When companies report earnings, and why the calendar looks the way it does

August 14, 2026·11 min read

Earnings season is not a convention the market agreed on. It is the visible shape of a filing deadline: a US public company has 40 days after a quarter ends to file its quarterly report, and 60 to 90 days after a year ends to file its annual one. Once you know the deadline, the whole calendar — including the odd gap every fourth quarter — stops looking arbitrary.

The short answer

A US company reports quarterly results within 40 days of the quarter ending if it is an accelerated or large accelerated filer, and within 45 days if it is neither. There is no fourth-quarter report: the fourth quarter is folded into the annual report, which is due 60, 75 or 90 days after the fiscal year ends depending on the same filer status. Those are ceilings, not appointments — companies choose a date inside the window and announce it in advance.

The deadlines, quoted

General Instruction A.1 of Form 10-Q sets the quarterly deadline in two lines: “40 days after the end of the fiscal quarter for large accelerated filers and accelerated filers”, and “45 days after the end of the fiscal quarter for all other registrants.” General Instruction A.(2) of Form 10-K sets the annual one at 60 days for large accelerated filers, 75 for accelerated filers, and 90 for everyone else.

Note the asymmetry, because a surprising number of summaries flatten it: on the quarterly report, large accelerated and accelerated filers share the same 40-day deadline. The two categories only diverge on the annual report, where the gap is 60 days versus 75.

Which category a company is in

Public float, measured as of the last business day of the company’s most recently completed second fiscal quarter. Per the SEC’s compliance guide on the Rule 12b-2 definitions, a large accelerated filer has a float of $700 million or more; an accelerated filer has $75 million or more but less than $700 million. Both must also have been subject to Exchange Act reporting for at least twelve calendar months, have filed at least one annual report, and not qualify under the smaller reporting company revenue test.

Status is sticky in both directions. The same guide sets the exit thresholds higher than the entry ones — a large accelerated filer stays one until its float falls below $560 million, and an accelerated filer until its float falls below $60 million — so a company does not flip category on a single bad quarter, and its reporting deadline does not move around underneath you.

In practice, every company most people follow is a large accelerated filer, which is why 40 days is the number worth remembering. For a December quarter end that puts the deadline in the second week of February; for a March quarter end, the second week of May.

Why there is no fourth-quarter earnings report

This is the part of the calendar that confuses people, and the form says it outright. Form 10-Q is filed “after the end of each of the first three fiscal quarters of each fiscal year, but no report need be filed for the fourth quarter of any fiscal year.”

So the fourth quarter has no quarterly report of its own. Its results arrive inside the annual report instead, and the annual report runs on a longer clock: 60 days rather than 40 for a large accelerated filer, and 90 rather than 45 at the other end of the scale. Two consequences follow.

• Fourth-quarter results arrive later. A company with a calendar fiscal year has until roughly the start of March to file, against mid-February for its other quarters. The annual-results announcement is the most spread-out of the year.
• The document is much bigger. A 10-K carries audited financial statements, the risk factors, and the full business description. It is the filing worth reading if you only read one a year, and it is nothing like a 10-Q in length.

The press release and the filing are two different things

The event people call “earnings” — the headline number, the conference call, the move in the stock — is not the 10-Q. It is a press release, and the company furnishes that release to the SEC on a Form 8-K under Item 2.02, “Results of Operations and Financial Condition”. The 10-Q or 10-K is a separate, longer document that often follows days or weeks later, inside the deadline above.

Form 8-K carries its own deadline. General Instruction B.1 states that “unless otherwise specified, a report is to be filed or furnished within four business days after occurrence of the event”. And Instruction 4 to Item 2.02 closes the obvious loop: the item “does not apply in the case of a disclosure that is made in a quarterly report filed with the Commission on Form 10-Q … or an annual report filed with the Commission on Form 10-K”.

Furnished, not filed

One distinction rewards knowing. Under General Instruction B.2, an earnings release provided under Item 2.02 is furnished rather than filed— it “shall not be deemed to be ‘filed’ for purposes of Section 18 of the Exchange Act or otherwise subject to the liabilities of that section” unless the company says otherwise. The 10-Q is filed, and carries that liability.

Three practical implications follow. The deadline table tells you the latest a company can report, not when it will: the release nearly always comes first, and companies announce the date well in advance. The numbers can move between the two documents — the release is the company’s summary, the filing is the reviewed version with the footnotes, and the footnotes are where the interesting reconciliations live. And the headline figure that moves the stock sits in the document with the lighter liability standard, which is a reasonable argument for waiting for the filing before concluding anything.

Why earnings land before the open or after the close

Almost every US earnings release arrives either before the market opens or after it closes, and the reason is regulatory rather than customary. Three rules stack up.

Regulation FDmakes selective disclosure impermissible. Adopted 15 August 2000 and effective 23 October 2000, its core requirement at 17 CFR 243.100(a) is that when an issuer discloses material non-public information to certain people, it must make that information public “simultaneously, in the case of an intentional disclosure” and “promptly, in the case of a non-intentional disclosure”. That is why the earnings call is webcast and why the press release hits the wire before anyone discusses it.

The exchanges want notice. Section 202.06 of the NYSE Listed Company Manual requires that when material news is released “between 7:00 A.M. and 4:00 P.M., Eastern Time, the company must notify the Exchange by telephone at least ten minutes prior to release of the announcement”. Nasdaq Rule 5250(b)(1) sets a similar obligation with a wider window: notify the MarketWatch Department “at least ten minutes prior to public announcement” where the release falls between 7:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. ET, and before 6:50 a.m. ET if it falls outside that window. The point of the notice is to let the exchange halt the stock if an orderly market requires it.

And the close is fenced off. NYSE’s guidance to its listed companies states they are prohibited from publishing material news after the official closing time until the earlier of 4:05 p.m. ET or the publication of the official closing price of the security. That five-minute fence is precisely why after-the-bell releases cluster at 4:05 p.m. and later rather than at 4:00 p.m. on the dot.

Put together: releasing mid-session means a notified exchange, a possible halt, and a number landing while people are trading on the old one. Releasing outside the session gives every investor the same figure at the same moment with hours to read it. Hence the two windows the whole market runs on. A calendar entry marked BMO or AMC — before market open, after market close — is telling you which one to expect.

Fiscal quarters are not calendar quarters

Every deadline on this page is counted from the end of a fiscalquarter, and a company’s fiscal year does not have to start in January. A retailer whose fiscal year ends in late January reports its fourth quarter in March; a company whose year ends in June reports what it calls Q1 in the autumn.

This is the single most common reason a company appears to be reporting at a strange time, or to be reporting the “wrong” quarter. Nothing unusual is happening — its year simply starts somewhere else. It also means “earnings season” is a statistical clustering rather than a rule: most large US companies do use a calendar fiscal year, so their windows overlap, and the ones that do not report in the quiet weeks between.

How to find one company’s date

• The company’s investor relations page. The authoritative source. Companies announce the date, and the before-open or after-close timing, in a short press release ahead of the event.
• EDGAR.The scheduling announcement itself is often an 8-K, and the results release will be one. Searching a company’s 8-K filings shows you what has been furnished and when.
• An earnings calendar in an app or on a data site. Convenient, and worth one caveat: until the company confirms, a listed date is an estimate derived from prior years. Dates move, and a calendar that does not distinguish confirmed from projected will not tell you which you are looking at.

Where StockPlus fits, and where it does not

StockPlus is our app, so treat this as the disclosure it is. It carries an earnings calendar and can send an earnings reminder, and the honest description of both is narrow.

• What the calendar holds: the ticker, the report date, a before-open or after-close flag, and an EPS estimate. That is all four fields. There is no actual reported EPS, no surprise versus estimate, and no revenue figure — so it tells you when to look, not what happened.
• What the alert sends: one batched push the day before, naming the tickers on your watchlist that report tomorrow. It does not include the before-open or after-close timing or the estimate, and it is off until you switch it on.
• What it costs: free on three watchlist tickers; every ticker on Pro at $2.99 a month. The calendar itself is not the paid part — the alert coverage is.
• Where the dates come from: a third-party market data provider, not the companies directly. Which means the caveat above applies to us as much as to anyone: a date can move, and the app does not currently mark a date as confirmed or projected.

If what you want is a nudge the day before something on your list reports, that fits. If you want estimate-versus-actual, a surprise history, or a call transcript, this is not the tool and we would rather say so here than have you find out after installing it.

Where to read next

• How to read an SEC Form 4 — the other filing calendar, on a two-business-day clock instead of a 40-day one, with every transaction code quoted.
• How to set stock price alerts — choosing a trigger you will actually act on, which matters more around an earnings date than at any other time.
• The STOCK Act’s 45-day rule — a third disclosure deadline, and the slowest of the three.