The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published the June 2026 Semi-Annual Report to Congress on July 1, 2026. The report notes that benefits of XBRL tagging accrue to data consumers (investors and other public users such as academics, the FASB, and others), while the costs fall largely on issuers and the Commission. Benefits to data consumers are cited as “…decreased information asymmetry between firms and investors by reducing information processing costs, making stock prices more informative, and reducing market inefficiencies and risks,” as well as enhanced market competition, and heightened monitoring of issuers which helps to inform investors and markets.
The study also notes that “Machine-readable data also includes metadata that provides contextual information that is highly relevant for training artificial intelligence (AI) and enabling machine-learning analyses, which are increasingly being used by investors. Studies have also found that providing large language models (LLMs) with structured data reduces error rates compared to HTML or unstructured data, and improved LLM performance and cost-effectiveness on financial tasks.”
While gains largely go to data consumers, the study notes that issuers have benefited from reduced audit fees and increased audit timeliness; higher liquidity; lower cost of capital; higher return on investment; and improved benchmarking. The study also points out that, “… Freely usable technical validation rules also allow issuers to check for certain errors before the machine-readable data is submitted, which can further streamline the compliance process by reducing Commission staff time that would otherwise be spent pinpointing and communicating the existence of technical errors to issuers, and by reducing issuer time that would otherwise be spent resolving such errors and resubmitting the machine-readable data file.”
Costs to the Commission include taxonomy and schema development, updates to the EDGAR filing system, the integration of new structured data into databases and the publication of new datasets. In assessing the cost to issuers, the Commission references several studies conducted by market participants including XBRL US and the NASDAQ. The SEC noted that in a 2023 proposed release, based on its understanding of third-party structured data pricing, “…smaller filers typically pay between $1,500 and $5,000 per year for third-party structured data compliance services and/or software, while larger filers typically pay between $5,000 and $30,000 per year for such services and/or software.” The SEC noted that factors such as the type of filing, number of data points tagged, industry and entity size, number of users of the specific structured data compliance software, and extent of outsourcing, can all impact the cost of compliance.
The report includes a review of SEC staff use of structured data including the Division of Corporation Finance, the Division of Investment Management, Enforcement, the Office of the Chief Accountant, and the EDGAR Business Office, and contains a listing of forms that require machine-readable reporting requirements in XBRL and in XML.
Read the report.
