CIK

The Central Index Key — the SEC's unique identifier for every entity that files via EDGAR.

Definition

Every entity that files with the SEC gets a CIK (Central Index Key), a numeric identifier between 1 and 10 digits. CIKs are assigned permanently — even if a company changes its name or ticker, the CIK persists.

Mapping CIK to ticker is non-trivial: companies can have multiple share classes with different tickers, tickers can change while the CIK remains, and not all CIKs correspond to publicly-traded entities. SEC publishes a tickers JSON at /files/company_tickers.json that gives the canonical mapping.

Related terms

• EDGAR