How to Access US Company Financial Data

Every other guide in this series answers the same question: which register publishes company financial statements, and how do you get them? The United States inverts it. There is no federal company register, no national filing of accounts, and no equivalent of Companies House, the Handelsregister, or the CVR. Incorporation happens at state level, and state registers record that a company exists — not what it earns. For the roughly 4,000 to 6,000 companies that trade on public markets, the US then swings to the opposite extreme: SEC EDGAR is arguably the best free financial-disclosure system in the world, fully machine-readable, with an open API and decades of history. For the millions of private companies, the honest answer is that audited financial statements are simply not publicly available, and no amount of searching will change that. This guide explains exactly where the line falls, what EDGAR gives you, what state registers do and don't hold, and the legitimate partial sources professionals actually use when a private US counterparty has to be assessed.

Why there is no US company register

The structural fact that governs everything else: company formation in the United States is a matter of state law, not federal law. A company is incorporated in Delaware, Nevada, Texas, or any of the fifty states, and each state's Secretary of State maintains its own register. There are therefore 50-plus separate registers, with different search interfaces, different data fields, different fee structures, and different bulk-data policies — and none of them collects financial statements.

How many companies, and how to size the market

The headline count is enormous but misleading. The SBA Office of Advocacy puts the number of US small businesses at roughly 35 to 36 million — 99.9% of all American businesses, using its standard definition of a small business as one with fewer than 500 employees. But the great majority have no payroll at all: the Office of Advocacy's own breakdown shows about 82% are nonemployer firms — sole proprietors and freelancers — numbering close to 30 million. The population that matters for company-data work is much smaller:

For scoping a US dataset, the ~6.4 million employer firms is the number to work from, not the 36 million headline. Census data puts employer firms at about 6.4 million, of which 99.7% have fewer than 500 employees — leaving roughly 20,000 large firms — and of the whole population only a few thousand are SEC filers with public financials. Business formation has run at historically high rates since 2021, with the Census Bureau recording roughly 5.5 million new business applications in 2024, well above the pre-pandemic norm of about 3.5 million a year, so the entity population churns fast at the small end.

What a state register typically holds is narrow but useful:

• Entity name, type, and status — active, dissolved, forfeited, in good standing.
• Formation date and jurisdiction, plus the entity's state file number.
• Registered agent and registered office — often a commercial agent's address, not the operating location.
• Annual report or franchise-tax status — confirmation the entity has kept up its filings, which in most states says nothing about its finances.
• Sometimes officers or directors, depending on the state.

Delaware and the incorporation market

One state dominates. Delaware is home to more than 2.1 million active business entities, and its 2024 annual report records 289,810 new entity formations in that year alone. The concentration at the top of the economy is extreme: 66.7% of Fortune 500 companies are incorporated in Delaware, and 81.4% of US-based IPOs in 2024 chose Delaware as their corporate home. The draw is the General Corporation Law and the Court of Chancery — a specialised business court that has written much of modern US corporate case law.

For a data consumer this creates a specific and frequently misunderstood pattern: the state of incorporation is usually not the state of operations. A company headquartered in California, trading in Texas, and employing people in twelve states may be a Delaware entity with a registered agent's address in Wilmington. Delaware's register will confirm it exists; it will tell you nothing about where the business actually happens, and nothing at all about its finances. Nevada, Wyoming, and New Mexico compete for formations on similar grounds, some of them explicitly marketing privacy.

Fifty registers, fifty standards

Register quality varies enormously by state, and this is a practical planning constraint rather than a detail. Some states offer clean search, downloadable filing images, and usable bulk data; others provide a basic name lookup, charge per document, restrict bulk access, or offer no programmatic interface at all. Fields differ too — some states publish officers and directors, others only the registered agent. Charging models range from free search to per-search fees.

Two further wrinkles matter. A company operating across state lines must register as a "foreign entity" in each state where it does business, so a single business generates records in multiple state registers, each with its own file number. And status terminology is inconsistent: "good standing," "active," "forfeited," "administratively dissolved," and "revoked" carry different meanings and consequences in different states, so status normalisation across a fifty-state dataset is real work. Delaware, being the incorporation capital, is also the state most likely to hold the parent entity record — but the operating footprint will be recorded elsewhere.

