10-K vs 10-Q: What Each SEC Report Contains and When It's Due

Every public company in the United States files two kinds of periodic reports with the SEC: one annual report and three quarterly reports each year. They share a lot of structure, but they are not interchangeable, and mixing them up leads to the wrong expectations about what data is available and how current it is.

This guide compares Form 10-K and Form 10-Q section by section, covers the filing deadlines, and shows how to pull either one as data instead of opening a filing viewer.

What is a Form 10-K?

A Form 10-K is a company's annual report to the SEC. It is required under Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 for any company with securities registered on a national exchange or that otherwise meets the Act's reporting thresholds. It covers the full fiscal year and includes audited financial statements, a description of the business, risk factors, and governance information.

Most of a 10-K's content comes directly from the issuer, not from an independent auditor, except for the financial statements themselves, which an independent registered public accounting firm must audit and sign off on.

What is a Form 10-Q?

A Form 10-Q is the quarterly update filed for the first three quarters of each fiscal year. Companies do not file a 10-Q for the fourth quarter, since the 10-K covers the full year including that period. A 10-Q contains unaudited financial statements and a shorter management discussion than a 10-K, built to show what changed since the last annual or quarterly report.

Filing deadlines: how fast each one is due

Deadlines depend on the filer's size category under SEC rules, based on public float (the market value of shares held by non-affiliates):

Smaller reporting companies follow the same deadline table above (filer category still controls the clock), but they qualify for scaled disclosure in some sections, such as fewer years of financial statements and lighter executive compensation tables.

What is inside a 10-K

A 10-K is organized into four parts, each with numbered items:

• Part I: Item 1 (Business), Item 1A (Risk Factors), Item 1B (Unresolved Staff Comments), Item 1C (Cybersecurity), Item 2 (Properties), Item 3 (Legal Proceedings), Item 4 (Mine Safety Disclosures, where applicable).
• Part II: Item 5 (Market for the Registrant's Common Equity), Item 7 (Management's Discussion and Analysis, MD&A), Item 7A (Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk), Item 8 (Financial Statements and Supplementary Data), Item 9A (Controls and Procedures).
• Part III: Item 10 (Directors, Executive Officers and Corporate Governance), Item 11 (Executive Compensation), Item 12 (Security Ownership), Item 13 (Certain Relationships and Related Transactions), Item 14 (Principal Accountant Fees). Many companies incorporate Part III by reference to their proxy statement rather than restating it in the 10-K.
• Part IV: Item 15 (Exhibits and Financial Statement Schedules), including Exhibit 21 (list of subsidiaries) and the certifications required under Sections 302 and 906 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Risk factors and MD&A

Item 1A and Item 7 are the two sections read most often outside of the financial statements. Item 1A lists the specific risks the company believes are material to an investment decision, from competitive pressure to regulatory exposure. Item 7 is management's own narrative explanation of the quarter's or year's results, trends and liquidity, in plain language rather than raw numbers.

What is inside a 10-Q

A 10-Q has two parts:

• Part I, Financial Information: Item 1 (unaudited Financial Statements), Item 2 (MD&A), Item 3 (Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk), Item 4 (Controls and Procedures).
• Part II, Other Information: Item 1 (Legal Proceedings), Item 1A (Risk Factors, only if they changed since the last 10-K), Item 2 (Unregistered Sales of Equity Securities), Item 3 (Defaults Upon Senior Securities), Item 5 (Other Information), Item 6 (Exhibits).

Because Item 1A in a 10-Q only needs to cover changes, many quarters show no new risk factor language at all. The 10-K remains the place to read the full list.

Key differences at a glance

How to find and query 10-Ks and 10-Qs as data

You can browse any company's 10-Ks and 10-Qs for free on EDGAR by searching the company and filtering by form type. For comparing filings across companies or pulling specific fields, SecFeed indexes every 10-K and 10-Q since EDGAR's full text archive began, so you can query by form type, ticker and filing date instead of opening each one by hand.

curl "https://secfeedapi.com/v1/filings?query=ticker:AAPL AND formType:\"10-Q\"&size=4" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

Each result includes the accession number, filing date and period of report, which you can pair with /v1/extractor to pull a specific item's text, or /v1/financial-statements to get the parsed statements directly:

from secfeed import Client

sf = Client("YOUR_API_KEY")
filings = sf.filings('ticker:AAPL AND formType:"10-K"', size=1)
statements = sf.financial_statements("AAPL", form_type="10-K", n=1)
print(statements)

Changing formType:"10-K" to formType:"10-Q" in the same query returns quarterly filings instead, with no other changes needed.

Frequently asked questions

Does every public company file both a 10-K and a 10-Q?

Yes, every company with securities registered under Section 12 of the Exchange Act, or that otherwise meets the Act's reporting requirements, must file both. Foreign private issuers file different forms (20-F and 6-K) instead.

Why doesn't a company file a 10-Q for the fourth quarter?

The 10-K already reports the full fiscal year, including the fourth quarter, so a separate fourth quarter report would duplicate that information.

Are 10-Q financial statements audited?

No. 10-Q financial statements are unaudited, though they are typically reviewed by the company's independent auditor under the standards for interim reviews. Only the financial statements in the 10-K receive a full annual audit.

Can a company change its filer category?

Yes. Filer category is reassessed each year based on public float as of the last business day of the second fiscal quarter, so a company can move between large accelerated, accelerated and non-accelerated status as its market value changes.

Where can I read a specific section, like risk factors, without downloading the whole filing?

You can read one item at a time with /v1/extractor (see the API docs) by passing the filing's URL and the item number, such as 1A for risk factors in a 10-K or part2item1a for the equivalent section in a 10-Q.