The Form U5A Files Dataset is a finite, historical corpus of Form U5A and Form U5A/A submissions accepted by EDGAR — the "Notification of Registration" that non-exempt public-utility holding companies filed with the SEC under Section 5(a) of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 (PUHCA 1935). Each record corresponds to a single accession number and bundles a metadata.json descriptor with every document the registrant transmitted to EDGAR for that submission, excluding embedded image files. Filers were the top-tier or intermediate holding companies whose multi-state electric or gas systems failed any Section 3 exemption; operating utility subsidiaries are described inside the form but are not themselves U5A filers. The dataset's EDGAR coverage begins September 1, 1997 and ends when the Energy Policy Act of 2005 repealed PUHCA 1935 effective February 8, 2006, after which Form U5A could no longer be filed. Form U5A/A records, which are amendments to previously filed notifications, are bundled into the same corpus as independent records.
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.
Download Single Container:
The dataset assembles every Form U5A original notification and Form U5A/A amendment that EDGAR accepted between September 1997 and the February 2006 sunset of PUHCA 1935. Form U5A is the short Section 5(a) notification that placed a non-exempt holding company onto the SEC's roster of registered holding companies, identifying the registrant, enumerating the subsidiaries and affiliated public-utility companies that constituted its system, and naming the officers and counsel through whom the Commission should communicate. The instrument is declaratory rather than financial: it inventoried structure rather than disclosing performance, and it triggered the substantive obligations of PUHCA — subsidiary registration on Form U5B, ongoing approvals under Sections 6, 9, 10, and 12, and annual reporting on Form U5S.
Because the form itself was retired together with PUHCA 1935 when the Energy Policy Act of 2005 took effect on February 8, 2006, the dataset is closed and covers the entire EDGAR era of the form. Each filing typically contains the name and address of the registrant holding company, a description of its subsidiary companies and their principal business activities, identification of affiliated public utility companies, and any exhibits supporting the registration notification. Records are distributed inside monthly ZIP containers organized by year, and the file types present across the corpus are TXT, JSON, HTML, and PDF.
One record in the Form U5A Files Dataset corresponds to a single Form U5A or Form U5A/A submission accepted by EDGAR, identified by its unique accession number. A record is a self-contained folder named with the eighteen-digit, dash-stripped accession number that bundles a metadata.json descriptor together with every document file the registrant transmitted to EDGAR for that submission, excluding embedded image files. The dataset unit is therefore the filing itself, not the registrant and not an extracted disclosure item: one accession number maps to one record, and an amendment (U5A/A) is its own record with its own accession number rather than a revision layered onto an earlier one.
Form U5A is the "Notification of Registration" filed under Section 5(a) of PUHCA 1935. A non-exempt holding company that owned or controlled at least ten percent of the voting securities of a public-utility company or another holding company became a registered holding company by transmitting this short notification to the Commission. The regulatory purpose was not financial disclosure but identification and structural inventory: the form placed the registrant on the SEC's roster of registered holding companies, mapped the system of subsidiaries to which it belonged, and triggered the substantive obligations of PUHCA, including subsidiary registration on Form U5B, ongoing approvals under Sections 6, 9, 10, and 12, and annual reporting on Form U5S. The instrument is declaratory: the registrant identifies itself, enumerates its system companies, and names the officers and counsel through whom the Commission should communicate.
The form was administered by the Division of Investment Management until the Energy Policy Act of 2005 repealed PUHCA effective February 8, 2006. After that date Form U5A could no longer be filed and the form was retired together with the rest of the U5-series filings. The dataset therefore spans the entire EDGAR era of the form, from the late-1990s onset of electronic acceptance through the February 2006 sunset.
A Form U5A/A is an amendment to a previously submitted U5A. Amendments typically update the schedule of subsidiary companies when a registered system acquires or divests a member entity, correct or supplement the names and addresses of officers and counsel, or refine the description of the registrant or its principal business. Each amendment is a complete submission and stands as its own record.
