Docs/Historical Data Downloads
Account & billingHistorical Data Downloads
Buy historical option trade files for the whole market by the day, or for the symbols you choose: price, available dates, file layout, formats, delivery, and purchase terms.
On this page
Historical Data Downloads sell option trade files, either for the whole market by the trading day or for the symbols you choose. Each order is paid once: you do not need a subscription to buy, and a purchase does not add API access.
Price
A whole-market order costs $2 per trading day, however many rows the day has. A recent day has about 9 to 17 million rows. A chosen-symbol order costs $1 per 10 million rows, rounded up to the next 10 million, with a $2 minimum. The order page shows example orders, and the exact row count and price before you pay. The file format does not change the price. You pay by card through Stripe Checkout, and Stripe issues an invoice.
Available dates
The order page shows the dates on sale. The range ends 15 days before today, and each new day is added once its files are built. Dates with no data, such as weekends and market holidays, cannot be chosen. A range that spans them includes only the days with data, and you pay only for those.
Choosing what to buy
An order is a date range, a format, and either the whole market or a list of symbols. Each file holds every trade in that selection, sorted by symbol and then time. Filter by expiration, put or call, or premium after you download.
Some index options are listed under two symbols, and ordering one does not include the other: SPX and SPXW, NDX and NDXP, RUT and RUTW, VIX and VIXW. Most SPX trades are under SPXW. The order page warns you before you pay if you chose only one of a pair.
What is in a file
Download a free sample to check the layout before you buy, in Parquet or CSV. It holds every DIS trade on 2026-10-15, 8,087 rows.
Each row is one trade, with the columns listed under Fields in the Historical SQL reference. The time column is written differently by format: CSV shows New York local time with no offset, and Parquet stores the same moment as a UTC timestamp, so a trade at 09:30 in CSV reads 13:30 in Parquet during daylight saving time. date is the trading date in both.
| Order | Files | Example name |
|---|---|---|
| Whole market | One per trading day | trades_2026-10-20.parquet |
| Chosen symbols | One per symbol per calendar month | SPY_2026-10.parquet |
A symbol with no trades in your range is left out of the order at no cost, and the order page names it before you pay. A month with no trades produces no file.
| Format | Details | Typical size |
|---|---|---|
| Parquet (recommended) | zstd compression and typed columns. Smaller, and fast to load in Python, R, DuckDB, or Spark | About 14 bytes per row |
| CSV | gzip compression (.csv.gz), with a header row. Most tools can open it, but a whole-market day is too large for Excel | About 17 bytes per row |
Receiving your files
Whole-market files are ready as soon as you have paid. Chosen-symbol files are built after you pay: small orders take minutes and large orders can take hours. Either way, we email you when they are ready.
On the order page, each order lists its files with their rows and sizes, and offers a link per file, Copy download command, one curl command that saves every file in a folder for that order, and Copy all links. If a download stops, run the command again in the same place and it continues each file where it stopped.
Each link works for 24 hours, and reopening the order page gives you fresh links and a fresh command. Links are available for 30 days from purchase, so please save your files before then.
Before offering chosen-symbol files, we compare the rows delivered with the rows you paid for. Corrected trades can move the count by up to 0.1%, and the order shows the rows your files hold. An order further short than that shows as needing attention, and we fix or refund it.
Limits
A chosen-symbol order can include up to 40 symbols and up to 5 billion rows. Contact Support if you need a larger or custom export.
Purchase terms
- You must accept the Historical Data Agreement before you pay. The order page shows it when you click Pay, the first time you buy.
- Purchases are final once paid. Files cannot be returned, so the money-back guarantee does not apply. We refund an order we cannot deliver.
- Files are licensed for your own personal, non-professional use and may not be redistributed. You may keep them after 30 days, under the agreement and the Terms of Service. Contact Support about commercial use.
Ask ChatGPT or Claude Code
Copy this prompt, paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex, then add your question. It tells the model to read our public docs first — no API key needed for that step.
You are helping me use OptionData (https://www.optiondata.io/), a historical U.S. equity options data API. Before answering, fetch these public files (no login required) and treat them as the source of truth: - https://www.optiondata.io/llms.txt — short product map (same content as https://www.optiondata.io/llm.txt) - https://www.optiondata.io/llms-full.txt — full API reference - https://www.optiondata.io/openapi.json — HTTP OpenAPI Do not invent endpoints, fields, tables, or limits. Prefer `Authorization: Bearer apikey_…` for HTTP APIs. Products: - Historical SQL: POST https://www.optiondata.io/api/historical/sql - Option chain: POST https://www.optiondata.io/api/option-chain I am asking about: Historical Data Downloads - Markdown: https://www.optiondata.io/md/historical-data-downloads - HTML docs: https://www.optiondata.io/docs/historical-data-downloads My question: