What Is Form N-PORT? Fund Holdings Filing

Form N-PORT is the portfolio report that registered funds file with the SEC, and it is the closest thing a retail investor has to a full inventory of what a fund owns. A factsheet shows the top ten positions. N-PORT lists every position, with identifiers, a dollar value, a share of net assets and a fair-value level. The public version of the filing carries the form type NPORT-P.

What is Form N-PORT?

Form N-PORT is a monthly portfolio report filed with the SEC by registered investment companies, which covers open-end mutual funds and ETFs as well as registered closed-end funds. Money market funds report separately on Form N-MFP and sit outside it. The form arrived with the Investment Company Reporting Modernization release (Release No. IC-32314, adopted October 13, 2016) and replaced Form N-Q, the old quarterly holdings report.

Two words in that description carry weight. Registered means the fund is registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940, the statute governing public funds sold to retail investors. Portfolio report means a position-by-position inventory as of the last business day of the month, rather than a narrative or a performance brochure. If you have compared mutual funds and ETFs on cost or structure, N-PORT is where both are described in the same vocabulary, on the same schedule, in the same machine-readable format.

EDGAR, the SEC's filing system, accepts hundreds of form types, and routine periodic reporting dominates the volume. The panel below ranks the busiest of them over the trailing year.

SELECT
    form_type,
    count()            AS filings,
    countDistinct(cik) AS filers
FROM global_markets.stocks_sec_edgar_index
WHERE filing_date >= today() - 365
  AND filing_date <= today()
GROUP BY form_type
ORDER BY filings DESC
LIMIT 12

The busiest single form type over that window is 4, with 345325 filings from 57207 distinct filers. Company forms such as the annual 10-K describe an operating business. Fund forms describe a portfolio. Our guide to the most common SEC filings walks the company side of that split, and N-PORT sits on the fund side alongside N-CEN and N-CSR.

What is inside an N-PORT filing?

An N-PORT filing has two halves. The first is fund level, one set of numbers for the whole portfolio:

• total assets and net assets at period end, the two figures behind how a fund's NAV is calculated
• monthly total return, including return attributed to categories of derivative exposure
• monthly flows, split into shares sold, shares redeemed and distributions reinvested
• borrowings and other liabilities, itemized by lender category
• interest-rate risk metrics for funds carrying debt exposure, measured as the value change for a one basis point and a 100 basis point move in rates
• liquidity classification of the portfolio across four buckets, from highly liquid to illiquid

The second half is the holdings list, one record per position. Each record carries the issuer name and its LEI, a CUSIP plus an ISIN or ticker where one exists, the balance held, the value in US dollars, the percentage of net assets, an asset category, an issuer category, the issuer's country, whether the position is restricted, and the fair-value level.

Fair-value level is the accounting hierarchy for how a price was obtained. Level 1 is a quoted price in an active market. Level 2 is a price built from observable inputs such as comparable trades. Level 3 is a model with unobservable inputs. A fund whose level 3 bucket grows over successive filings is a fund whose marks rest more on models than on trades, which is visible in N-PORT and invisible on a factsheet.

Derivatives get their own sub-record. A swap, a future or a written option is reported with its counterparty, the notional amount, the reference asset, the expiration date and the unrealized appreciation. Some items travel to the SEC without appearing on the public copy, per-holding liquidity classification chief among them. The form instructions mark which items are public, and reading that list before planning an analysis saves time.

How often is Form N-PORT filed?

Read this part carefully. The rule changed, and the change phased in over two compliance dates.

Under the original regime, a fund prepared a report for every month and filed the three monthly reports together within 60 days of each fiscal quarter end. Only the third month of the quarter was made public. Two thirds of the data existed without being visible outside the SEC, and the public month could describe positions up to five months old.

The SEC adopted amendments on August 28, 2024 (Release Nos. 33-11298 and IC-35308) moving the form to monthly filing. Under the amended rule a fund files each monthly report within 30 days after month end, and that report becomes public 60 days after month end. The compliance dates were staggered by fund group size: larger groups, those with net assets of $1 billion or more, from November 17, 2025, and smaller groups from May 18, 2026.

Two habits keep you accurate. Cite the release number and the compliance date you are relying on rather than a flat sentence about the current cadence, since a filing pulled from 2023 was made under one set of rules and a filing from 2026 under another. Then check the fund's own filing history: the gap between consecutive NPORT-P accessions shows which regime that filer was on at the time.

N-PORT vs 13F: what is the difference?

Form 13F is the other holdings disclosure people quote, and the two answer different questions.

A 13F is filed by an institutional investment manager with at least $100 million in 13(f) securities under discretion. It covers that manager's US-listed equity and listed-option positions, and it is silent on bonds, cash, short positions and foreign listings. N-PORT is filed by a fund about itself, and it covers the whole portfolio.