Records in the Form U5A Files Dataset are distributed inside monthly ZIP containers organized by year and named in YYYY/YYYY-MM.zip form. Decompressing a monthly archive yields a top-level YYYY-MM/ folder whose direct children are accession-number folders, one per filing. Inside each accession-number folder the dataset places:
metadata.json file describing the submission;The file-types found in the dataset are TXT, JSON, HTML, and PDF. The overwhelming majority of U5A filings, particularly the early ones, are a single monospaced ASCII text document wrapped in an EDGAR SGML envelope; later filings, and supporting exhibits in any era, may appear as HTML or PDF. Image files referenced from the submission (logos, scanned seals, photographs of signatures) are deliberately omitted.
The folder name strips the dashes from the accession number, while metadata retains the canonical dashed form, so reconciliation between filesystem path and metadata identifier is by simple normalization.
metadata.json descriptorThe metadata file is a flat JSON object capturing what EDGAR recorded about the submission at the moment of acceptance, in dataset-normalized form. Its principal fields are:
formType — either "U5A" for an original notification of registration or "U5A/A" for an amendment.accessionNo — the canonical dashed accession number (e.g., 0000891836-02-000505).description — the EDGAR human-readable description of the form, typically "Form U5A - Notification of registration [Section 5(a)]".filedAt — the ISO-8601 timestamp, with Eastern-time offset, at which EDGAR accepted the filing.linkToFilingDetails, linkToTxt, linkToHtml — durable URLs into www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/... pointing at the primary document, the combined submission text, and the -index.htm landing page respectively.linkToXbrl — present for schema uniformity with other datasets but always an empty string here.documentFormatFiles — an array of objects describing every document in the EDGAR submission, each with sequence, size (bytes, as a string), documentUrl, description, and type. The final element conventionally points at the combined submission text file with description "Complete submission text file".dataFiles — always an empty array; no machine-readable data instances accompany U5A submissions.entities — an array of registrant/filer objects, one per CIK associated with the submission. Each entity object carries the ten-digit zero-padded cik, the companyName annotated with its EDGAR role (e.g., "ALLEGHENY ENERGY SUPPLY CO LLC (Filer)"), the type of form for that entity, an act code ("35" for PUHCA 1935), the fileNo (typically in the 030- series historically used for PUHCA registrants), the EDGAR filmNo, and the registrant's sic industry code with its label (most commonly 4911 Electric Services, 4924 Natural Gas Distribution, or related utility codes).id — an opaque 32-character hex identifier internal to the dataset.The metadata layer is the canonical place to read identifying facts about the filing; the primary document is the canonical place to read its substantive content.
The U5A submission document is plain text wrapped in EDGAR's classic SGML document envelope. The envelope is a small header of unclosed start-tag-style lines followed by the body inside <TEXT>...</TEXT>:
1
<DOCUMENT>
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<TYPE>U5A
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<SEQUENCE>1
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<FILENAME>sc0295.txt
5
<DESCRIPTION>NOTIFICATION OF REGISTRATION
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<TEXT>
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... form body in fixed-width ASCII ...
8
</TEXT>
9
</DOCUMENT>
Only <DOCUMENT> and <TEXT> are paired; <TYPE>, <SEQUENCE>, <FILENAME>, and <DESCRIPTION> are header lines in EDGAR's SGML dialect rather than well-formed XML elements. The body inside <TEXT> is monospaced ASCII laid out for fixed-width rendering and organized around the prescribed sections of Form U5A.
Title block. Centered header lines identifying the issuing authority ("SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION, Washington, D.C. 20549"), the form designation ("FORM U5A"), the English title ("NOTIFICATION OF REGISTRATION"), and the statutory authority ("Filed pursuant to Section 5(a) of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, as amended"). For U5A/A, the title block also flags the amendment and often carries an amendment number.
Registrant identification. The full legal name of the holding company, its state of incorporation or organization, its principal executive offices address, telephone number, and SEC file number. This block establishes the entity whose registered-holding-company status is being notified.
Communications block. The names, titles, and addresses of officers, general counsel, or outside counsel to whom the Commission should direct communications regarding the filing. The block typically lists two to four individuals together with firm affiliations where outside counsel is used.
