How to Cite an Annual Report or SEC Filing

Company reporting is one of the few places where the primary source is easier to reach than the commentary about it. Every filing an SEC registrant makes is public, permanent and addressable, with an accession number and a stable URL. A reference that points at a news summary or a data vendor instead is a reference the reader cannot check.

The worked example is real and was verified against the SEC's own submissions record for Apple Inc. (CIK 0000320193) on 22 September 2026: Apple's Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended 28 September 2024, filed 1 November 2024, accession number 0000320193-24-000123.

What to Collect

• The company's registered name
• The form type: Form 10-K, Form 20-F, annual report to shareholders
• The fiscal year the report covers, and its end date
• The filing date
• The accession number, or the register's document reference
• The filing URL

On EDGAR, all of this is on the filing index page. The document itself carries the fiscal year end on its cover; the index carries the filing date and accession number.

Quick Reference by Major Style

APA (7th Edition)

APA treats a company report as a report by a group author. The template below is the one the University of Queensland Library publishes for reports, with the report number slot used for the form type and accession number.

In-text: (Apple Inc., 2024)

When the company publishes the report on its own site and is therefore both author and publisher, do not repeat the name: author position only, then the URL.

MLA (9th Edition)

Build the entry from the template of core elements, with the company as author and the regulator's site as the container.

In-text: (Apple Inc.)

The MLA Style Center's post "How do I cite a company's report?" is the rule on point, and it is the one to follow: if a report was written and published by the same corporate entity, begin with the title and list that entity as publisher; if it was written by one entity and published by another, the writer goes in the author slot and the publisher in the publisher slot. On EDGAR, Apple wrote the filing and the SEC publishes it, so the company stays in the author slot. That post is flagged by MLA as eighth-edition content, so check it against the MLA Handbook, 9th ed.

Chicago (18th Edition)

The Chicago Manual of Style is subscription-only and its free Citation Quick Guide has no filing entry. Murdoch University Library's Chicago guide has a form for reports by government agencies and other organisations; follow that, or whichever guide your department names. The elements are the company, the report title with its fiscal year, the filing date, the regulator and the URL.

Harvard (Cite Them Right)

The University of Sheffield's Harvard guide, which states that it follows Cite Them Right, has a reports entry with a corporate-author variant — one of its own examples is a supermarket's food-surplus and food-waste report, listed under the company name as J Sainsbury (2016).

In-text: (Apple Inc., 2024)

That guide also notes that a report with a DOI does not need "Available at" or an access date, because a DOI is stable and a URL is not. Filings have no DOI, so keep the access date.

Referring to a Figure Inside a Filing

A 10-K is hundreds of pages. Point your reader at the part you used, not at the document as a whole:

• Give the item number — Item 1A Risk Factors, Item 7 Management's Discussion and Analysis, Item 8 Financial Statements — because those are stable across filers and years.
• Give the page or the note number for a figure from the financial statements.
• If you took a number from an interactive data file rather than the narrative document, say so.

Missing Elements

No accession number. Non-US registers use their own references. Use the register's document reference and the URL.

The fiscal year is not the calendar year. This is common and it trips people up. Apple's fiscal 2024 ended in September 2024. Put the fiscal-year-end date in the title information so the reader cannot mistake it.

An amended filing. A 10-K/A amends a 10-K. Cite the one you read, name the form type exactly, and say if your point depends on the amendment.

A report only available from a data vendor. Find the register copy. If it genuinely does not exist there, cite the vendor as the container and note the access date.

Common Mistakes

• Citing a news article about the results instead of the filing
• Using the calendar year for a company whose fiscal year ends mid-year
• Confusing the annual report to shareholders with the Form 10-K, which are different documents with different contents
• Leaving out the form type, so the reader cannot tell which of a company's many filings you mean
• Linking to an EDGAR search result rather than the filing document
• Treating a 20-F or an annual return as interchangeable with a 10-K
• Quoting a figure from an "adjusted" or non-GAAP presentation as though it came from the audited statements

Sources for These Formats

• University of Queensland Library, "APA 7th referencing style: Report"
• MLA Handbook, 9th ed., template of core elements; MLA Style Center, "How do I cite a company's report?" (published 4 December 2017; MLA flags it as eighth-edition content)
• Murdoch University Library, Chicago 18th guide, "Reports: Government Agencies and Other Organisations"
• University of Sheffield Library, "Harvard referencing" (based on Cite Them Right), Reports section
• U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR submissions record for Apple Inc. (CIK 0000320193) and the filing document for accession 0000320193-24-000123

Full style rules: APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard.

A filing is a report with a corporate author, which the citation generator does handle: choose the report type, put the company in the author field as a single name, and put the form type and accession number in the number field.