How Long Does Congress Have to Disclose Stock Trades?

The STOCK Act sets two clocks: 30 days from when the member learns of the transaction (relevant when a spouse or a manager trades), and a hard stop of 45 days from the transaction itself. The report covers the member, their spouse, and dependent children.

InsiderWatch measures the gap between each trade date and the filing date for every Congress trade it captures, and publishes the distribution on the Congress tracker: how many arrive within two weeks, how many in the last stretch before the deadline, and how many after it. The median and the share past 45 days are shown live below when the store has enough filings.

Treat Congress trades as a record of what members did, not as a same-day trading signal. The value is in patterns: a member who repeatedly buys a sector their committee oversees, or a wave of buys in one stock across many members. Those patterns survive a 30-day lag; a single trade usually does not.

The STOCK Act amended the Ethics in Government Act, the 1978 law behind the annual financial disclosures every senior federal official files. Before 2012, a member's trades appeared once a year in that annual report, up to sixteen months after the fact. The STOCK Act added the periodic transaction report and set its deadline as 30 days after the filer is notified of the transaction, with an outer limit of 45 days after the transaction date. The 30-day clock exists because many trades are made by a spouse, a broker or a managed account, and the member may only learn of them from a statement.

Two dates appear on every report: the transaction date and the date the report was filed. The difference is the disclosure lag. InsiderWatch records both for every trade it captures from the Senate's electronic system and the House Clerk's filings, then computes the median lag, the share of trades filed after the 45-day limit, and the distribution in two-week buckets, all shown in the live panel on this page and on the Congress tracker. The measured figures are only as complete as the capture, so they describe the filings in our record rather than every filing ever made.

A few things distort the raw number. Some members file one report covering a month of trades, so the oldest trade on it can be near the deadline while the newest is days old. Amended reports carry the original transaction dates and a later filing date. And a report filed on the 45th day is on time, so "late" here means the 46th day or after.

Late reports are not hidden. The filing date is public, and the House and Senate ethics committees can charge a $200 fee per late report, which they can waive for a first offense or a good reason. Reporters and trackers compile lists of members whose reports arrived weeks or months after the deadline, and those lists have become a regular news genre. The public record of who files late, and how late, is one of the more reliable pieces of the whole system, because it needs no estimate: two dates on a form.

A Form 4 tells you what an insider did this week. A periodic transaction report tells you what a member of Congress did last month, on average. Trackers that present Congress trades as a trading signal, or that compute a member's "return" from the trade date, are measuring something the filer's counterparties could not have acted on. The durable uses are different: the pattern of a member's trades against the committees they sit on, the stocks many members buy in the same window, the members whose reports are consistently late, and the lag itself as a measure of how well the law works.