Schedule of system companies. The heart of the notification: an enumeration of the registrant and every subsidiary or affiliated public-utility and non-utility company forming the holding-company system. The list is conventionally rendered as an SGML <TABLE> block with a <CAPTION> and <S>/<C> column markers identifying fixed-width columns. Typical columns include Name of Company, Form of Organization (corporation, limited liability company, partnership, trust), State or Other Jurisdiction of Organization, and Nature of Business (e.g., electric utility, gas distribution, transmission, generation, service company, fuel supply, financing subsidiary, exempt wholesale generator, foreign utility company). Indentation is used to encode ownership hierarchy, with parent entities listed before their subsidiaries; ASCII rule lines (-----) frame the table. Footnote markers (1), (2), etc., reference explanatory paragraphs immediately below that disclose ownership percentages, voting arrangements, partial ownership, EWG/FUCO status, or other qualifications.
Narrative description of the system. A short prose passage describing the registrant's principal business and that of its principal subsidiaries, often summarizing service territories, regulated utility operations, and significant non-utility activities.
Exhibit references and exhibits. Form U5A's exhibit requirement is light compared with substantive PUHCA filings, but registrants commonly attach a corporate organization chart, copies of the registrant's certificate of incorporation and bylaws (or incorporate them by reference to earlier filings), and any acquisition or reorganization order under which the system was formed. Exhibits are listed in an exhibit index near the end of the body and, where present in the EDGAR submission, appear as additional document files in the accession-number folder.
Signature and verification. The body closes with a signature block executed by a duly authorized officer of the registrant, dated, and followed by a notarized VERIFICATION paragraph in which the signatory swears under oath that the contents are true to the best of their knowledge and belief. ASCII /s/ markers stand in for handwritten signatures; corporate-seal language appears for filings executed under seal.
<PAGE> markers are interspersed through the body to demarcate the logical pages of the original filing, preserving the paginated layout of the typewritten document that EDGAR transcribed.
A record includes the full body of the original U5A or U5A/A notification, the SGML document envelope around it, every document file the registrant submitted to EDGAR for the accession number (subject to the image-file exclusion), the EDGAR-supplied filenames, and the dataset-normalized metadata.json capturing form type, accession number, acceptance timestamp, registrant identifying information, file-number and SIC classification, and a manifest of the constituent documents. Where exhibits were filed as separate documents, those exhibits appear as additional files inside the accession-number folder under their original filenames.
Image files referenced from the body of the notification — typically scanned signatures, corporate seals, or system maps — are excluded. The combined SGML submission file (the <accession>.txt aggregate that EDGAR produces for retrieval convenience) is referenced from documentFormatFiles but is not separately duplicated as a record file: each constituent document is preserved individually. Materials filed by the registrant on other forms — Form U-1 applications, U5S annual reports, U5B subsidiary registrations, and exempt-status orders — are separate filings with their own accession numbers and are not contained in a U5A record.
Form U5A's content requirements were stable throughout the EDGAR era because the form itself dates from the original 1935 statute and its instructions changed little in its final decade. The structural evolution material to interpretation is statutory rather than presentational: the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (Pub. L. 109-58, Title XII, Subtitle F) repealed PUHCA 1935 in its entirety and replaced it with PUHCA 2005, transferring oversight of holding-company books and records to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The repeal took effect on February 8, 2006, six months after enactment. Form U5A could not be filed after that date, and the dataset's records terminate accordingly. Amendments (U5A/A) filed in the period leading up to the repeal frequently reflect late system restructurings, divestitures driven by regulated-utility refocus, and the addition of exempt-wholesale-generator and foreign-utility-company subsidiaries authorized under the 1992 amendments to PUHCA.
EDGAR began accepting U5A filings electronically in the late 1990s, and from that point through the form's retirement the dominant transmission format was monospaced ASCII text wrapped in the SGML document envelope described above. HTML-formatted U5A bodies became permissible after EDGAR's broader HTML acceptance in the early 2000s, and a minority of late filings appear as .htm documents; PDF appears chiefly for scanned exhibits. The dominant data-extraction surface for the dataset is therefore the SGML-wrapped ASCII body and its embedded <TABLE> blocks.
