exhibits, frequently used for staff-question responses, supplemental letters, and updated financial schedules under the extended EX-99.<letter><number> naming.The description field in both the SGML wrapper and the manifest typically narrates the exhibit's role (for example, "Response to Staff Questions" addressed to the SEC Office of Public Utility Regulation), giving extractors a second classification signal beyond the type code.
The primary U-1 (or U-1/A) document follows the substantive structure prescribed by the form's instructions under PUHCA, regardless of whether it is delivered as HTML or ASCII text. The body is overwhelmingly narrative and legal in tone, interspersed with tabular financial data. The recurring ordered sections are:
70-NNNNN file number, the names and addresses of the applicants and any joint filers, and the names and addresses of the persons authorized to receive notices and communications from the SEC.The exhibits themselves carry the supporting documentation: organizational charts, system maps, financial statements (often presented as tables of capitalization, income statements, and pro forma balance sheets), forms of notes and indentures, opinions of counsel, copies of state-commission orders, and — particularly common in amendments — formal responses to staff comments from the Office of Public Utility Regulation.
Each record includes the full metadata.json manifest and the full set of source documents that comprised the original EDGAR submission, in their native formats, with the SGML <DOCUMENT> wrapper preserved at the head of each non-metadata file. HTML and TXT primary bodies, exhibit documents, and PDF attachments are all redistributed when they were part of the submission.
.txt SGML submission file that EDGAR produces — the concatenation of all documents in a single submission — is not redistributed inside the folder. Only its URL is recorded in metadata.json under linkToTxt, and the corresponding documentFormatFiles entry uses a single-space type. Downstream tooling that requires the monolithic submission file must fetch it separately from EDGAR using that URL.The U-1 form's substantive content requirements were stable across the dataset's window; the Items enumerated above were defined by long-standing PUHCA rules and did not undergo material amendment between 1994 and the form's retirement in February 2006. The repeal of PUHCA closed the form rather than restructured it, so there is no late-period redesign to account for. What did evolve is the presentation format of the source documents:
.txt documents whose <TEXT> payload is line-wrapped ASCII with rudimentary tabular formatting using spaces, pipes, or aligned columns for financial schedules..htm or .html documents, with embedded styling and HTML tables for financial exhibits. The SGML wrapper is unchanged; only the inner <TEXT> payload shifts from raw ASCII to an <HTML>...</HTML> block.h32600a5uv1za.htm-style naming). PDF attachments appear more frequently for scanned exhibits such as state-commission orders or signed opinions of counsel.The documentFormatFiles array, the entity manifest, and the SGML wrapper structure are uniform across the entire window — only the inner document payloads change between ASCII text, HTML, and PDF.
Several nuances matter when reading or programmatically extracting these records.
U-1/A shares the PUHCA fileNo of the original application but receives a distinct accession number and lives in a distinct folder. Reconstructing the full docket for a transaction therefore requires grouping by entities[].fileNo rather than by accession.entities, and the signature blocks at the bottom of the body distinguish which co-applicant attests to which assertions.<table> elements.description field in documentFormatFiles and in the SGML <DESCRIPTION> header is filer-supplied free text and varies in capitalization and abbreviation; the type field (and the SGML <TYPE> tag) is the more reliable classifier.<DOCUMENT> wrapper precedes the HTML payload, naive HTML parsers will see leading non-HTML tag text unless the wrapper is removed; naive text extractors should treat the wrapper headers as the authoritative source of TYPE, SEQUENCE, FILENAME, and DESCRIPTION rather than re-deriving them from filenames.Each record was submitted to the SEC by a registered public utility holding company or by a subsidiary of a registered holding company under PUHCA 1935. The filer class was narrow and statutorily defined; operating utilities at large, independent power producers, and ordinary Exchange Act issuers did not use Form U-1.
The class did not include holding companies that qualified for an exemption under Section 3 of the Act ("exempt holding companies"), which used Form U-3A-2 annual exemption statements rather than U-1 transactional applications. Stand-alone exempt wholesale generators (EWGs) and foreign utility companies (FUCOs) were also outside the U-1 filer set, although registered systems investing in EWGs or FUCOs did file U-1 applications to obtain that authority.
Form U-1 was a prior-approval, event-driven filing. Time alone did not generate a record; each filing was triggered when a registered system company proposed a transaction that PUHCA required the SEC to authorize before consummation. The principal statutory triggers, identified by the section of the Act invoked in the application, were:
In substance, the triggers covered virtually every external financing, internal financing, acquisition, sale, organizational change, dividend out of capital, service contract, and restructuring step within a registered system. Day-to-day rate-regulated utility operations were not the trigger — discrete corporate or financing transactions were.