SEC EDGAR: world-class data, for a narrow population

Where the US does disclose, it does so better than almost anyone. The Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR system (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval) publishes the filings of every company with SEC reporting obligations, and it is free, comprehensive, and built for machines.

• The 10-K is the audited annual report: full income statement, balance sheet, cash-flow statement, notes, management discussion, and risk factors. The 10-Q is its quarterly counterpart, and the 8-K reports material events between them. Foreign private issuers file the 20-F or 40-F instead.
• Everything is free. No account, no per-document fee, no clearing agency — the contrast with Austria, Ireland, or Luxembourg could not be sharper.
• XBRL tagging has been required since 2009, so financial data is available at line-item level rather than trapped in PDFs. Inline XBRL now embeds the tags in the human-readable filing itself.
• Open APIs at data.sec.gov expose company submissions, all XBRL facts for a company, and "frames" that return one concept across all filers for a period — the last of these is genuinely powerful for benchmarking.
• Full-text search covers filings since 2001, and the archive holds over twenty million filings from more than 890,000 filing entities since 1994.

How many US public companies are there?

Fewer than most people assume, and the number has been falling for a quarter of a century. World Bank data puts listed domestic companies in the US at 3,908 in 2025, down from 4,010 in 2024. Academic tracking using CRSP data counts 3,657 domestic operating companies plus 1,515 foreign firms listed on major US exchanges at the end of 2025 — the "operating companies" measure excludes REITs, closed-end funds, and ETFs. Exchange-level counts put Nasdaq at around 2,325 and the NYSE at around 1,588 listings at the same date.

The historical arc matters more than any single figure. The US listed population peaked at 8,090 companies in 1996 and has roughly halved since, as companies stay private longer, private capital deepens, and mergers and take-privates remove listings faster than IPOs add them. For a data consumer this means the share of the US economy visible through EDGAR is shrinking year by year — the free, excellent data covers a steadily smaller slice of American business.

What financial data you actually get

For an SEC reporting company, the disclosure is deeper than any European register provides. The core forms:

Two features have no European equivalent at this scale. Quarterly reporting means four financial data points a year rather than one, so trend detection is far faster. And segment reporting in the 10-K breaks revenue and profit down by business line and geography, which is exactly the granularity that benchmarking and competitor analysis need.

Where to get it, and what it costs

The answer to cost is short: nothing. There is no paywall, no account, no per-document fee, and no clearing agency anywhere in the SEC system. The access routes:

• EDGAR full-text search — search the text of all filings and exhibits published since 2001, with Boolean operators, free.
• Company filing pages — every filer's complete history by CIK, back to 1993–94, downloadable as HTML, text, or the original documents.
• The submissions API (data.sec.gov/submissions/CIK##########.json) — a company's filing metadata and history as JSON.
• The companyfacts API (data.sec.gov/api/xbrl/companyfacts/) — every XBRL fact a company has reported, across all filings, in one call. This is the fastest route to a multi-year financial history.
• The frames API (data.sec.gov/api/xbrl/frames/) — one financial concept across all filers for a period, for example every company's reported revenue for a given year. This is the benchmarking endpoint, and nothing in Europe matches it.
• Financial Statement Data Sets — quarterly bulk downloads of the numeric data from all XBRL filings, for anyone who wants the whole corpus rather than per-company calls.

The practical constraints are technical, not commercial: the SEC asks for a descriptive User-Agent header identifying your application and contact, and applies a fair-access rate limit (on the order of ten requests per second). Respect both and the entire corpus is yours at no cost.

The identifier problem: why US entity resolution is hard

Alongside the missing financials sits a second structural problem that catches out every team building a US pipeline: the United States has no national company number. Where Norway has the organisasjonsnummer, Finland the Business ID, and the Netherlands the KVK number — one permanent identifier resolving a company across every government system — the US has a set of partial identifiers, none of which covers the whole population and none of which authoritatively links to the others.

