Using SEC EDGAR Full-Text Search for Executive Compensation

Building a Peer Set on a Deadline

You have a comp committee meeting in three weeks and a mandate: build a defensible peer set for the CEO's pay renewal, using public filings rather than a subscription survey. The obvious path — opening ten separate DEF 14A proxy statements one at a time and scrolling to the Summary Compensation Table in each — takes hours you don't have. There's a faster way in. SEC EDGAR's full-text search system lets you query the actual text of filed proxies and other disclosures for specific compensation language, executive names, or plan terms, then pull back a list of companies that disclosed something comparable. Used well, it turns EDGAR from a filing archive into a peer-finding engine. This is the core promise of SEC EDGAR full-text search for executive compensation research: fewer wasted hours reading filings that turn out to be irrelevant. Here's how to structure the queries and turn the results into a peer compensation table you can defend across the table.

What SEC EDGAR Full-Text Search Executive Compensation Queries Can and Can't Do

EDGAR provides free public access to filings, and SEC guidance describing how to use the system is public domain (SEC.gov, 2025). The full-text search tool searches the text of the filings themselves — it is not a structured compensation database — so a query returns documents containing your search terms, not a ranked list of comparable pay figures. That distinction matters for how you use SEC EDGAR full-text search executive compensation research in practice: it is a discovery tool for identifying which companies disclosed a given term, clause, or plan structure. You still open each filing to read the actual numbers.

For finding compensation, full-text search is not a shortcut around reading a proxy — it's a way to decide which proxies are worth reading in the first place.

Building Queries That Surface Compensation Tables Efficiently

Every proxy statement filed by a public company includes a Summary Compensation Table disclosing pay for the CEO, CFO, and generally three additional named executive officers, together known as the NEOs (Meridian Compensation Partners, 2025). Full-text search works best when you search for the language surrounding that disclosure, rather than a number you're trying to guess in advance.

A few query patterns hold up well:

• Search a specific compensation term — "change in control," "clawback," "double trigger" — alongside an industry filter to see how peer companies structure the clause you're evaluating.
• Filter by form type (DEF 14A) and date range so results return only recent proxy seasons, since pay figures and plan terms shift year to year.
• Search an executive's name in quotation marks to find every filing that mentions them — useful for tracking a CEO across companies or confirming an incoming executive's prior public-company pay history.
• Pair an industry classification code with a plan-name search to find companies using a similar equity vehicle. SIC and NAICS remain the standard systems for defining a comparable peer group by sector.

Each pattern narrows a universe of thousands of filers down to a short list worth actually reading — which is where the real work of a peer study begins.

From Search Results to a Peer Compensation Table

Once full-text search returns a list of DEF 14A filings, the work shifts to reading each one the way a comp committee would: locating the Summary Compensation Table, the Pay Versus Performance table, and any severance or change-of-control disclosure, then recording every figure with its source. If that reading process isn't second nature yet, the guide on how to read a DEF 14A proxy statement walks through where each figure lives and how to interpret it.

For CEO pay specifically, the number sits in a predictable location once you've opened the right filing — our companion piece on how to find CEO salary on SEC EDGAR covers that step directly.

A usable peer table needs consistent categories across every company: base salary, bonus, stock awards, option awards, non-equity incentive pay, and total compensation, each tagged to its filing year. Proxies filed for the 2023 season and after also carry a Pay Versus Performance table under Item 402(v), adopted August 25, 2022 and tagged in Inline XBRL — a structured data language producing a single document readable by both people and software (Mintz, 2022; SEC.gov, 2024). That table lives inside the proxy statement itself, not the annual report on Form 10-K (Greenberg Traurig, 2023) — so when you're searching EDGAR for XBRL-tagged executive compensation data specifically, restrict your search to proxy filings.

XBRL Tags Add Precision — With a Learning Curve

Inline XBRL tagging means the compensation figures in a modern proxy aren't just printed numbers; they're structured data points that can, in principle, be extracted more systematically than by reading full text alone. That's a meaningfully different task from a full-text keyword search, and it's worth understanding the difference before investing time in either approach. The explainer on XBRL-tagged executive compensation data covers how the tagging works and where it does and doesn't help a peer-group build.

Full-text search finds the filing. XBRL tagging, where it applies, makes the numbers inside that filing more extractable. Neither replaces the judgment call at the center of any peer study: which companies actually belong in the set, matched on revenue band, sector, and ownership structure — a decision that determines whether the comparables hold up in a committee room.

A peer set built from filings you can name — a specific company, a specific fiscal year, a specific table — survives scrutiny in a way a scraped number never does.

Where Manual EDGAR Research Hits Its Limits

Full-text search and careful reading get you real, citable numbers. What they don't give you is speed at scale, or a percentile position once the numbers are collected. If you've pulled ten peer proxies and logged every figure, you still have to decide where your own pay sits relative to the 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles of that set, and be ready to defend how the peer group was selected. That work is manual and repeatable, and it's easy to make an inconsistent call under deadline pressure — particularly on which fiscal year to use when peers report on staggered filing calendars.

Turning EDGAR Research Into a Defensible Peer Set

If you're running this process by hand, a consistent intake structure matters as much as the search queries themselves. The Proxy Peer-Group Extraction Workbook is a data-entry template built for exactly this: one row per peer company, fields for each Summary Compensation Table line item, a place to record the filing's accession number and fiscal year, and a percentile calculator once the set is complete. It doesn't replace reading the filings — nothing should — but it keeps every figure traceable to its source, which is the difference between a number you can cite in a negotiation and a number you're simply hoping sounds right.

If you'd rather not run the searches, the reading, and the peer-set math yourself, see how CEOSalary approaches this end to end at /pricing.