PUHCA 1935 was administered at the SEC by the Division of Investment Management (and historically by the predecessor Division of Corporate Regulation). The Act imposed three layers of obligation on registered systems:
The SEC reviewed each U-1 against the substantive standards of the relevant section and then issued an order authorizing, denying, or conditioning the transaction. The order, not the U-1 itself, was the operative legal authorization.
Form U-1 was filed before the proposed transaction was consummated. A typical lifecycle ran:
There was no fixed periodic deadline; timing was driven by when the registered system wanted to transact and how long staff review took. Some applications sought multi-year "omnibus" or "shelf" financing authority, with later amendments filed as the system drew on that authority or sought to extend it. Some U-1/A amendments were also filed after an order had been issued, to seek supplemental or expanded authority (for example, to increase the size of an authorized financing program). As a result, U-1/A amendments are not a small corrective tail — they are a substantial share of records.
The dataset is bounded on both ends:
No Form U-1 or U-1/A filings exist after February 2006, and none can be created under current law. The dataset is a closed historical corpus covering the final twelve years of a seventy-year SEC pre-clearance regime.
Form U-1 belongs to a tightly bounded regulatory family: the PUHCA 1935 forms used by registered public utility holding companies between 1935 and the statute's repeal on February 8, 2006. The most useful comparisons are with other PUHCA-series forms, with the parallel Securities Act and Exchange Act filings the same companies submitted for non-PUHCA purposes, with the post-2006 FERC successor regime, and with non-PUHCA "application-style" SEC filings that share U-1's procedural posture but not its substance.
U5S was the periodic counterpart to U-1. U-1 is event-driven and prospective: each filing requests SEC authorization for a specific acquisition, security issuance, intra-system loan, service contract, or reorganization step. U5S is calendar-driven and retrospective: an annual narrative-and-financial report describing the holding company system as it actually exists at year end (corporate chart, intercompany transactions, service company billings, fuel arrangements, indebtedness, investments). U-1 filings often cite U5S-style data as exhibit support, but the documents serve different functions. For time-series structural and financial data on a registered system, use U5S; for the transaction-by-transaction approval record, use U-1. Both were discontinued in the same February 2006 cohort.
U-3A-2 was filed by holding companies claiming exemption under PUHCA Section 3(a)(1)-(5) — typically intrastate systems, predominantly retail single-state systems, or holding companies whose utility activities were incidental. These filers were not registered and therefore never filed Form U-1. The two datasets effectively partition the PUHCA-regulated population into the registered tier (U-1, U5S) and the exempt tier (U-3A-2).
Several narrower forms address transactions that might otherwise have required a U-1 application:
U-1 is the broadest and most heavily used registered-system application form, often acting as the catch-all when no narrower vehicle applied. To reconstruct the full record of an authorized transaction, a researcher may need U-1 combined with U-9C-3 financing reports, U-57 EWG/FUCO declarations, or U-13-1 service company materials. Form U-5B (the registration statement that brought a holding company into the registered system) is the entry point; U-1 covers discrete transactions during membership; U5S and U-13-60 cover annual operating data. All terminate on the same February 8, 2006 cliff.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 did not eliminate federal holding company oversight; it transferred a much thinner successor framework, "PUHCA 2005," from the SEC to FERC. FERC administers it through filings such as FERC Form 65 (notification of holding company status), Form 65-A (waiver requests), and Form 65-B (exemption notifications), plus books-and-records access requirements under FERC Part 366. These filings live on FERC's eLibrary system, not EDGAR, and are not part of any SEC dataset. Substantively the regime is narrower: principally books-and-records access and cost allocation oversight, with no pre-clearance of securities issuances, acquisitions, or intra-system financings. FERC Form 65 is not a continuation of Form U-1; the SEC's transactional-approval function ended with U-1.
U-1 is often confused with Securities Act registration statements because both can involve security issuance, but the legal functions are distinct. A registered holding company issuing debt or equity historically needed two parallel filings: a U-1 to obtain PUHCA authorization under Sections 6 and 7 (capital structure, intra-system effects, "fair and reasonable" terms) and an S-1 or S-3 to register the securities for public sale under the Securities Act of 1933. U-1 is an application for an SEC order authorizing the transaction; S-1/S-3 is the disclosure document used to sell the securities to investors. Financial exhibits overlap; legal purpose, audience, and disclosure standard do not. Post-2006 only the Securities Act track remains.