The private-company gap: the defining feature of US data

This is the part that surprises anyone arriving from Europe. In Germany, Denmark, or Belgium, a private limited company with twenty employees files accounts that anyone can read. In the United States, the equivalent company files nothing public at all. There is no obligation on an ordinary private company to publish financial statements — not to a state register, not to the SEC, not to anyone but its own lenders, investors, and tax authority.

The scale of the gap is easiest to see at the top of the market. Among US companies with over $100 million in annual revenue, only about 13% — roughly 2,790 companies — are publicly traded, leaving more than 19,000 substantial private businesses with no public financials. And the number of US public companies has fallen by roughly half over the past twenty-five years as companies stay private longer, which means the share of the economy visible through EDGAR is shrinking, not growing.

The narrow exceptions

A minority of otherwise-private companies do end up filing financial statements, and knowing the categories is worth real money:

• Companies over SEC registration thresholds. A company must register with the SEC — and therefore file — once it exceeds $10 million in total assets and has 2,000 or more holders of record (or 500 or more non-accredited holders), even without a listing.
• Public debt issuers. Private companies that issue registered bonds take on reporting obligations, so some large private groups file full financials because of their debt rather than their equity.
• Regulation A Tier 2 issuers. Companies raising up to $75 million in any twelve-month period under Reg A must file offering circulars plus ongoing semiannual and annual reports with audited financials.
• Regulated utilities. Electric, gas, and water utilities file detailed financial data with state public utility commissions and, for interstate operations, with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) — revenue, operating expenses, rate base, and capital structure. Access is fragmented across fifty-plus commissions.
• Banks and insurers. Regulated financial institutions report to their supervisors — bank call reports and insurance statutory filings are public and detailed, covering entities that would otherwise disclose nothing.
• Nonprofits. Tax-exempt organisations file the Form 990, which is public and contains real financial detail — a large and often overlooked dataset covering hospitals, universities, foundations, and trade bodies.

Add these together and the population of US entities filing meaningful public financial statements runs to a few tens of thousands, against tens of millions of registered entities. That ratio is the US data story in one line.

The private-equity layer

A large and growing share of substantial US private companies sit inside private equity and venture capital portfolios, and this shapes both why they stay private and what disclosure exists. Sponsor-backed companies have sophisticated financial reporting — they have to, for their lenders and investors — but it flows to the fund, the credit providers, and the board rather than to any public register. Where such a company carries rated or registered debt, some of that reporting becomes visible; where it does not, the company can be very large and still publish nothing.

The distress data gives a sense of the population's scale and stress. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, 81 US private-equity- and venture-backed companies filed for bankruptcy in 2024, falling to 66 in 2025 as credit loosened and more situations were resolved out of court — against 688 and 749 total US corporate bankruptcies in those years respectively. Sponsor-backed filings concentrated in consumer discretionary and healthcare, sectors squeezed by rates, reimbursement change, and leverage. For a risk workflow the lesson is that a private US counterparty's ownership matters: a sponsor-backed company usually has strong internal reporting and access to capital, but also leverage that a public register will never show you.

The nonprofit exception: Form 990 and the largest open financial dataset in America

There is one enormous exception to US financial opacity, and it is consistently underused by commercial data teams because it sits outside the corporate world. Tax-exempt organisations must file an annual information return with the IRS — the Form 990 — and it is public by law. Unlike a corporate tax return, which is confidential, the 990 is a disclosure document: anyone can read it, in full, for free.

The scope is far broader than "charities." The 501(c) universe spans 27 subsections and includes hospitals and health systems, private universities and colleges, foundations, trade associations, professional bodies, credit unions, museums, pension trusts, and social-welfare organisations — many of them very large enterprises. A major US teaching hospital or private university publishes more financial detail through its 990 than most European private companies publish anywhere.

Which form, and what it contains

The detail on a full Form 990 exceeds what most European small and medium companies file: revenue broken down by contributions, programme services, and investments; expenses split by programme, management, and fundraising; and compensation disclosed for named officers, directors, and highest-paid employees. For competitor analysis, market sizing, or counterparty assessment in any sector with a significant nonprofit presence — healthcare, education, insurance, research — this is a substantial and free source.

