CIK
The permanent numeric identifier the SEC assigns to every filer — company, fund or individual.
Updated 2026-07-26
A CIK, or Central Index Key, is the number under which a filer's whole history lives. It does not change when the company renames itself, changes ticker, reincorporates or is acquired, which makes it far more reliable than a name for joining records across years.
Individuals have CIKs too. An officer who sits on the boards of three companies files under one CIK for all three, and that is what lets a person page collect their transactions across issuers instead of guessing from name spellings.
A CIK is padded to ten digits in some contexts and printed without leading zeros in others. Both forms refer to the same filer; the padding is a formatting choice, not a different identifier.
Related terms
5 entries- Accession number
- The unique identifier of one submission to EDGAR, in the form 0001234567-25-000123.
- EDGAR
- The public filing system of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, where company and insider disclosures are submitted and published.
- Entity resolution
- Deciding whether two records from different sources describe the same company or person.
- Insider
- A person or entity whose relationship with a company obliges them to report their transactions in its securities.
- Ticker symbol
- The short code under which a security trades on a particular venue.