US public company R&D spending
What is in it
R&D expense per company and period, with the reported-or-derived label. The companies file is worth joining here: R&D is concentrated in a few industries and the SIC code is what shows that.
What it shows
Only about 2,200 of the 5,000 companies covered report R&D at all, and it is heavily concentrated in pharmaceutical preparations, prepackaged software and semiconductors. Absence here mostly means a company that does no R&D rather than one that failed to tag it, which makes this a coverage dataset as much as a spending one.
Rows by period
| Period | Rows |
|---|---|
| FY | 17,498 |
| Q3 | 6,350 |
| Q2 | 6,285 |
| Q4 | 6,083 |
| Q1 | 6,052 |
| TTM | 1,493 |
Files
- research-development-spending.csv.gz — 348 KB, 41,471 rows
- companies.csv.gz — company names, tickers and industries, 5,060 rows, joins on
cik - README.md — the column meanings, the metric dictionary and the licence, written by the same pass that writes the data. Include it when redistributing these files.
What it is good for
- R&D intensity by industry and over time
- Identifying research-driven companies from filings rather than by sector label
- Studying how R&D disclosure varies across industries
Citing it
SequelSEC (2026). US public company R&D spending [Data set]. Retrieved from https://sequelsec.com/datasets/research-development-spending
Published under CC BY 4.0. The source filings are US government works in the public domain; the normalisation, derivations and labelling are this site’s. Full terms.