Where to get it, and what it costs

Free, in several forms:

• IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search (TEOS) — the official lookup for an organisation's status, determination letter, and filed returns.
• Exempt Organizations Business Master File Extract (EO BMF) — the full universe of recognised tax-exempt organisations with names, EINs, and addresses, downloadable by state and region, updated monthly. This is the closest thing the US has to a free national entity register for any sector.
• SOI annual extracts — the IRS Statistics of Income office publishes selected financial data from all Forms 990, 990-EZ, and 990-PF filed by active organisations in a calendar year, as analytical datasets.
• Bulk PDFs and machine-readable XML — the IRS releases processed 990 documents in bulk, with electronically filed returns available as complete XML containing the full filing: financials, officers, and schedules.
• ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer — a free interface over more than 1.8 million nonprofit tax filings, with returns back to 2001, full-text search across filings, and a public API. In practice this is the fastest route in.
• The auto-revocation list — organisations that lose exempt status for failing to file for three consecutive years, published by the IRS. A useful negative signal.

The hidden gem: Single Audits

One further source deserves specific mention because it delivers something the rest of the US private landscape does not: genuine audited financial statements. Any nonprofit — or other non-federal entity — that spends above the federal threshold in a single fiscal year (historically $750,000 in federal grant money) must undergo a Single Audit under federal uniform guidance, and the resulting audit package is filed with the Federal Audit Clearinghouse and made public. These packages include the organisation's full audited financial statements, auditor's opinion, schedule of federal awards, and any findings. PDFs are available for fiscal years from around 2015 onward.

Where private US financials actually surface

When there is no filing, professionals assemble a picture from fragments. None of these is a substitute for audited accounts, and it is important to be honest about that — but together they support a defensible assessment.

• UCC filings. Under the Uniform Commercial Code, secured lenders file financing statements against a borrower's assets, recorded at state level. They reveal who lends to a company, when, and against what collateral — a strong signal of borrowing activity, banking relationships, and asset base. Delaware operates one of the most heavily used UCC filing systems in the country.
• Court records. Federal and state litigation, and especially bankruptcy filings, expose detailed financials — a Chapter 11 debtor files schedules of assets, liabilities, and monthly operating reports that are more granular than most annual accounts.
• Bond and credit documentation. Companies with rated debt appear in rating-agency reports, and covenant reporting reaches lenders and sometimes the market.
• Government contract data. Federal award systems publish contract values and vendor details for companies that sell to the government — a real revenue signal for that segment.
• Property, licensing, and employment records. Real-estate holdings, professional licences, and regulatory registrations establish scale and footprint.
• Trade payment data. Commercial bureaux aggregate how promptly a company pays its suppliers — the closest thing the US has to a broad private-company credit signal, though it is proprietary and inferential, not filed.
• Voluntary disclosure. In a private US transaction, financial statements typically arrive because the counterparty provides them under an NDA. In the US the practical route to private financials is usually the relationship, not the register.

The two real alternatives: estimate it, or find it abroad

When a private US company publishes nothing, there are exactly two workable routes. One accepts that no filing exists and builds a number. The other refuses to accept it and goes looking for a jurisdiction where the same economic activity was required to be disclosed. Most teams reach for the first. The second is more powerful and far less used.

Alternative 1: modelled estimates

Estimated financials are constructed rather than retrieved. The common methods:

• Revenue-per-employee benchmarking — take a reasonably reliable headcount and multiply by an industry revenue-per-employee ratio derived from companies that do file. This is the workhorse method and the source of most "estimated revenue" figures you see on commercial platforms.
• Peer-derived ratio modelling — build margin, working-capital, and leverage assumptions from a peer set of filed accounts and apply them to the estimated revenue base.
• Trade payment behaviour — aggregated supplier payment data, converted into a payment score. This measures liquidity behaviour rather than size, and it is genuinely predictive of distress.
• Observable operational signals — locations, property footprint, job postings, licences, government contract awards, import and export records. These bound the scale of a business even when they do not measure it.

Alternative 2: follow the ownership chain out of the US

This is the underused one, and for many counterparties it turns "no data" into audited group accounts. The logic is simple: a US company may publish nothing, but its foreign parent almost certainly has to. If the US entity is a subsidiary of a German, French, UK, Nordic, or Japanese group, that parent files consolidated financial statements in a jurisdiction where disclosure is mandatory — and those consolidated accounts include the US operations.

