sec-mcp

audit

A Model Context Protocol server that gives Claude Desktop access to SEC EDGAR data — company filings, financial statements, and company info. No API key needed.

Why an MCP for this?

EDGAR is a set of public REST endpoints with no API key, and the documentation at sec.gov/search-filings/edgar-application-programming-interfaces is reasonable. So strictly speaking, an MCP isn't needed. What this wrapper buys you:

1. Persistent User-Agent identity. SEC's fair-access policy requires a contact email in the User-Agent header; without one, requests get throttled or rejected. You don't want to re-paste your email into every prompt. The MCP stores it in a config file and stamps every request.

2. Ticker → CIK resolution with caching. Every EDGAR endpoint is keyed by a zero-padded 10-digit CIK, not by ticker. Without a tool, each query would re-fetch the ~1 MB company_tickers.json and parse it from scratch. The MCP caches it for an hour.

3. URL-construction quirks the docs are quiet about. The CY{period} prefix on the XBRL frames endpoint, the trailing I for instant concepts, the zero-padded CIK, the dash-stripped accession number in archive URLs. Easy to get wrong on the fly; encoded once in the tool.

4. Response shaping. companyfacts responses are tens of MB and filings.recent is laid out as column-major parallel arrays. Both are usable, but a language model would burn a lot of context reformatting them. The MCP returns trimmed, row-shaped JSON.

5. Discovery. With the MCP installed, the tool list itself tells Claude that it can query SEC filings, plus the common concept names. Without it, the model has to remember the endpoints exist.

If you only pull one or two filings a year, you don't need this — just give Claude the URL. At any higher volume, the wrapper pays for itself by turning "explain the URL grammar in every conversation" into "ask a natural question."

Install

Install with Cargo (Rust 1.88 or newer):

cargo install sec-mcp

This compiles the rustls crypto backend (ring), which has a small amount of C, so you need a C compiler on the build host — but no cmake or assembler. macOS (Xcode Command Line Tools) and most desktop Linux distros already have one; a minimal Linux image may not — install it first, e.g. apt install build-essential on Debian/Ubuntu.

Configure Claude Desktop

Edit ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "sec-edgar": {
      "command": "sec-mcp",
      "args": []
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop.

First use

On your first SEC-related request Claude will explain that a contact email is required by the SEC EDGAR fair-access policy and ask your permission before proceeding. Your email is stored locally in ~/Library/Application Support/sec-mcp/config.toml and is only used in the HTTP User-Agent header sent to the SEC — it is not shared anywhere else.

Example prompts

• "What are Apple's recent SEC filings?"
• "Show me Tesla's annual revenue for the last 5 years"
• "What was Microsoft's net income last quarter?"
• "What industry is NVDA in according to the SEC?"
• "Show me Amazon's most recent 10-K filing"
• "What tickers are listed on NYSE with 'energy' in the name?"
• "What financial metrics does Apple report to the SEC?"
• "Which companies had the highest revenue in 2024?"

Available tools

Common XBRL concepts for sec_financial_concept

Development

cargo test          # offline; hits no network

There is also an opt-in live suite that drives the built server over stdio against the real SEC EDGAR APIs — the thing offline tests can't see, like EDGAR changing a response shape or a URL-construction quirk slipping through. It is skipped unless SEC_MCP_LIVE_EMAIL is set, which both opts in and supplies the contact email the fair-access policy requires (the address is read from the environment, never committed):

SEC_MCP_LIVE_EMAIL="you@example.com" cargo test --test live_smoke -- --nocapture

The suite runs sequentially through one server process, so it stays well within EDGAR's rate limit.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.md for details.

MCP registry

Ownership-verification token for the MCP registry (read from this crate's rendered README on crates.io):

Registry ownership token: mcp-name: io.github.brechanbech/sec-mcp

Releasing

A version is immutable once published — crates.io yanks, it does not delete, and a number is never reused — so the order matters:

1. cargo test and cargo clippy --all-targets clean.

2. Bump version in Cargo.toml.

3. Bump version in server.json — both fields, the top-level one and the one under packages[]. Nothing enforces this: no script, no CI, no test reads the file, and it is the step that goes missing. This manifest stayed correct, but the registry entry did not: 0.5.0, 0.5.1 and 0.5.2 all shipped to crates.io while the registry still advertised 0.4.4, because step 6 was never run.

4. Commit and push; let CI go green before publishing rather than after.

5. cargo publish --dry-run, which compiles from the packaged copy and so catches a crate depending on a file it does not ship. Then cargo publish.

6. Publish to the MCP registry, after crates.io and not before — the registry verifies the namespace by reading mcp-name from this crate's rendered README on crates.io, and server.json names a cargo version that must already exist there:

   sh

   mcp-publisher validate      # checks server.json against the live registry
   mcp-publisher login github  # interactive, for the io.github.brechanbech/* namespace
   mcp-publisher publish