What is the STOCK Act?
The law that turned congressional stock trading from a private matter into a public record — and the reason every number on this site exists.
Filings through 5 Nov 2026 · source: House Clerk & Senate EFD
The STOCK Act of 2012 requires every member of the U.S. Congress to publicly disclose any purchase or sale of stocks, bonds or commodity futures worth more than $1,000 — within 45 days of the transaction.
It applies to members of both chambers, their spouses and their dependent children. The filings are published by the House Clerk and the Senate Office of Public Records, and they are what this section is built from.
What a filing contains
Each reported transaction carries five things: who traded, what (ticker and asset type), when the trade happened, when it was filed, and a bracket for the amount — not an exact figure.
The brackets are wide by design: $1,001–15,000, then $15,001–50,000, and so on up to an open-ended top band above $50 million. A member who bought $16,000 and one who bought $49,000 file the identical bracket.
The filing also names the owner: the member, a spouse, a joint account or a dependent child. That is why two seemingly identical rows on the same day are usually not duplicates.
The 45-day deadline, and how it is used
The clock starts at the transaction, not at the month’s end. Across the 3,675 filings currently on file, half of them reached the public record within 26 days of the trade. But 484 of them took longer than 45 days, some of them many months.
A long gap is not automatically a breach: the law sets the clock at 30 days from the moment the member is notified, capped at 45 days from the trade, and a managed account can inform its owner late. What the filings measure exactly is the gap itself — and that is what this section shows.
The penalty for a late filing is a $200 fee. It has been widely criticised as too small to deter anything, and late filings remain common.
What the filings do not show
They do not show why a trade happened. Most large-cap filings come from managed accounts, index funds or routine rebalancing rather than a decision about a specific company.
They do not show how much was made or lost. Without exact amounts or share counts, no return can be calculated from a filing alone — and any figure presented as one is an estimate built on assumptions the filing does not contain.
And they do not show knowledge. A filing records a transaction, not what the member knew when they made it.
Why the disclosure lag matters
The lag is the one quantity these filings measure precisely. A trade disclosed after 40 days is public information about a decision made nearly six weeks earlier — in a fast-moving stock, that is a different world.
That is why every page in this section shows the lag on each filing, and the median next to the legal limit.
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