About DebtCanary
What is DebtCanary?
DebtCanary is a free corporate debt maturity tracker that monitors refinancing risk across hundreds of public companies. It reads structured financial data from SEC EDGAR filings, calculates a composite risk score for each company, and presents the results in a straightforward dashboard. Think of it as an early warning system for corporate debt stress — like the canary in the coal mine, but for capital markets.
The project tracks debt maturity schedules (when principal payments come due), interest coverage ratios, leverage metrics, and cash positions. Each company gets a score from 1 to 10 reflecting its overall refinancing risk, along with a detailed breakdown of the underlying components.
Why DebtCanary Exists
Corporate debt data is public information — every public company files detailed financial statements with the SEC. But accessing, parsing, and comparing this data across hundreds of companies requires navigating complex XBRL filings, understanding GAAP reporting concepts, and building infrastructure to normalize data across different companies and fiscal years.
Professional credit analysts at banks and rating agencies have proprietary tools for this. Individual investors and researchers typically do not. DebtCanary bridges that gap by automating the data extraction and presenting the results in a format that anyone can understand.
The "maturity wall" — the concentration of large debt maturities in a short time window — is a concept that drives credit markets but is rarely visible to non- professionals. DebtCanary makes this data accessible, enabling more informed discussion about corporate financial health.
Data Source
All data is sourced from the SEC EDGAR system, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system. Specifically, DebtCanary uses the XBRL Company Concept API to retrieve structured financial facts from 10-K annual report filings.
The data pipeline queries specific US GAAP reporting concepts for each tracked company, extracts the most recently filed values, and calculates the composite risk scores. Data is cached and refreshed periodically to reflect new filings.
Due to the nature of SEC filings, there is an inherent lag between when a company's fiscal period ends and when the data appears in EDGAR. Annual reports (10-K) are typically filed 60-90 days after the fiscal year end.
Coverage
DebtCanary currently tracks companies across fifteen sectors including technology, energy, healthcare, financial services, industrials, and consumer sectors. The company list focuses on large and mid-cap public companies that are widely followed and have meaningful debt on their balance sheets.
Not all companies report all of the XBRL concepts used in the scoring model. The data completeness flag on each company page indicates how many of the four scoring components could be calculated. Companies with "Limited" data quality should be interpreted with additional caution. See the Methodology page for details.
Disclaimer
DebtCanary provides corporate debt data sourced from SEC EDGAR public filings for informational and educational purposes only. This is not financial advice. Risk scores are calculated using publicly available data and a simplified model that may not capture all factors affecting a company's creditworthiness. Always consult qualified financial professionals before making investment decisions. Data may be delayed or incomplete. DebtCanary is not affiliated with the SEC, EDGAR, or any company tracked on this site.
Limitations
- Reporting variation: Companies have discretion in how they report maturity schedules. Some report detailed year-by-year breakdowns; others report only current vs. non-current categories. This affects the precision of maturity concentration calculations.
- Filing lag: EDGAR data reflects the most recently filed annual report, which may be several months old. Companies may have issued new debt, refinanced, or repaid debt since their last 10-K filing.
- Simplified model: The risk score is a simplified composite metric. Professional credit analysis considers many additional factors: industry dynamics, management quality, asset values, off-balance- sheet obligations, covenants, credit facility availability, and macroeconomic conditions.
- US GAAP only: The XBRL concepts used are US GAAP specific. Companies that report under IFRS or other standards may have different data availability.
- No real-time updates: Data is refreshed periodically, not in real time. Market conditions, credit spreads, and company fundamentals can change rapidly.