What Is a 10-K Filing? The SEC's Annual Report, Explained

A 10-K is the annual report a US public company is legally required to file with the SEC. It is audited, follows a fixed structure of numbered Items, and covers far more than the glossy annual report a company mails to shareholders: a full description of the business, risk factors, financial statements, and management's discussion of the year's results.

What a 10-K is and who has to file one

Form 10-K is required under Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 for companies with securities registered on a national exchange, or that otherwise meet the Act's reporting thresholds. It is the primary way investors get audited, standardized financial information directly from the company rather than through a broker, news outlet or research report.

Three things set a 10-K apart from a company's own shareholder annual report:

• It is a legal filing, not a marketing document. The content and structure are set by SEC rules, not by the company's communications team.
• The financial statements are audited by an independent registered public accounting firm, whose report appears in the filing itself.
• It is filed on EDGAR, so every 10-K from every filer is public, searchable and in the same basic shape.

How soon after year end it is due

The SEC sorts filers into three categories by public float, and the 10-K deadline depends on which one a company falls into:

What is inside a 10-K

A 10-K is organized into four parts, each made of numbered Items. The exact item numbering is consistent across filers, which is what makes it possible to pull the same section from thousands of companies:

Item 1A, the risk factors, is one of the most frequently read sections because it is the company's own list of what could go wrong, disclosed to satisfy securities law rather than written for marketing. How to extract 10-K risk factors covers pulling that section specifically.

How a 10-K differs from a 10-Q and an 8-K

A 10-K is one of three regular SEC filings a public company makes, and they are not interchangeable:

• 10-K: annual, audited, comprehensive, filed once per fiscal year.
• 10-Q: quarterly, unaudited (though reviewed by the auditor), filed for the first three quarters of the fiscal year. The fourth quarter is covered by the 10-K instead.
• 8-K: filed within days of a specific triggering event, such as an acquisition, executive change or earnings release, not on a fixed annual or quarterly schedule.

A full comparison of what each one contains and when it is due is in 10-K vs 10-Q.

What a 10-K does not tell you

A 10-K is a snapshot as of the company's fiscal year end, filed up to 90 days later. Treat it accordingly:

1. It is already stale by the time it is filed. Up to three months can pass between fiscal year end and the filing date.
2. It only updates once a year. Material changes between 10-Ks show up in 8-Ks and 10-Qs, not in the annual report.
3. Numbers are company-reported, audited for fair presentation under US GAAP, but still prepared and presented by the company itself, not an independent analyst.

Reading 10-K filings as data

Browsing 10-Ks one at a time on EDGAR works for a single company, but comparing financial statements, risk factors or filing dates across many companies by hand does not scale. SecFeed parses 10-K filings directly, including the XBRL-tagged financial statements, so you can pull them as structured JSON.

curl "https://secfeedapi.com/v1/financial-statements?ticker=NVDA&formType=10-K" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

from secfeed import Client

sf = Client("YOUR_API_KEY")
statements = sf.financial_statements("NVDA", form_type="10-K", n=2)
for period in statements["data"]:
    print(period["fiscalYear"], period["incomeStatement"]["revenues"])

That call returns the income statement, balance sheet and cash flow totals from a company's most recent 10-Ks, taken from the filing's own XBRL tags rather than re-typed by hand. To search for 10-K filings by company, date range or other criteria first, use /v1/filings, and to pull a specific section such as the risk factors or MD&A as text, use the filing section extractor. For downloading the full filing and its exhibits, including material contracts filed as Exhibit 10, see how to download SEC filings with Python and downloading material contracts (Exhibit 10).

Frequently asked questions

How often is a 10-K filed?

Once per fiscal year, covering the full year just ended. It is the company's fourth-quarter and full-year report combined, since there is no separate 10-Q for the fourth quarter.

Is a 10-K the same as an annual report?

No, though the terms are often used loosely as if they were. The 10-K is the legal filing made to the SEC, with a fixed structure set by SEC rules. A company's shareholder annual report is a separate, often more polished document that a company is not legally required to produce in the same format, and some companies simply send shareholders their 10-K instead.

Who is required to file a 10-K?

Companies with a class of securities registered under Section 12 of the Exchange Act (generally, companies listed on a national exchange), and companies that have registered securities under the Securities Act and meet certain shareholder or asset thresholds under Section 15(d), must file a 10-K each year.

Where can I find a company's 10-K for free?

Every 10-K is public and free on the SEC's EDGAR system, searchable by company name, ticker or CIK. SecFeed indexes the same filings and adds structured access: parsed financial statements, extracted sections and filtering across companies, through the EDGAR filing search API.

What happens if a company files its 10-K late?

It generally files Form NT 10-K, a notification of late filing, which can provide a brief automatic extension if the company states a reason and represents that it could not file on time without unreasonable effort or expense. Repeated or unresolved late filings can affect a company's eligibility to use certain short-form registration statements.