How Members of Congress Disclose Their Stock Trades

Under the STOCK Act, members of Congress must report a stock trade within 30 days of learning of it and no later than 45 days after it happened, disclosing the trade date and a dollar range rather than an exact amount. The law sets the outer limit; how quickly members actually file varies. Looking at recent disclosures shows what that gap looks like in practice.

How it works

The STOCK Act of 2012, formally the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, requires members of Congress to file a periodic transaction report for each trade worth more than $1,000. This covers trades made by the member as well as trades made by a spouse or a dependent child, so a household's trading activity, not just the member's own trades, must be disclosed.

The law sets two deadlines. A member must report a trade within 30 days of being notified of it, and no later than 45 days after the trade itself, whichever comes first. The 30-day clock starts when the member learns of the trade, which can happen after the trade date, so in practice it can only push a disclosure earlier, never later than the 45-day limit. As an illustration, using round numbers: a trade made on March 1 must be reported by April 15 at the latest, which is 45 days later.

Disclosures do not state an exact dollar amount. Instead, each report places the trade into one of several ranges, starting at $1,001 to $15,000, then $15,001 to $50,000, then $50,001 to $100,000, and continuing in steps up to over $50,000,000. This means two trades reported in the same range could differ in size by tens of thousands of dollars, and the disclosure alone cannot tell you where in that range the real figure falls.

Because the law allows up to 45 days before a trade must be reported, a stock trade can already be six weeks old by the time the public sees it. Anyone reading a disclosure is looking at a transaction that has already happened, not a live signal, and the price or conditions at the time of disclosure may differ from those at the time of the trade.

These reports are published through two official channels: the Clerk of the House for House members, and the Senate's public disclosure site for senators. Both make the filings searchable by member and by date, though the underlying filings themselves are what the law requires, not a running summary of trading patterns.

What the disclosure requirement cannot tell you is why a trade was made, why one filing took longer to appear than another, or what information, if any, the member had at the time. The STOCK Act requires timing and a dollar range; it does not require an explanation.

A worked example with real figures

Looking at every disclosure with a disclosure date in the 90 days to October 28, 2026, we counted 1,545 stock trades filed by 49 members of Congress, made up of 666 purchases and 868 sales. That split shows sales were reported more often than purchases over this stretch, though the data does not say why.

The more telling figure is how long each trade took to become public. The median gap between trade date and disclosure date was 28 days, and half of all trades were disclosed somewhere between 19 and 40 days after they happened. That spread sits comfortably inside the 45-day limit the STOCK Act allows, but it also means a typical disclosure is already a month old by the time it is visible, and some trades took longer than others for reasons the records do not explain.

Separately, CNN reported that the House passed a bill in July that would bar sitting members of Congress from buying new individual stocks, though it would not require them to sell holdings they already have, and the Senate did not advance it. That legislative effort is about restricting future trading, not about the disclosure timeline described here, which remains governed by the STOCK Act's existing 30- and 45-day deadlines.