How Late Does Congress Report Its Stock Trades?

The short answer. The STOCK Act of 2012 gives a member of Congress 45 days from a trade to disclose it. Of the 24,875 transactions in our database, 8,930 — 35.9% — were filed after that deadline. The standard penalty for missing it is $200.

Checked 1 October 2026. Last change to the facts below: the STOCK Act's 45-day rule, unchanged since 2012. If those dates are far apart, the legislative position may have moved since this was last edited.

What is the actual deadline?

45 days from the transaction, filed as a Periodic Transaction Report. Note that the clock runs from the trade, not from the month end or the quarter end, so each trade carries its own deadline.

The report gives the date, the ticker, the direction and a range — "$1,001 to $15,000", "$15,001 to $50,000" and so on. It never gives an exact amount, which is why every congressional-trading figure anywhere, including on this site, is an estimate built from bands.

How often is the deadline missed?

35.9% of the 24,875 disclosed transactions we hold were filed late — 8,930 of them. Read live, so it moves as filings arrive.

Which disclosures took longest?

Ranked by days between the trade and its disclosure. A filing that arrives a year late is not a different kind of disclosure from one that arrives on time; it is the same form, with the same $200 penalty, arriving after the information has stopped being useful.

Why does a $200 fine not work?

Because it is not scaled to anything. The penalty for filing a late report is the same whether the trade was $1,000 or $1,000,000, and it is routinely waived. That asymmetry is the strongest argument made for H.R. 7008, passed by the House on 22 July 2026 and not yet law, which would replace it with a fee of the greater of $2,000 or 10% of the investment's value, plus forfeiture of profits.

It is also why the bill's other change matters: notice 7 to 14 days before a sale cannot be filed late in the same way, because a notice that arrives after the trade is not a late notice, it is a missing one.

Does a late filing mean something improper happened?

No, and it is worth saying plainly. The most common explanations are administrative — a managed account the member does not direct, a spouse's broker, a staffer who missed a form. Lateness tells you the disclosure system is leaky. It does not tell you the trade was wrong.

What this page cannot tell you

Anything about a trade that was never disclosed at all. Every figure here is drawn from filings that exist; there is no way to count the ones that do not.

Educational information, not financial advice. Figures on this page are read from the source filings when the page loads rather than written into the article. Dated events — votes, appointments, filings — are written down with their date and source, because those do not change.