Timing separates them too. A 13F is due 45 days after the end of a calendar quarter. The panel below measures that lag in the filings themselves.

SELECT
    quarter_end_date,
    round(avg(days_to_file), 1)                           AS avg_days_to_file,
    max(days_to_file)                                     AS slowest_days,
    round(100 * countIf(days_to_file <= 45) / count(), 1) AS filed_by_day_45_pct
FROM
(
    SELECT
        accession_number,
        toString(toDate(toString(any(period))))                          AS quarter_end_date,
        dateDiff('day', toDate(toString(any(period))), any(filing_date)) AS days_to_file
    FROM global_markets.stocks_13f_filings
    WHERE form_type = '13F-HR'
      AND period >= '2023-06-30'
      AND toDate(toString(period)) <= today() - 75
    GROUP BY accession_number
)
WHERE days_to_file BETWEEN 0 AND 400
GROUP BY quarter_end_date
ORDER BY quarter_end_date

For the 2026-03-31 quarter, the average 13F-HR arrived 34.1 days after the period it describes, 97% of them were in by day 45, and the slowest ran 129 days.

Pin a single quarter and the shape gets clearer. The panel below takes the quarter ending March 31, 2026, whose 13F deadline fell on May 15, 2026, and counts filings by week after quarter end.

SELECT
    concat('Week ', toString(w.week_no))    AS week_after_quarter_end,
    toUInt32(ifNull(f.filings, 0))          AS filings
FROM
(
    SELECT arrayJoin(range(1, 14)) AS week_no
) AS w
LEFT JOIN
(
    SELECT
        intDiv(days_to_file, 7) + 1 AS week_no,
        count()                     AS filings
    FROM
    (
        SELECT
            accession_number,
            dateDiff('day', toDate('2026-03-31'), any(filing_date)) AS days_to_file
        FROM global_markets.stocks_13f_filings
        WHERE form_type = '13F-HR'
          AND toDate(toString(period)) = toDate('2026-03-31')
        GROUP BY accession_number
    )
    WHERE days_to_file BETWEEN 0 AND 90
    GROUP BY week_no
) AS f ON f.week_no = w.week_no
ORDER BY w.week_no

The first week after quarter end holds 67 reports. Week 7, the bucket containing day 45, holds 3437. Read the curve left to right and you can see how a six-week allowance actually gets used. Our guide to when 13F filings are due covers the deadline mechanics in full.

Between the two sits the shareholder report. A registered fund files an annual and a semi-annual report on Form N-CSR, carrying audited financial statements and a schedule of investments. Those arrive twice a year. N-PORT is the monthly layer underneath them.

How do I pull a fund's N-PORT from EDGAR?

Every filer on EDGAR has a Central Index Key, a CIK, which is a permanent numeric id. Fund families usually file under a trust CIK, with each fund series and share class identified inside the document, so the retrieval path runs CIK first, then series.

The browse path takes the CIK and the form type directly:

https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=<fund CIK>&type=NPORT-P&count=40

If you do not know the CIK, EDGAR full-text search resolves a fund name to one, and the machine-readable filing history for a known CIK lives at https://data.sec.gov/submissions/, with the number zero-padded to ten digits.

Open a filing and the document to read is the XML. A public NPORT-P submission has a header identifying the registrant and series, a fund-level block, and a holdings block holding one element per position. Inside a position element the tags you meet first are name, lei, cusip, balance, valUSD, pctVal, assetCat, issuerCat and fairValLevel. Derivative positions add a nested block with counterparty and contract terms. The same parser works on every fund, every month, which is what makes N-PORT worth learning.

FAQ

Is Form N-PORT public?

Partly. The public version is filed as NPORT-P and carries the fund-level section with the full holdings list. Some items reach the SEC without appearing on the public copy, per-holding liquidity classification chief among them, and the form instructions mark which is which.

What is the difference between N-PORT and NPORT-P?

N-PORT is the form. NPORT-P is the public submission type that appears on EDGAR. When searching a fund's filing history for holdings, NPORT-P is the form type to look for.

Do ETFs file Form N-PORT?

Yes. An ETF registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940 files N-PORT like any other registered fund. Many ETFs also publish a daily holdings file on the sponsor's website, which is more current than the filing and is a voluntary disclosure rather than a regulated one.

How is N-PORT different from a fund's annual report?

The annual and semi-annual shareholder reports on Form N-CSR carry audited financial statements and adviser commentary twice a year. N-PORT is monthly, unaudited and structured as data, which makes it easier to track positions from one period to the next.

How current are the holdings in an N-PORT filing?

Each report describes positions as of the last business day of the month it covers, and it becomes public after a lag set by the rule in force at the time. Compare the report date against the acceptance date on the filing before treating a holdings list as current.

Every panel above ships with the SQL that produced it, expand any one to read the query. To measure filing lags or filing-day pile-ups for yourself, ask the question in plain English on the Strasmore terminal.