Step one: establish whether a foreign parent exists.

• GLEIF Level 2 data is the best free starting point. The Global LEI System's "who owns whom" dataset records each LEI holder's direct accounting consolidating parent and ultimate accounting consolidating parent — the latter defined precisely as the highest-level legal entity preparing consolidated financial statements. That is exactly the entity whose accounts you want. GLEIF publishes it openly and free, and relationships are verified against public documents such as subsidiary lists in audited consolidated accounts.
• Exhibit 21 of a 10-K lists a US registrant's subsidiaries — useful in reverse, to find out whether a company you are looking at belongs to a listed group.
• European parents' own filings disclose their subsidiaries. Consolidated accounts across most of Europe include a participations or subsidiary-undertakings note naming each subsidiary, its registered office, and the ownership percentage — so searching parent-side filings will surface US entities by name.
• State foreign-qualification records, company websites, and press coverage fill the remaining gaps.

Step two: pull the parent's accounts from its home register. Once the parent is identified, the guides in this series tell you exactly where to go and what it costs — free XBRL from Denmark's CVR, free filings from Norway's Brønnøysund or the UK's Companies House, the Bundesanzeiger for Germany, the Firmenbuch for Austria. What you get:

• Consolidated group financials, audited, including the US operations.
• Geographic segment reporting, which in many groups breaks out North American revenue and sometimes assets or headcount as a separate line.
• The subsidiary list, giving the legal name, registered office, and ownership percentage of the US entity — which also solves part of the identifier problem described above.
• Occasionally, subsidiary-level detail where local rules or the group's own disclosure practice provide it.

Accounting standards and who audits

US public companies report under US GAAP, set by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), with the SEC as regulator; foreign private issuers may file under IFRS. Notably, the US has not adopted IFRS for domestic issuers, so US GAAP versus IFRS reconciliation is a live issue in any cross-border comparison — revenue recognition, lease accounting, and development-cost treatment all differ enough to matter.

Audits of public companies are performed by firms registered with and inspected by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), created after the Enron and WorldCom failures, with internal-control attestation under Sarbanes-Oxley. Private companies may be audited, reviewed, compiled, or not examined at all, entirely depending on what their lenders and investors require — so even when private financials are obtained under NDA, the level of assurance varies enormously and should be established before the numbers are relied on.

Listed companies and the exchanges

US public companies list principally on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, which together host the largest equity market in the world by capitalisation. The listed population is on the order of several thousand companies — small relative to the number of US businesses, and, as noted, roughly half what it was twenty-five years ago. Over-the-counter markets host additional companies with lighter or no SEC reporting, which is a trap in itself: an OTC-quoted company is not necessarily an SEC reporting company, so the existence of a ticker does not guarantee the existence of audited filings. Check the filer status, not the quote.

Insolvency: the one place private financials become public

US bankruptcy data is public, federal, and — unusually for this jurisdiction — genuinely rich. Cases are filed in the federal bankruptcy courts, dockets are available through the courts' PACER system, and the Administrative Office of the US Courts publishes quarterly and annual statistics.

The recent cycle has been sharp. For the twelve months ending 31 December 2024, business bankruptcy filings rose 22.1% to 23,107 — the highest total since 2017 — with increases across all three main chapters: Chapter 7 up 23.0% to 12,582, Chapter 11 up 19.6% to 8,456, and Chapter 13 up 14.6% to 1,520. Chapter 7 (liquidation) accounted for 54.5% of business filings and Chapter 11 (reorganisation) for 36.6%. Separately, Epiq AACER recorded commercial Chapter 11 filings up 20% to 7,879 in calendar 2024, with small-business Subchapter V elections up 32% to 2,381. Filings continued rising into 2025.

Four pitfalls in US company data workflows

Pitfall 1: Expecting a register filing that does not exist

The most expensive error. Private US companies file no public financial statements anywhere. Teams applying European habits burn days searching for a document that was never created. Establish filer status first, then choose the workflow.