Several practical considerations shape how a U5A record should be read.
<TABLE> blocks in the body simultaneously carry SGML column tags (<S>, <C>, <CAPTION>) and ASCII fixed-width column rules. Either an SGML-aware extractor or column-position-aware text parsing will recover the schedule of system companies; treating the body as free text will lose the hierarchical structure of the subsidiary list.description and type fields in documentFormatFiles are the reliable routes for identifying which file is the U5A body and which are exhibits.act code "35" on entity objects and the 030- file-number series are useful markers that a record belongs to the PUHCA regime and not to ordinary Securities Exchange Act or Securities Act registrations that may share the same CIK.<PAGE> breaks and the recurring centered title-block at the top of each logical page mean that section continuity must be tracked across page markers; a section can be split across multiple <PAGE> boundaries with repeated header decoration on the next page.Each Form U5A record is a notification of registration filed with the SEC by a non-exempt public-utility holding company under Section 5(a) of PUHCA 1935. The filer is the holding company itself, in its capacity as a parent that directly or indirectly owns, controls, or holds with power to vote ten percent or more of the voting securities of a public-utility company (electric or retail gas) or of another holding company.
Form U5A is not periodic Exchange Act disclosure. It is a one-time registration notification that placed the holding company onto the SEC's register of regulated holding companies, after which it became subject to the broader PUHCA reporting regime (Forms U5B, U5S, U-13-1, U-9C-3, and various applications and declarations).
The filer set was narrow and statutorily defined. A filer had to be both:
In practice, filers were multi-state electric or gas utility holding companies whose systems crossed state lines or otherwise failed a Section 3 exemption. The registrant was always the top-tier or intermediate holding company. Operating utility subsidiaries were described inside the filing but were not themselves U5A filers; if they were Exchange Act registrants, they continued to file 10-K, 10-Q, and 8-K separately.
Outside the U5A population: pure operating utilities, non-utility industrial parents, Section 3 exempt holding companies, mutual funds, banks, insurers, foreign private issuers without U.S. utility subsidiaries, and any Exchange Act registrant lacking a regulated public-utility subsidiary.
Form U5A was event-driven, not periodic. The obligation arose when an entity became a non-exempt holding company under PUHCA 1935, which could happen through:
The filing was due promptly upon the entity becoming subject to registration. It furnished identifying information about the registrant, descriptions of subsidiary companies and their principal businesses, identification of affiliated public-utility companies, and supporting exhibits. After the U5A was on file, ongoing PUHCA reporting moved to other forms, most notably the annual Form U5S.
A Form U5A/A is an amendment filed by the same holding-company registrant to correct, supplement, or update the original notification, for example to revise registrant information, update the subsidiary system description, attach omitted exhibits, or respond to staff comments. Amendments were not scheduled; they were filed as needed.
The governing statute was the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, enacted as Title I of the Public Utility Act of 1935. Section 5(a) required every non-exempt holding company to register with the SEC by filing a notification in the prescribed form; Form U5A was that form. PUHCA matters were administered by the SEC (historically through the Office of Public Utility Regulation, later the Division of Investment Management).
Paper U5A filings existed for decades before EDGAR. The dataset's EDGAR-published coverage begins September 1, 1997 and ends with the form's discontinuation in February 2006, when the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (Pub. L. 109-58, enacted August 8, 2005) repealed PUHCA 1935 effective February 8, 2006. The repeal terminated the Section 5(a) registration obligation and ended Form U5A. Successor authority over many utility-holding-company matters transferred to FERC under PUHCA 2005, which uses a different statutory and reporting framework and does not use Form U5A.
Form U5A sits inside a narrow, now-historical cluster of filings created under PUHCA. The closest comparison targets are the other PUHCA forms that surrounded a registered holding company's lifecycle: the registration statement (U5B), the annual report (U5S), the exemption statement (U-3A-2), and transactional applications (U-1). After PUHCA's 2005 repeal, the regulatory function migrated to FERC, which is a useful boundary case even though it is not an SEC dataset. Generic EDGAR forms such as 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, and 13F are not meaningful neighbors and are excluded below.
