The 45-day rule, and how often it is missed
The law gives 45 days to disclose a trade. How often is that met?
The headline everyone reaches for is that political stock trading is disclosed hopelessly late. Our data says something more specific and more interesting: congressional compliance is mostly good, and the late filing is concentrated overwhelmingly in the executive branch.
Percentage of trades disclosed after 45 days
Computed live from our database when you loaded this page. Nothing here is hand-typed, so nothing here can go stale.
| Branch | Chamber | Party | Trades | Late | Avg days | Worst |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Executive branch | executive | - | 621 | +85.2% | 60 | 421 |
| Congress | house | D | 372 | +2.7% | 28 | 547 |
| Congress | house | R | 155 | +15.5% | 75 | 536 |
| Congress | senate | R | 63 | 0% | 25 | 39 |
| Congress | senate | D | 12 | +8.3% | 42 | 332 |
| Congress | senate | - | 1 | 0% | 29 | 29 |
Live from our database. 6 rows shown.
- Days between transaction date and disclosure date, for every trade we can resolve to a listed equity.
- 'Late' means more than 45 days, the deadline set by the STOCK Act.
- Executive-branch filers are separated from Congress, because mixing them produces a number that describes neither.
- This is EQUITY trades only. Our raw feed holds 5,000 rows, but roughly three quarters are bonds and other non-equity assets, mostly from a single filer. Including them would let one person's bond ladder define the behaviour of Congress.
- Our coverage is a sample of filers, not the whole of Congress. It is not a compliance audit and should not be cited as one.
- A late filing is not evidence of wrongdoing. It is evidence of a late filing.
Free to quote, chart or republish with attribution. Cite as: SteadyShares, The 45-day rule, and how often it is missed, https://steadyshares.com/research/the-45-day-rule. If you are a journalist and want the underlying query or a different cut of the data, ask and we will run it.
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Educational information, not financial advice, and not a recommendation to buy or sell anything. A late regulatory filing is a paperwork failure and nothing more: we make no allegation of wrongdoing against any person named on this page.