PUHCA filings and Exchange Act reports are orthogonal. Form 10-K and 10-Q are periodic investor-disclosure documents covering financial condition and results; they are not requests for authorization, contain no SEC order, and address PUHCA-specific concepts (integrated system, service-company cost allocations) only incidentally. 8-K is event-driven but its triggers are investor-disclosure events (Item 1.01, Item 2.01, Item 5.02, etc.) reported after the fact — the inverse of U-1's prospective pre-approval posture. A 10-K from a PUHCA-era registered holding company will reference pending or completed U-1 authorizations, but it does not contain the application text, staff comments, or Commission order. Conversely, U-1 filings lack the MD&A, segment, and risk-factor disclosure found in 10-K.
Several non-PUHCA SEC filings share U-1's procedural posture — a request for Commission action yielding an order — but operate under different statutes and address different subject matter:
These are reference points for researchers studying SEC adjudicatory workflows generally, not substitutes for U-1.
Form U-1 is distinctive on four axes at once:
No other SEC dataset substitutes on any of these dimensions: U5S supplies the periodic system view, U-3A-2 captures the exempt population, S-3 covers the public offering side of an authorized issuance, 10-K provides investor-facing periodic narrative, and FERC Form 65 is the post-repeal status-notification analog. Only U-1 contains the application text, exhibits, amendments, and SEC order trail for transactions undertaken by registered holding companies during the PUHCA 1935 era.
The Form U-1 Files Dataset draws a narrow set of legal, regulatory, financial, academic, and engineering professionals who need the original transaction descriptions, Section 6/7/9/10/12/13 citations, financial exhibits, affiliate identifications, and SEC order conditions captured in each filing.
Lawyers in utility practice groups pull the original application and exhibits when financing agreements, indentures, intercompany service contracts, tax-allocation agreements, or pre-2006 merger documents reference an SEC order entered on a U-1. They use the Section 6/7 securities-issuance authorizations, Section 9/10 acquisition authorizations, Section 12 affiliate-transaction provisions, Section 13 service-company terms, and the schedule of order conditions to draft legal opinions, contract memoranda, and litigation briefs that hinge on what the SEC actually authorized.
Internal counsel at modern utility holding companies, particularly successors to pre-repeal registrants, use the dataset to reconstruct corporate history. Applicant and affiliate identification, transaction descriptions, supporting exhibits, and continuing order conditions answer which subsidiaries were acquired under which orders, which intercompany financings were authorized, and which service-company arrangements survived. The output supports diligence files, audit responses, and replies to FERC or state-commission inquiries about long-standing intercompany structures.
Counsel and analysts practicing before FERC mine the pre-2006 record for the SEC's prior treatment of integrated systems, associate companies, permissible affiliate transactions, and routine intra-system financings. They focus on the narrative description, Section citations, and imposed conditions to support FERC pleadings, books-and-records compliance memoranda, and arguments in EWG, FUCO, and holding-company status disputes.
Cost-of-service and rate-base experts use the dataset when a disputed capital structure, debt issuance, or affiliate cost allocation traces to a U-1 authorization. The financial exhibits, use-of-proceeds language, debt maturity and interest-rate parameters, and SEC-imposed conditions on capitalization ratios or affiliate pricing serve as the authoritative record of what the holding company represented to a federal regulator at issuance, which state commissions revisit during prudence reviews and refund cases.
Fundamental analysts and fixed-income credit researchers covering regulated utilities use the financial exhibits to build long-run histories of utility cost of capital and capital structure. Pro forma balance sheets, interest-rate ranges for proposed debt, dividend and stock-issuance plans, and intercompany loan terms are often more granular than 10-K disclosures, supporting historical reference curves, leverage-cap studies, and inputs to current valuation and credit models.
Industry economists and financial historians use U-1 filings as the primary contemporaneous record of holding-company combinations, system reorganizations, and cross-border acquisitions during a period when nearly every material utility deal cleared PUHCA review. Applicant and target identification, affiliated-company organizational charts, purchase price and financing structure, and pre- and post-transaction capitalization exhibits drive analyses of premium levels, financing mix, merger conditions, and the integration test.
