All public companies in the US are required to file annual and quarterly reports with the SEC, which usually detail its history, products, acquisitions, financial statements, and legal and regulatory risks. ¹ The SEC has developed an API on top of their EDGAR filing database to give information on the reporting companies and their filings.

There’s a dataset of publicly listed companies:

https://www.sec.gov/files/company_tickers.json

And there’s another API to get metadata about the company and its latest filings:

https://data.sec.gov/submissions/CIK0000320193.json

I downloaded all 10,885 companies and their metadata and extracted the most relevant information into a CSV file, which I uploaded to Github Gists.

41% of NYSE and NASDAQ companies are incorporated in Delaware, and 44% of all companies in the list (which includes those exchanges plus CBOE, OTC, and some unlabeled exchanges) are incorporated in Delaware.

Here are some visualizations of the data:

There’s a large range of industry categories, and some categories like Deep Sea Foreign Transportation of Freight and American Depository Receipts had only non-operating companies.