U5B is the substantive registration statement that followed the U5A notification. The two are easily confused because both arise under Section 5 and mark entry into the registered regime, but they differ in stage and depth. U5A is the short Section 5(a) notification that placed the company on the registered-holding-company roster. U5B is the full registration statement, with detailed disclosure of corporate structure, capitalization, intercompany relationships, service contracts, accounting practices, officers and directors, and consolidated financials. U5A initiates; U5B substantiates.
U5S is the recurring annual report filed by registered holding companies, closer in cadence to a 10-K than to U5A. It updates corporate-family structure, intercompany transactions, system service company activity, subsidiary financials, and tax allocations. U5A is filed once at registration; U5S is filed every year afterward and is the better resource for tracking system changes over time. U5A captures only the initial state.
U-3A-2 is the inverse of U5A. It is filed annually by holding companies asserting an exemption from PUHCA registration under Section 3(a). U5A documents entry into the registered regime; U-3A-2 documents staying outside it. Both identify the holding company and its utility subsidiaries, but U-3A-2 focuses on the basis for exemption (intrastate operations, predominantly non-utility character), is recurring, and applies to a far larger filer population — thousands of U-3A-2 filings exist against a much smaller universe of U5As.
U-1 was the transactional workhorse of registered holding companies, used to seek SEC authorization for specific actions: securities issuances, acquisitions, intercompany loans, service contracts, dividend declarations, and reorganizations. A registered system typically filed one U5A in its lifetime but dozens or hundreds of U-1s. U-1 is event-driven and transaction-specific; U5A is a one-time identification filing. For the substantive regulatory history of a registered system, U-1 is the principal source; U5A only marks the entry point.
U5A/A is the amendment record bundled into the same dataset, used to correct or update notification information. It is to U5A what 10-K/A is to 10-K: a supplementary record read together with the original. It is not a separate dataset but a subtype within the same corpus, and the only update mechanism inside the U5A lineage itself.
When the Energy Policy Act of 2005 repealed PUHCA effective February 2006, holding-company oversight moved from the SEC to FERC. The functional successors to U5A are FERC-65 (notification), FERC-65A (waiver), and FERC-65B (exemption) under 18 CFR Part 366. These are not in EDGAR and are not part of this dataset, but they are the continuation of the same status-notification obligation. The FERC regime is lighter on financial detail than PUHCA's was, and accessed through a different public channel. Anyone tracing a holding company across the 2006 boundary must move from SEC U5A/U5B/U5S to the FERC Part 366 corpus.
The Form U5A Files Dataset is narrow, finite, and historical, covering only the short notification that marked a holding company's entry onto the registered roster from September 1997 through the February 2006 repeal of PUHCA. Within the PUHCA lifecycle, U5A initiates, U5B substantiates, U5S maintains, U-1 transacts, and U-3A-2 opts out. U5A is not a substitute for any of them, and is not interchangeable with the post-2006 FERC Part 366 corpus. Its distinct value is marking the formal entry point of named holding companies into a regulatory regime that no longer exists — most useful when paired with the related PUHCA datasets to reconstruct a full view of a registered system.
Though the form was discontinued in February 2006, the corpus remains the authoritative pre-repeal record of registered holding-company structure. Lawyers, diligence teams, regulators, credit and equity analysts, litigators, in-house compliance staff, academic researchers, and data engineers each draw on specific sections of the registration notification to resolve questions that current filings cannot answer.
Used to identify which legal entity held a given operating utility on a specific date, confirm which affiliates sat inside a registered system, and reconstruct ownership chains before residual oversight moved to FERC. The subsidiary list, affiliated-utility section, and U5A/A amendment trail anchor opinion letters, successor-liability memos, and arguments in proceedings where pre-2006 registration posture is material.
Used to reconstruct legacy corporate genealogies of acquisition targets. The subsidiary roster and amendment history surface dormant or merged entities that may still hold contracts, easements, environmental liabilities, or tax attributes, supporting entity-mapping deliverables and rep-and-warranty negotiations.