Researchers in regulatory economics, energy policy history, and administrative law use the dataset to study how PUHCA shaped the U.S. electric and gas utility industry in its final administrative period. Narrative transaction descriptions, corporate-structure recitations, cited statutory sections, and pro forma capitalization exhibits feed longitudinal series on subsidiary acquisitions, financing requests, and approval conditions used in peer-reviewed work on the integrated-system standard and the lead-up to repeal.
Energy and financial-regulation policy analysts aggregate U-1 records by transaction type, financing size, affiliate-transaction terms, and order conditions to characterize what PUHCA actually constrained, then compare that baseline to post-2006 outcomes under FERC and state oversight. Cited Sections, categories of relief sought, conditions imposed, and financial magnitudes are the operative fields for retrospective policy papers and comparative analyses.
Financial data engineering teams ingest U-1 records as structured input to corporate-history knowledge graphs, entity-resolution pipelines, and complete EDGAR archives. Each filing contributes parent-subsidiary edges, acquisition events, securities-issuance events, and affiliate-transaction relationships keyed to accession numbers and dates. Metadata files, applicant and affiliate identifiers, dated transaction descriptions, and exhibit lists drive enriched utility corporate genealogies and pre-/post-2006 entity linkage.
Teams building retrieval systems for energy regulatory work treat the archive as a bounded, closed corpus. Metadata, narrative descriptions, Section citations, and exhibits are paired with related SEC order releases to produce grounded answers about specific past authorizations, legacy intercompany arrangements, and precedent cited in current contracts.
Across these audiences, value concentrates in the same five elements of each filing: applicant and affiliate identification, the cited sections of PUHCA, the transaction description, the financial exhibits, and the conditions attached to the resulting SEC order.
The Form U-1 Files Dataset supports a small set of concrete workflows that exploit the application narrative, Section citations, exhibit set, and entity manifest in each record.
Energy regulatory counsel grouping records by entities[].fileNo (the 070-NNNNN PUHCA docket number) to assemble the original U-1, every U-1/A amendment, the EX-F opinions of counsel, and the EX-D state-commission orders into a single transaction file. The output is a chronologically ordered binder used to draft legal opinions or litigation briefs that turn on what the SEC actually authorized — including the as-amended Item 1 transaction terms and any conditions imposed in the resulting order.
In-house counsel at successor holding companies searching the Item 1 narrative and EX-G / EX-99.G financial exhibits for specific note amounts, interest rates, and maturities referenced in surviving indentures, tax-allocation agreements, or service company contracts. The Section 6(a), 7, and 12 citations in Item 3 confirm the statutory basis of the authorization, and the signature blocks identify which co-applicant attested to which terms — feeding diligence files and FERC books-and-records responses.
Financial historians and regulatory economists parsing Item 1 (transaction description), Item 2 (fees), and the EX-G capitalization exhibits across the full Form U-1 corpus to produce a structured panel of acquisitions, security issuances, and intra-system financings. Joining the entities array (CIK, SIC 49xx, state of incorporation) with cited PUHCA Sections in Item 3 yields deal-level variables — premium, financing mix, leverage at issuance, conditions imposed — for econometric work on the integrated-system standard and the lead-up to repeal.
Cost-of-service expert witnesses pulling the use-of-proceeds language from Item 1, the pro forma capital structure tables from EX-G, and any conditions on capitalization ratios or affiliate pricing recorded in the application. These exhibits are used as contemporaneous federal-regulator representations when a state commission revisits the prudence of a debt issuance, capital structure, or affiliate cost allocation that originally cleared a U-1 — often more granular than the corresponding 10-K footnotes.
Data engineering teams ingesting the metadata.json manifests to extract acquisition and formation events. Each record contributes nodes (one per element of entities, with CIK, IRS number, state, SIC) and edges (acquirer-target, parent-subsidiary, lender-borrower) anchored to the accessionNo, filedAt date, and PUHCA fileNo. The resulting graph supports entity-resolution joins to post-2006 EDGAR filings and FERC Form 65 status notifications.
LLM and RAG developers chunking the Item 1 narrative, Item 3 statutory analysis, and EX-99 staff-question responses after stripping the SGML <DOCUMENT> wrapper and using the <TYPE> tag (rather than filenames) for document classification. The closed February 2006 boundary makes the corpus stable; pairing chunks with the description field and PUHCA file number yields grounded citations for queries about specific Section 9(a)(2) acquisition authorizations, Rule 53/54 reliance, or service-company orders under Section 13.
