SEC EDGAR API

Warnings

• breaking SEC EDGAR requires a valid User-Agent header with company name and contact email. Requests without it are blocked with 403 errors.
  Fix: Always pass user_agent='YourName yourname@example.com' when creating EdgarClient.
• gotcha CIK numbers must be zero-padded to 10 digits for some endpoints. Passing an unpadded CIK may result in 404 errors.
  Fix: Zero-pad CIK strings: cik = str(cik).zfill(10)
• gotcha SEC EDGAR enforces rate limiting at 10 requests per second. Exceeding this results in temporary IP blocks.
  Fix: Add delays between requests with time.sleep(0.1) or use a rate limiter.
• gotcha The package import uses underscores (sec_edgar_api) while the pip install name uses hyphens (sec-edgar-api).
  Fix: Use 'from sec_edgar_api import EdgarClient' after installing with 'pip install sec-edgar-api'.
• gotcha Returned data is raw JSON from SEC EDGAR as Python dicts. There are no typed models or dataclass wrappers. Key names follow SEC conventions and may be inconsistent.
  Fix: Inspect response dicts carefully and handle missing keys defensively with .get().

Install

• pip install sec-edgar-api Python

Imports

• EdgarClient

  from sec_edgar_api import EdgarClient

  The main client class is EdgarClient, not SECEdgarAPI or similar names.

Quickstart

Fetch SEC EDGAR submissions and company facts for Apple Inc.

from sec_edgar_api import EdgarClient

# SEC EDGAR requires a User-Agent header identifying the caller
client = EdgarClient(user_agent="MyCompany admin@mycompany.com")

# Get submissions for Apple (CIK 0000320193)
submissions = client.get_submissions(cik="0000320193")
print(submissions["name"])
print(submissions["cik"])

# Get company facts (XBRL data)
facts = client.get_company_facts(cik="0000320193")
print(list(facts["facts"].keys()))