When is the COT report released?

The CFTC publishes the Commitments of Traders report on Friday at 3:30 pm Eastern Time. It shows positions as they stood at the close of business on Tuesday of the same week. That is the rule; the exceptions are federal holidays and, rarely, a government that has stopped working.

Tuesday's positions, Friday's report

The reporting firms send their position data to the CFTC on Wednesday morning. The CFTC processes it over the next two days, and the report goes out on Friday afternoon. Everything in it is therefore three days old the moment it appears — a snapshot of Tuesday, not a view of Friday.

3:30 pm Eastern is 19:30 UTC while the US is on daylight saving time and 20:30 UTC in winter. Europe and the US change their clocks on different weekends, so for two or three weeks in March and about a week around the turn of October and November the gap to European time is one hour shorter than usual.

Holidays

The CFTC publishes its release calendar in advance and marks every date it has had to move. In its own words, federal holidays may delay the release by one or two days. In practice that looks like this:

1. A holiday later in the week — Wednesday, Thursday or Friday — usually moves the release to the following Monday. Thanksgiving, always on a Thursday, is the regular case; Christmas, New Year's Day, Juneteenth and Independence Day do the same whenever they land late in the week. Occasionally it is the Tuesday instead: after the Christmas holidays of 2014, the next report came out on Tuesday, December 30.
2. A holiday on the Monday — Labor Day, Memorial Day and the like — normally leaves the Friday release where it is.
3. A holiday on the Tuesday itself moves the snapshot, not the release: the report then uses Monday's positions and still comes out on Friday. Independence Day 2023 fell on a Tuesday: that week's report used the positions of Monday, July 3, and came out on Friday as usual.

Closures can also come at short notice. In January 2025 a national day of mourning closed federal offices on a Thursday, and that week's report moved to the following Monday. So “every Friday” is right most weeks and wrong a handful of times a year; the release schedule on the CFTC's website is the reference.

When the report did not come out

The report depends on CFTC staff and on the reporting firms' systems. When either stops, so does the report. Several cases stand out:

1. October 2013 — a government shutdown. The first delayed report, originally due on October 4, appeared on October 25, and the CFTC aimed to be back on its normal schedule by November 8.
2. December 2018 to January 2019 — another shutdown. The last report before it came out on December 21, 2018. Afterwards the CFTC worked through the backlog in date order from February 1, 2019, planning two reports a week until it was current.
3. February to March 2023 — a cyber incident at ION, a third-party software provider, kept several reporting firms from submitting their data. The delayed reports were published in order through March 21.
4. October to November 2025 — a shutdown stopped processing from October 1 to November 12. Publication resumed on November 19 with the oldest missing week, at two or three reports a week, with the backlog scheduled to clear by December 29.

None of the missing weeks were lost: each report was published later, oldest first, under its original Tuesday date, so the history has no gaps. While the backlog lasted, though, the newest report available could be old — after the 2025 shutdown, for several weeks, well over a month.

What it means for reading the data

The COT report is a weekly snapshot with a built-in delay. On a normal Friday you are looking at Tuesday; after a holiday, at a Tuesday that may be almost a week old by the time you read it. WAVG leads every market page with the report's own Tuesday and names the publication day next to it, so the age of the numbers is always in view. What the report contains is explained in What is the COT report?