The Form U-1 Files Dataset is a closed historical archive covering filings from January 1994 through February 2006, when Form U-1 was discontinued following the repeal of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935. No new filings are added after that cutoff. The dataset can be accessed through three endpoints: a public JSON index, a full archive download, and per-month container downloads. Download endpoints are authenticated with an API key passed as a token query parameter (?token=YOUR_API_KEY).
Dataset Index JSON API: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-u1-files.json
This endpoint returns dataset-level metadata (name, description, last updated timestamp, earliest sample date, total records, total size, form types, container format, and file types), the full dataset download URL, and a list of all monthly containers with per-container size, record count, updated timestamp, and download URL. Use it to discover which containers exist and to detect which ones changed in the most recent refresh. This endpoint does not require an API key.
Fetch it with curl:
curl https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-u1-files.json
Example response:
1
{
2
"datasetId": "1f13365b-9ae0-696f-91be-113e20572318",
3
"datasetDownloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-u1-files.zip",
4
"name": "Form U-1 Files Dataset",
5
"updatedAt": "2026-04-15T08:00:58.809Z",
6
"earliestSampleDate": "1994-01-01",
7
"totalRecords": 11271,
8
"totalSize": 127302575,
9
"formTypes": ["U-1", "U-1/A"],
10
"containerFormat": "ZIP",
11
"fileTypes": ["TXT", "JSON", "HTML", "PDF"],
12
"containers": [
13
{
14
"downloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-u1-files/2006/2006-02.zip",
15
"key": "2006/2006-02.zip",
16
"size": 1842910,
17
"records": 47,
18
"updatedAt": "2026-04-15T08:00:58.809Z"
19
}
20
]
21
}
Download Entire Dataset: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-u1-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads the complete archive as a single ZIP file containing every monthly container in the dataset. Use this when you want the full historical corpus in one request. This endpoint requires an API key.
Download Single Container: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-u1-files/2006/2006-02.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads one monthly container ZIP identified by its key from the index (format YYYY/YYYY-MM.zip). Each monthly container holds one folder per accession number, and each accession folder contains a metadata JSON file together with all original EDGAR submission documents (TXT, HTML, PDF) excluding image files. This endpoint requires an API key.
The dataset covers Form U-1 and Form U-1/A filings — the application-declaration filed by registered public utility holding companies under PUHCA 1935, and amendments to those applications. No other PUHCA-series forms (U5S, U-3A-2, U-9C-3, U-13-1, U-57, etc.) are included in this dataset.
One record represents a single EDGAR submission identified by its 18-digit accession number, materialized on disk as a folder named after that accession number (no dashes). Each record corresponds to either an original U-1 application-declaration or a U-1/A amendment, and each folder contains a metadata.json manifest plus the original submission documents (HTML, TXT, PDF) carried in that submission.
Form U-1 was filed by registered public utility holding companies and their subsidiaries — corporations that directly or indirectly owned 10 percent or more of the voting securities of an electric or gas utility company and had registered with the SEC under Section 5 of PUHCA, plus the operating utilities, sub-holding companies, and service companies within those registered systems. Holding companies exempt under Section 3 of the Act, stand-alone EWGs, and FUCOs did not file U-1.
The dataset covers filings submitted from January 1994 — when EDGAR coverage of U-1 filings began — through February 2006, when PUHCA 1935 was repealed by the Energy Policy Act of 2005 effective February 8, 2006. The corpus is closed: no Form U-1 or U-1/A filings exist or can be created after the repeal.
The dataset is distributed as monthly ZIP containers organized in a YYYY/YYYY-MM.zip layout. Inside each container, every record sits in its own folder named after the accession number and contains a metadata.json manifest alongside the original EDGAR documents in TXT, HTML, or PDF format. Image attachments (GIF, JPG) and the monolithic .txt SGML submission file are excluded.
U-1 and U5S are PUHCA companions that serve different functions. U-1 is event-driven and prospective — each filing requests SEC authorization for a specific transaction (acquisition, securities issuance, intra-system financing, service contract, or reorganization step). U5S is calendar-driven and retrospective — an annual narrative-and-financial report describing the registered holding-company system as it existed at year end. For a transaction-by-transaction approval record, use U-1; for the periodic system-level view, use U5S.
Yes. Each U-1/A amendment receives its own EDGAR accession number and lives in its own folder, even though it shares the underlying PUHCA 070-NNNNN docket number with the original U-1 and any other amendments in the proceeding. To reconstruct the full docket for a transaction, group records by entities[].fileNo rather than by accession number.