Form 10-K
The annual report of a U.S. public company, containing audited financial statements and a description of the business.
Updated 2026-07-26
The 10-K is the longest and most structured thing a company files: business description, risk factors, management's discussion, audited statements and notes. Its financial statements carry an auditor's opinion, which the quarterly reports do not.
Since the statements are tagged in XBRL, the numbers inside a 10-K can be read by machine without anyone retyping them. That is the basis of every financial figure this site shows for a company.
An annual report describes a period that has ended. The filing date tells you when the description became public; the period end tells you what it describes. Both are shown, and confusing them is the fastest way to date a figure wrongly by a quarter or more.
Related terms
5 entries- Disclosure lag
- The gap between the date something happened and the date it became public.
- Fiscal period
- The stretch of time a reported figure covers, which need not line up with the calendar year.
- Form 10-Q
- The quarterly report of a U.S. public company, with unaudited financial statements.
- Form 8-K
- A report of a specific material event, filed within days of the event rather than on a calendar schedule.
- XBRL
- The tagging standard that turns figures inside a financial report into machine-readable facts.