Source break // SEC EDGAR, 13 October 2026
EDGAR filing times stopped meaning one thing per company
- Source
- The acceptanceDateTime field in each company’s submissions file (data.sec.gov/submissions)
- First seen in the data
- 13 October 2026
- Found
- 13 October 2026
- Our handling changed
- 13 October 2026 (commit abfff0e0, 6ac7d466)
- What we did
- Switched source · Withheld
What changed
The acceptance time in the submissions file is never Eastern time. Some filings carry true UTC; others carry UTC with the Eastern offset added a second time. Until 9 October 2026 each company’s file used one of the two throughout. Filings accepted on 13 October read as true UTC in every file we checked, while older filings kept their old reading, so a single company’s file now mixes both.
What it did to our series
- Read as Eastern time, the way our earnings calendar first read it, the field put companies’ report times on the wrong side of the session: Apple showed as reporting before the open and JPMorgan after the close.
- A first fix measured one encoding per company file. It broke on 13 October, the day JPMorgan’s first true-UTC results filing arrived: five 6:30 a.m. filings showed as one before the open and four during market hours.
Measured
- Across the 141 companies on the earnings calendar before 9 October, 80 files carried true UTC and 61 the doubled offset; reading them as Eastern put 65 of 141 on the wrong session and left 13 more unsupported.
- JPMorgan’s results filings of 14 July and 13 October 2026 were both accepted at 6:30:38 a.m. Eastern, yet the file shows 14:30:38 for the first and 10:30:38 for the second.
- EDGAR’s company 8-K Atom feed gives each filing’s time with an explicit offset, and it matched the Accepted line on the filing index page for 30 of 30 filings across both encodings and a mixed file.
What we did
- Report times now come from the 8-K Atom feed, filing by filing, never from the submissions field.
- Stored calendar entries read before the switch carry no report time until they are read again, so an old reading is withheld rather than shown.
- The AI connector’s earnings tool gives a date and its basis but no time of day.
Why: A time that is right for some filings and silently wrong for others cannot be corrected by one rule per company, so the field is no longer read for clocks at all. Withholding an old reading is better than showing a time we know may be four or five hours off.
Still true
- The offerings calendar measures the gap between two filings in the same company file. A pair that straddles 13 October in a file that used the doubled offset is off by four to five hours; the page prints no clock times.
Where you see it
- Earnings calendar: Before-the-open and after-the-close labels read from the 8-K feed since 13 October 2026.
- Offerings calendar: Filing-to-filing gaps across 13 October can be off by four to five hours in some company files.
- AI connector: earnings_date returns no time of day.