Pitfall 2: Confusing the state "annual report" with accounts

A Secretary of State annual report is an entity-status confirmation with a fee — address, agent, sometimes officers. It contains no financial data at all. Do not let the name mislead the pipeline.

Pitfall 3: Reading the state of incorporation as the state of operations

Two-thirds of the Fortune 500 are Delaware entities; almost none of them operate there. Registered-agent addresses are not business addresses, and incorporation data says nothing about geography, employees, or activity.

Pitfall 4: Assuming a ticker means audited filings

OTC-quoted companies may have limited or no SEC reporting obligations. Confirm the company files 10-Ks with the SEC before assuming EDGAR-grade financials exist.

How the US compares to European registers

The comparison is stark and worth internalising: the US has the best public-company disclosure system in the world and effectively the weakest private-company disclosure among developed economies. A European risk team that can pull audited accounts on a €5 million Danish supplier in ninety seconds will find nothing at all on a $50 million US supplier. That asymmetry — not language, not cost, not format — is the defining feature of US company data.

What's free, what costs money, and where to find it

Frequently asked questions

Is US company financial data publicly available?

It depends entirely on the company. For SEC reporting companies — public filers — full audited financial statements are free on EDGAR, in structured XBRL, with an open API. For ordinary private US companies, financial statements are not publicly available anywhere: there is no federal register, and state registers hold no financial data.

Is there a US equivalent of Companies House?

No. Company formation is governed by state law, so there are fifty-plus separate Secretary of State registers rather than one national register, and none of them collects financial statements. The closest federal analogue is SEC EDGAR, but that covers only companies with securities-law reporting obligations, not companies generally.

Where do I find a US company's financial statements?

If it is an SEC reporting company, on EDGAR at sec.gov — the 10-K is the audited annual report, the 10-Q is quarterly, and structured XBRL data is available through free APIs at data.sec.gov. If it is a private company, there is no filing to find; you would need to work from partial sources such as UCC filings, court records, regulatory filings, or financials provided directly under an NDA.

Do private US companies have to file financial statements?

No. There is no general obligation on a private US company to publish financial statements. Narrow exceptions exist: companies crossing SEC registration thresholds (over $10 million in total assets with 2,000 or more holders of record, or 500 or more non-accredited holders), registered debt issuers, Regulation A Tier 2 issuers, regulated utilities, banks and insurers, and tax-exempt nonprofits filing Form 990.

Does a Secretary of State annual report contain financial information?

No — and this is a common and costly misunderstanding. A US state annual report is a short filing confirming the entity's address, registered agent, and sometimes officers, submitted with a fee to keep the company in good standing. It contains no balance sheet, no income statement, and no financial data of any kind.

Why are so many US companies incorporated in Delaware?

Delaware's General Corporation Law and its Court of Chancery — a specialised business court that has written much of modern US corporate case law — make it the default choice. More than 2.1 million legal entities are incorporated there, including 66.7% of the Fortune 500, and 81.4% of US-based IPOs in 2024 chose Delaware. Note that incorporation there says nothing about where a company operates.

Is SEC EDGAR free, and does it have an API?

Yes to both. EDGAR filings are free with no account or per-document fee, and the SEC provides free public APIs at data.sec.gov covering company submissions, all XBRL facts for a company, and cross-company frames that return one financial concept across all filers for a period. XBRL tagging has been required since 2009, so data is available at line-item level.

How many US companies are publicly traded?

Around 3,900 listed domestic companies as of 2025 (World Bank), down from 4,010 in 2024, plus roughly 1,500 foreign firms listed on major US exchanges. The count peaked at 8,090 in 1996 and has roughly halved since as companies stay private longer. Among US companies with over $100 million in annual revenue, only about 13% — roughly 2,790 — are publicly traded, leaving more than 19,000 substantial private businesses with no public financial disclosure.

What does it cost to get US public company financials?

Nothing. SEC EDGAR filings are entirely free — no account, no per-document fee, no clearing agency. That covers audited annual reports (10-K), quarterly reports (10-Q), material-event disclosures (8-K), proxy statements, and structured XBRL data, plus free APIs at data.sec.gov including a frames endpoint that returns one financial concept across all filers. The only constraints are technical: the SEC requires a descriptive User-Agent header and applies a fair-access rate limit of roughly ten requests per second.

