Making something optional is not the same as making it disappear. The SEC’s new plan to let companies end quarterly reporting offers a good example.
On May 5, 2026, the SEC proposed letting public companies drop quarterly reports in favor of a twice-a-year Form 10-S. The pitch, echoing President Trump’s 2025 call to scrap the “quarterly earnings rat race,” is that less frequent filing frees management to focus on the business instead of the next 90-day print. News coverage has treated this as the beginning of the end for Form 10-Q.
It probably isn’t. The proposal doesn’t ban quarterly reporting, it makes it optional. And optionality, in this case, is likely to produce a lot less change than the headlines suggest.
We’ve run this experiment before
The EU dropped its mandatory quarterly requirement in 2013; the UK followed in 2014. By the end of 2015, fewer than 10% of UK-listed firms had actually stopped reporting quarterly. Given a choice, most companies chose to keep doing what they were already doing. There’s no obvious reason U.S. issuers, operating in a market with even deeper analyst coverage and higher retail participation, would behave differently.
The lesson from the UK isn’t that companies love paperwork. It’s that once quarterly reporting is priced into how a company is valued, financed, and compensated, removing the legal requirement to report quarterly removes surprisingly little of the practice itself.
Debt and compensation contracts don’t care what the SEC allows
A huge share of public companies operate under credit agreements, bond covenants, and executive comp plans that reference quarterly financial metrics, like quarterly EBITDA tests, quarterly compliance certificates, and quarterly-vesting performance targets.
This isn’t hypothetical: standard leveraged-loan and high-yield bond agreements routinely require borrowers to deliver a signed compliance certificate, with covenant-ratio calculations attached, within 45 days of each fiscal quarter-end. That’s a contractual obligation completely separate from anything filed with the SEC. Electing semiannual SEC reporting doesn’t rewrite those loan documents. A company would either need to keep producing quarterly numbers internally to satisfy its lenders (undercutting the compliance savings the SEC is promising) or go back to its bank group or noteholders and renegotiate the reporting covenant, with the cost of legal fees and, often, a fee to the lenders for the accommodation. Most CFOs will prefer to avoid that math.
Investors and analysts are the real gatekeepers, and they’re not going to unilaterally disarm
Sell-side models are built quarter by quarter. Comparability across a peer set matters more to most investors than a single company’s compliance burden — an issuer that goes semiannual while its competitors stay quarterly risks looking opaque exactly when it can least afford to.
The buy side is already saying so directly. SIFMA’s Asset Management Group, which represents the broker-dealers and asset managers that underwrite and invest in U.S. public companies, told the SEC the proposal raises real “questions about the timeliness of information available to investors” and about comparing companies that report on different schedules. And when the SEC’s own Investor Advisory Committee convened a panel on the idea in March, with participants from firms including Citadel and Fidelity, the reaction was skeptical rather than enthusiastic about whether semiannual reporting would take hold.
Companies with active analyst coverage have every incentive to keep feeding the model, too. Indeed, the SEC’s proposal itself notes management can keep the current quarterly earnings-call and press-release cadence regardless of what it files with the Commission.
If the SEC adopts its plan, the likely outcome is a hybrid, not a wholesale shift. Some smaller, thinly-covered companies with no debt covenants to worry about may take the option and welcome the relief. But large, widely-held, analyst-covered issuers are likely to keep quarterly disclosure. Their investor-relations practices and contractual requirements won’t be altered by a change to SEC rules.