Used as historical baselines for merger review, rate cases, and affiliate-transaction oversight of successor systems. Subsidiary business-activity descriptions and affiliated-utility identifications let staff economists trace the regulated/non-regulated mix and service-company arrangements that persist in current form.
Used to verify the historical perimeter of registered systems referenced in still-outstanding indentures, intercompany notes, and guarantees. Registrant identification and subsidiary lists feed structural subordination and recovery analysis where legacy entity boundaries affect priority of claims.
Used to attribute legacy assets and liabilities to specific operating subsidiaries when current segment reporting traces back to pre-2006 entity structure. Supports initiation-of-coverage research and sum-of-the-parts models that depend on historical entity boundaries.
Used as documentary evidence of who owned what, when, in environmental, tort, ERISA, and securities matters against utility defendants. The registrant address, subsidiary roster, and U5A/A dates support jurisdictional arguments, alter-ego claims, successor-liability theories, and document-production scoping.
Used to keep entity-management databases, minute books, and corporate registers consistent with primary SEC filings. U5A/A amendments authoritatively document when subsidiaries were added, dissolved, renamed, or transferred within a registered system.
Used to build panel datasets classifying holding companies by their electric, gas, and non-utility mix, and to track structural change through amendments. Supports empirical papers on diversification, regulatory burden, post-repeal restructuring, and archival work on the holding-company era.
Used as a bounded, structured source of pre-2006 utility holding-company structure. Standardized metadata and consistent subsidiary-listing conventions support entity extraction, linkage to modern CIK identifiers, time-indexed ownership graphs, and extraction-model benchmarks.
The following workflows show how the U5A/U5A/A corpus is used in practice. Each ties to specific record elements: the subsidiary schedule in the body, the amendment trail across accession numbers, the registrant block, and the entities/sic/fileNo fields in metadata.json.
Reconstructing pre-2006 holding-company system trees. Parse the <TABLE> schedule of system companies in each U5A body, resolve indentation depth and footnoted ownership percentages into a parent-child graph, then chain the original U5A with its U5A/A amendments to produce a time-indexed roster of every subsidiary, EWG, and FUCO that sat inside a registered system. Output feeds entity-reference databases and legacy-genealogy deliverables in utility M&A diligence.
Bridging SEC PUHCA filings to the post-2006 FERC Part 366 regime. Use the registrant identification block and entities[].cik together with fileNo (the 030- series) to pin each registered system at its February 2006 terminal state, then hand off to FERC-65/65A/65B filings to continue the holding-company status record across the repeal boundary. Supports cross-regime tracking by regulatory counsel and commission staff.
Successor-liability and alter-ego evidence packaging for utility litigation. Pull the registrant name, principal-office address, signature/verification block, and the dated subsidiary schedule from the relevant U5A and any U5A/A amendments to establish who owned which operating utility on a specific date. The notarized verification paragraph and EDGAR filedAt timestamp anchor admissibility in environmental, tort, and successor-liability matters.
Mapping the regulated vs. non-regulated mix of legacy utility systems. Extract the "Nature of Business" column from the schedule of system companies, cross-reference each entity's SIC label from metadata.json (4911, 4924, service-company, fuel-supply, financing-subsidiary, EWG/FUCO), and produce panel data classifying each registered system by its electric, gas, and non-utility composition. Supports regulatory-economics research and sum-of-the-parts equity models.
Amendment-driven change detection across registered systems. Diff the schedule of system companies between an original U5A and each subsequent U5A/A for the same registrant to surface added, divested, renamed, or restructured subsidiaries, with each change timestamped by the amendment's filedAt. Output supports compliance entity-management databases and merger-review baselines at FERC and state commissions.
Benchmarking SGML/ASCII extraction pipelines on a small, bounded corpus. Use the dataset's bounded set of filings as a finite test set for SGML-envelope parsing, fixed-width <TABLE> recovery, footnote resolution, and hierarchical-list reconstruction. The combination of monospaced ASCII bodies with embedded <S>/<C> column markers and <PAGE> breaks provides a compact regression suite for historical-EDGAR extractors.
