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Real-time SEC filing APIs, and what real-time actually means

Most SEC filing APIs advertise real-time and deliver 12 to 24 hour lag. Here is the truth about how EDGAR publishing works, why the delays exist, and what latency numbers to demand from any provider.

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The claim vs the reality

Every SEC filing API vendor claims to be real-time. Almost none of them are.

The SEC EDGAR system publishes filings on a rolling basis 24/7 with a technical latency of about 15 to 30 seconds from acceptance to public availability. Any vendor claiming to be real-time should be delivering the parsed data within 60 seconds of that acceptance timestamp.

Here is what different vendors actually deliver in practice, based on measured comparison:

| Vendor | Advertised Latency | Actual Latency (Form 4) | |--------|-------------------|--------------------------| | SEC EDGAR direct | Real-time | 15 to 30 seconds | | EdgarKit | Real-time (30 seconds) | 15 to 45 seconds | | Finnhub | Real-time | 12 to 24 hours | | Polygon | Real-time | 4 to 24 hours | | Financial Modeling Prep | Real-time | 6 to 48 hours | | SEC-API.io | Real-time | 30 seconds to 5 minutes | | Alpha Vantage | Delayed | Weekly batch |

The gap between "real-time" (30 seconds) and what most vendors deliver (12+ hours) is where the interesting signals live. Insider trades that matter are usually acted on within hours by informed traders. If your data is 24 hours late, the arbitrage window has closed before you see the filing.

Why vendors claim what they cannot deliver

Definitional gaming. Many vendors define "real-time" as "we ingest EDGAR's daily bulk file overnight and expose it via API by 9am the next day, which is faster than the previous end-of-week batch." That is real-time by their internal metric but 12+ hours from the actual filing.

Cost avoidance. Polling EDGAR's /cgi-bin/browse-edgar endpoint every few seconds requires infrastructure. Most vendors would rather run a nightly batch job.

Ambiguity in the fine print. Read the SLA. Very few vendors will contractually guarantee sub-minute latency.

What latency you actually need

For most use cases, 30-minute latency is enough:

  • Portfolio compliance reporting
  • Fundamental research on 10-Ks
  • Historical backtesting
  • Content generation
  • Long-term investment analysis

For a small subset, sub-minute latency is table stakes:

  • Insider trade alerting for active trading
  • Event-driven strategies on 8-Ks (earnings, M&A, guidance)
  • Merger arb tracking
  • Congressional trading alerts

If you fall into the second bucket, you need to test latency yourself. Do not trust the marketing page.

How to test a vendor's actual latency

Pick a company that files frequently (any large-cap with insider activity, TPL and CRWV are good). Set up two things:

  1. A polling script hitting EDGAR directly, watching for new Form 4s from that company
  2. A polling script hitting your vendor's API for the same company

Log the timestamp of the first appearance in each feed. Do this for a week. The gap is your real latency.

Most vendors fail this test. The ones that pass are worth paying for.

What EdgarKit's ingestion looks like

Under the hood, EdgarKit runs three parallel ingestion paths:

  1. EDGAR daily feed polling every 30 seconds against the full-index endpoint
  2. RSS feed subscription for high-priority form types (4, 8-K)
  3. XBRL bulk file processing for historical backfill

New filings hit the API within 30 to 45 seconds of SEC acceptance. Webhooks fire within 60 seconds. The full historical corpus (2004 through present) is queryable in the same shape.

Current stats from the production DB:

  • 398,000+ filings indexed
  • 825,000+ parsed insider transactions
  • 7,300+ companies fully covered
  • Ingestion runs every 30 seconds, 24/7

What real-time actually enables

Real-time SEC data unlocks a specific class of product:

  • Insider alert bots: Discord/Slack bot that posts every P-code insider buy above $100k within a minute of filing
  • Event trading: 8-K filings for earnings, guidance, and M&A that trigger algorithmic trades
  • Compliance monitoring: Alerting when insiders at portfolio companies file transactions
  • Research automation: LLM agents that summarize 10-Ks the moment they file

None of these work if your data lags a day. All of them work at 30-second latency.

Try it

Signup for a free EdgarKit API key at edgarkit.com/#signup. Free tier covers 10,000 requests per month with the same sub-minute latency as paid tiers.

Or read the Track Insider Buying guide for a working code example.