10-K vs 10-Q: what is the difference?

01The difference in one paragraph

A 10-K is the comprehensive annual report a US public company must file with the Securities and Exchange Commission: audited financial statements plus a full description of the business, its risks, and management's discussion of the year. A 10-Q is the slimmer quarterly version, filed three times a year (the fourth quarter is covered by the 10-K): unaudited — though reviewed — financial statements and updates to what changed since the annual report. Both are legally mandated disclosures, both are free on the SEC's EDGAR system, and together they are the primary-source record of a company's reported performance.

02What the 10-K contains

The 10-K's numbered items include the sections most research starts from:

• Item 1 — Business. What the company actually does, in its own words: segments, products, customers, competition, regulation.
• Item 1A — Risk Factors. Management's own enumerated list of what could go wrong. Boilerplate accumulates here, so the informative read is what changed versus last year's list.
• Item 7 — Management's Discussion & Analysis (MD&A). Management explains the year's results: why revenue and margins moved, liquidity, and known trends and uncertainties.
• Item 8 — Financial statements. The audited income statement, balance sheet, cash-flow statement, and the footnotes, where accounting choices and one-time items live.

03What the 10-Q contains

The 10-Q carries condensed, unaudited quarterly financial statements (an independent auditor reviews them, a lighter procedure than a full audit), a quarterly MD&A, and updates to risk factors and legal proceedings only where something material changed. It is the fastest official read on how the business is tracking between annual reports — and because it skips most of the annual boilerplate, quarter-over-quarter changes stand out more clearly.

04Filing deadlines

Deadlines scale with company size, measured by public float:

• Large accelerated filers ($700M+ float): 10-K due within60 days of fiscal year-end, 10-Q within 40 days of quarter end.
• Accelerated filers ($75M-$700M): 10-K within 75 days, 10-Q within 40 days.
• Non-accelerated filers (under $75M): 10-K within 90 days, 10-Q within 45 days.

A company that misses these deadlines files an NT (notification of late filing) — itself a disclosure worth noticing, since late filings often accompany accounting trouble.

05The 8-K, for everything between

Material events cannot wait for the next quarterly report: acquisitions, executive departures, auditor changes, bankruptcy, earnings releases themselves. Those go on a Form 8-K, generally due within 4 business days of the triggering event. In practice the 8-K stream is a company's official news feed, and the 10-K/10-Q are the periodic ledger it reconciles to.

06What to read first

A practical order for a first pass: the MD&A (management's own explanation of the numbers), then the changes in Risk Factors versus the prior filing, then the cash-flow statement (harder to flatter than earnings), then the footnotes on anything that looked unusual. All filings are free atsec.gov/edgar/search, including full-text search across every company's documents.

07How bips·ai uses this

bips·ai reads a company's EDGAR filings directly and surfaces what matters in its analyses — risk-factor themes, recent material events from 8-Ks, and the filing-grounded facts behind each bull and bear case — with citations linking back to the original documents on SEC.gov, so you can verify the cited claims at the source.

This guide is for educational purposes only and is not investment advice. See the fullDisclaimers.