Indenture and intercompany-claim perimeter analysis. Match registrants and subsidiaries from the U5A schedule against entities named in still-outstanding bond indentures, intercompany notes, and guarantees, using the U5A snapshot to confirm whether a referenced affiliate sat inside the registered system at issuance. Feeds structural-subordination and recovery work for credit analysts covering legacy utility holding-company debt.
The Form U5A Files Dataset is accessible through three endpoints: a JSON index for metadata, a full archive download, and per-container downloads for individual monthly archives.
Dataset Index JSON API: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-u5a-files.json
Returns dataset-level metadata and the full list of container files. The response includes the dataset name, description, last update timestamp, earliest sample date (1997-09-01), total records and total size, covered form types (U5A and U5A/A), container format (ZIP), and the file types included in each container (TXT, JSON, HTML, PDF). Each container entry lists its key, size, record count, last updated timestamp, and direct download URL. This endpoint is useful for monitoring which containers were updated in the most recent refresh run so that only changed containers need to be re-downloaded. This endpoint does not require an API key.
Example response:
1
{
2
"datasetId": "1f13365b-9ae0-6a3f-8d22-fc4f697beb47",
3
"datasetDownloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-u5a-files.zip",
4
"name": "Form U5A Files Dataset",
5
"updatedAt": "2026-04-16T08:39:21.474Z",
6
"earliestSampleDate": "1997-09-01",
7
"totalRecords": 50,
8
"totalSize": 349835,
9
"formTypes": ["U5A", "U5A/A"],
10
"containerFormat": "ZIP",
11
"fileTypes": ["TXT", "JSON", "HTML", "PDF"],
12
"containers": [
13
{
14
"downloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-u5a-files/2005/2005-12.zip",
15
"key": "2005/2005-12.zip",
16
"size": 18432,
17
"records": 2,
18
"updatedAt": "2026-04-16T08:39:21.474Z"
19
}
20
]
21
}
Download Entire Dataset: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-u5a-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads the complete dataset as a single ZIP archive containing all monthly container files from September 1997 through February 2006. This endpoint requires an API key.
Download Single Container: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-u5a-files/2005/2005-12.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads one monthly container archive instead of the full dataset. Replace the year and month segments in the URL to target a specific period. This endpoint requires an API key.
The dataset covers Form U5A, the "Notification of Registration" filed under Section 5(a) of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, together with Form U5A/A amendments to previously filed notifications. Both form types are bundled into the same corpus.
One record corresponds to a single Form U5A or Form U5A/A submission accepted by EDGAR, identified by its unique accession number. Each record is a folder containing a metadata.json descriptor and every document the registrant transmitted to EDGAR for that submission, excluding embedded image files.
The filer was a non-exempt public-utility holding company — a parent that directly or indirectly owned, controlled, or held with power to vote ten percent or more of the voting securities of a public-utility company or another holding company, and that did not qualify for any Section 3 exemption. In practice these were multi-state electric or gas utility holding companies whose systems crossed state lines.
Form U5A was event-driven rather than periodic. It was filed promptly upon an entity becoming subject to registration — through formation of a multi-state holding-company structure, a reorganization or merger producing a new top-tier parent, acquisition of ten percent or more of the voting securities of a public-utility or holding company, or loss of a previously held Section 3 exemption. Form U5A/A amendments were filed as needed thereafter.
The dataset's EDGAR coverage begins September 1, 1997 and ends with the form's discontinuation in February 2006, when the Energy Policy Act of 2005 repealed PUHCA 1935 effective February 8, 2006. No new U5A filings are possible after that date, and the dataset is closed.
U5A is the short Section 5(a) notification that placed a holding company onto the registered-holding-company roster; U5B is the fuller registration statement filed in conjunction with or after the U5A, providing detailed disclosure of corporate structure, capitalization, intercompany relationships, and financials; U5S is the annual report filed every year afterward by registered holding companies. U5A initiates, U5B substantiates, and U5S maintains.
Records are distributed inside monthly ZIP containers organized by year and named in YYYY/YYYY-MM.zip form. Inside each accession-number folder are a metadata.json descriptor and the original EDGAR submission documents; the file types found across the corpus are TXT, JSON, HTML, and PDF, with image files deliberately omitted.