Do US companies use IFRS or GAAP?

US domestic issuers report under US GAAP, set by the Financial Accounting Standards Board; the US has not adopted IFRS for domestic companies. Foreign private issuers may file under IFRS using Form 20-F. Because US GAAP and IFRS differ on revenue recognition, leases, and development costs among other areas, cross-border comparisons need reconciliation rather than direct benchmarking.

Is there a national company number in the United States?

No. The US has no single public company identifier. The EIN is a federal tax number but is not public; the CIK covers only SEC filers; state file numbers are state-specific, so a company operating in five states has five of them; the LEI is public but voluntary and thinly adopted; and DUNS is proprietary. This makes US entity resolution a matching problem rather than a lookup, and it is the most commonly underestimated part of building a US company-data pipeline.

How many businesses are there in the United States?

Roughly 35 to 36 million by the SBA's count, but that figure is dominated by around 30 million nonemployer businesses — sole proprietors and freelancers with no payroll. The population that matters for company data is the roughly 6.4 million employer firms, of which 99.7% have fewer than 500 employees, leaving only about 20,000 large firms — and only a few thousand are SEC filers with public financial statements.

How many US business bankruptcies are there each year?

Business bankruptcy filings rose 22.1% to 23,107 in the twelve months ending 31 December 2024, the highest since 2017, with Chapter 7 up 23.0% to 12,582 and Chapter 11 up 19.6% to 8,456. Bankruptcy is also the one moment private US financials become public: a Chapter 11 debtor files asset and liability schedules and monthly operating reports that are often more detailed than a European annual account.

Are US nonprofit financials public?

Yes, and in unusual detail. Tax-exempt organisations must file an annual Form 990 with the IRS, and it is public by law — covering revenue by source, functional expenses, balance sheet, named executive compensation, governance, and related-party transactions. Private foundations file Form 990-PF, which includes a complete grant list. The data is free through IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search, the Exempt Organizations Business Master File, bulk XML downloads, and ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, which covers over 1.8 million filings back to 2001.

Where can I find audited financial statements for a US nonprofit?

Through the Federal Audit Clearinghouse. Any organisation spending above the federal threshold — historically $750,000 in federal grant money in a fiscal year — must undergo a Single Audit, and the resulting package is public. It contains the full audited financial statements, the auditor's opinion, a schedule of federal awards, and any findings, with PDFs available from around fiscal 2015 onward. This is one of the few places genuine audited statements exist for non-listed US entities. Note that Form 990 itself is a tax information return, not an audited statement.

How do I find out if a US company is foreign-owned?

Start with GLEIF's free Level 2 "who owns whom" dataset, which records each LEI holder's direct and ultimate accounting consolidating parent — the ultimate parent being defined as the highest-level legal entity that prepares consolidated financial statements. Beyond that, European parents disclose their subsidiaries by name, registered office, and ownership percentage in the notes to their consolidated accounts, so searching parent-side filings will surface US entities; Exhibit 21 of a 10-K lists a US registrant's subsidiaries; and state foreign-qualification records, company websites, and press coverage fill remaining gaps.

Can I use a foreign parent's accounts to assess a US subsidiary?

Often, yes — and it is the most underused route to US financial data. A US company may publish nothing while its foreign parent is legally required to file audited consolidated accounts that include the US operations, usually free of charge in its home register. Those accounts typically give group financials, geographic segment reporting that may break out North America, and a subsidiary list with ownership percentages. The limits are that consolidated figures describe the group rather than the US entity standalone, and geographic segments are often broad, so US-specific attribution can be approximate.

How do I assess a private US company with no public financials?

By assembling partial evidence rather than retrieving a filing. Useful sources include UCC financing statements (which reveal lenders and collateral), court and bankruptcy records, federal contract award data, regulatory filings for licensed industries, Form 990 for nonprofits, property and licensing records, and commercial trade-payment data. In practice, most private US financials reach a counterparty because the company provides them under an NDA during a transaction.