Central Index Key (CIK)
It narrows the field to a shortlist. No rule in this engine decides a pair on it.
Unique within: United States SEC filers, including foreign private issuers. It is a register of filers, not a register of incorporation, and that distinction decides most of what follows.
What your CIK column does in Entity Bind
A CIK never settles a pair here, and it is one of the surest ways to fetch the right candidate. The stage that compares identifier values runs four rules — LEI, registration number, D-U-N-S, ticker-plus-exchange — and CIK is not one of them. It is supplied by the live SEC EDGAR source and carried in the crosswalk as its own scheme, alongside tickers and exchanges, EIN, state of incorporation and former names with their date brackets. Send it inside `extra`, where it is read for retrieval and never for a decision.
Your own column will carry gaps and typos the specimen does not, and a few hundred rows will show how much of your file it still settles.
Start freeOn this page
Issuer, shape and a specimen
Every row below is checkable in another tab: the body that assigns the identifier, the exact shape including any check digits, and a specimen value. Where we hold a value we have verified against the issuing body, the specimen is that value; where we do not, it is a shape, labelled as one.
- Issued by
- The United States Securities and Exchange Commission, which assigns one to every filer on EDGAR.
- Unique within
- United States SEC filers, including foreign private issuers. It is a register of filers, not a register of incorporation, and that distinction decides most of what follows.
- Format
- Up to ten digits, assigned sequentially, and rendered zero-padded to ten characters in EDGAR's own URLs, file names and JSON payloads. A CIK quoted unpadded and a CIK quoted padded are the same identifier, and a pipeline that treats them as different strings will report a coverage problem it created itself.
- What one value identifies
- One filer. A group whose parent and financing subsidiary both file hold two CIKs, and a filer's name on EDGAR is the filer's name — which for a subsidiary filer is not the group name a CRM would carry.
- Specimen
- 0000320193 — Apple Inc., the number in the path of every EDGAR filing the company has made.
What goes wrong with CIK
The failure modes that decide whether this column is worth sending, and what each one costs you once it turns up in a live file. Worth reading before you plan an integration around the column.
- 01
A CIK is strong enough to decide a pair and no rule in this engine decides on one. It is one per filer, assigned by the authority that runs the register, and it would make a perfectly good key. The stage that compares identifier values runs exactly four rules — LEI, registration number, D-U-N-S, ticker-plus-exchange — and CIK is not among them, so a CIK is carried in the crosswalk and used to fetch the right candidates: a real contribution, and not a decision.
- 02
EDGAR is not a register of incorporation and publishes no registered office. Its mailing address is where the SEC posts, frequently a registered agent or a post box, so it is held in its own field and never written as a registered office. Field fill was measured over 40 large filers: EIN, business address, mailing address, state of incorporation and switchboard at 100%, former names with the dates they applied between at 57%, and LEI at 2% — nothing is built on the EDGAR LEI.
- 03
The SEC universe is small and its name problem is unusual. 6,471 tickered filers with complete rows measured 99.91% unique on name, the highest of the five registers Entity Bind has counted — and it is the one register that fails a factor of the parity contract, the rule that a new region must measure at least as well as the United Kingdom baseline before anything is claimed for it. Adding SEC filers to the three-region parity calculation drops the combined probability from 0.999955 to 0.0082 on exactly one measurement: the name-plus-postcode tier at 1,942 of 2,000, against the UK baseline's 2,998 of 3,000. The 58 abstentions are closed-end fund families — Fund against Fund II at one address — which is a finding about the shape of EDGAR's tickered universe rather than an engine defect. It is also why no quality claim is made about SEC filers until the priced recording leg runs.
Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy.
If one of those is already in your file, a sample turns it into a number of rows instead of a suspicion.
Start freeThe other identifiers on a company record
4 of the 8 settle a pair on their own; the other 4 narrow the field and hand the decision on. If your file carries more than one of them, the question worth settling is which one is doing the work.
LEI
Decides a matchLegal Entity Identifier
Company number
Decides a matchCompany registration number
Ticker
Does not decideExchange ticker symbol
SIREN / SIRET
Decides a matchSIREN and SIRET
D-U-N-S
Decides a matchData Universal Numbering System number
VAT number
Does not decideVAT registration number
EUID
Does not decideEuropean Unique Identifier
Or try your own rows: create your Free workspace and upload a company CSV to inspect the decisions and receipts. Where a further column would settle an unresolved row, it names that column; contact us for an assisted review.
Start freeWhere CIK shows up elsewhere
The rest of the answer, on the shelves that hold it. Each card names its own — a register, a definition, a guide or a comparison — and opens on the page that carries it at length.
- JurisdictionUnited StatesThere is no national company register in the United States. Coverage is Colorado, as public-domain bulk data, plus SEC EDGAR. Delaware publishes nothing.
- DefinitionCIK (Central Index Key)The CIK is the number the US Securities and Exchange Commission assigns to every filer in its EDGAR system, and it is the join key for anything derived from US securities filings.
- DefinitionCrosswalkA crosswalk is a mapping between the identifier schemes that name the same company in different systems — LEI to company number to CIK to ticker — so that data joined on one key can be joined to data keyed on another.
- DefinitionCandidate generationCandidate generation is the retrieval step that proposes the small set of entities a record might be, and its recall is the hard ceiling on everything the rest of the pipeline can achieve.
- GuideCompany identifiers explainedCompany number, LEI, CIK, ticker, SIREN and SIRET, DUNS, VAT, EUID and ISIN. What each identifies, who issues it, what it does not guarantee, and which ones actually decide a match.
- GuideBlocking and candidate generationYou cannot compare every pair. How blocking keys work, why rarity weighting matters, how to measure retrieval with recall@k, and the silent failure mode that mints duplicates.
Sources
The bodies and records this page quotes about CIK, each with the caveat that travels with it.
- SEC EDGAR company search
A register of filers rather than of incorporation, so a company absent from it is not a company that does not exist. United States federal works are public domain.
- Apple Inc., CIK 0000320193, on SEC EDGAR
The specimen on the CIK page, at the filer index that assigns it. Checked against EDGAR's submissions data on 2026-09-25.
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Questions about CIK
How do I verify a CIK without confusing it with incorporation?
Look up the supplied CIK in SEC EDGAR, retaining its leading-zero form for the submissions URL. Compare the filer name and former names with your company row, and keep the filing source and retrieval date. EDGAR registers filers, not every US incorporated company. An absent CIK must remain missing rather than becoming a failed company-identity check.
Can I resolve a US company by CIK?
You can retrieve one, and for a filer that is usually enough to get the right entity back — the CIK reaches EDGAR, EDGAR names the filer, and the record is cited to the filing it came from. What you do not get is a pair settled on the CIK itself, because the stage that compares identifier values decides on four things and CIK is not one of them. In practice that matters least on exactly the records where a CIK is available, since a filer that has a CIK usually also carries a ticker and an exchange, and exact ticker-plus-venue agreement is a shortcut that stage does take.
Does a CIK tell you the company's legal identity?
It tells you the filer's identity, which is narrower. EDGAR registers the entity that files, so a group with a parent and a financing subsidiary that both file has two CIKs and two names, and the name attached to a CIK is the filer's name rather than the group's. It also publishes no registered office — the address on a filing is SEC correspondence, often a registered agent — so a CIK is a strong handle on a filing history and a weak one on where a company is legally registered. For that, the register of incorporation wins, and the crosswalk is what connects the two.