How Fast Are Congress Trades Disclosed? We Measured 448 Filings

You see a headline. A representative bought shares in a defense contractor. The story spreads fast. Then you check the fine print. The trade happened weeks ago. The stock already moved.

That gap between trade and disclosure is the single most important thing to understand before you follow congressional trades. Most articles about it, including the earlier version of this one, explain the 45-day rule and leave it there. So we measured it instead.

Across 448 transactions taken from Periodic Transaction Reports filed between July 6 and August 13, 2026, the median lag between trade and filing was 27 days. One in five reached the public within a week. The slowest was 619 days.

Below is where those numbers come from, what they mean, and the one number we deliberately do not publish.

The rule: 45 days is a ceiling, not a promise

The legal framework comes from the STOCK Act of 2012, formally the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act. You can read the bill text on congress.gov. Before it, members of Congress disclosed their holdings once a year. After it, they must file a Periodic Transaction Report, usually called a PTR, for individual trades.

The timing rule has two parts. A member must file within 30 days of becoming aware of a transaction, and in no case later than 45 days after the transaction itself. It applies to purchases, sales and exchanges of covered securities above a $1,000 threshold, and it covers the member, their spouse and dependent children.

Notice the structure. The 45 days is an outer bound. Nothing stops a member from filing the next day, and some do. Nothing forces a member to file before day 45 either. And some file late. The penalty starts at a modest standard fee, historically $200, which the ethics committees can waive. That soft enforcement is why late filings are a normal part of this data rather than an anomaly.

What we measured

Our congressional feed records the transaction date and the filing date for every trade it ingests. That makes the lag a subtraction, done per transaction rather than per document, since one PTR often carries many trades with different dates.

The sample: 448 transactions, 51 members, from PTRs filed between July 6 and August 13, 2026.

The median and the tail tell two different stories, and both are true.

The typical filing is prompt. Half of all transactions were public within 27 days, comfortably inside the deadline. 89 of them, one in five, arrived within a week of the trade. A member who wants to file quickly can, and many do.

The tail is very long. 19 transactions covered trades more than a year old. The slowest was a sale of Pfizer stock on November 26, 2024, disclosed on August 7, 2026 in the $1,001 to $15,000 band, 619 days later. That filing is public and you can read it yourself: PTR 20035147. This is why quoting the mean is misleading. The mean across this sample is 93 days, a number that describes almost none of the actual filings.

One more detail worth knowing before you build anything on this data: 22 percent of these transactions were partial disclosures, where the filing does not resolve to a specific ticker and the asset is described in prose. Any tracker that shows you a clean ticker for every row is either dropping those filings or guessing at them.

The number we are not publishing

The obvious next statistic is the share of filings that miss the 45-day deadline. In our sample, 113 of 448 transactions, or 25 percent, were filed more than 45 days after the trade.

We are not calling that a violation rate, because it would be wrong.

Our filing window is 38 days wide. The deadline it would have to measure is 45 days. That means no transaction in this sample had its full statutory clock run inside the window we observed. What a short window does capture is every late filing from years past that happened to land in it, alongside only the timely filings from the last few weeks. Old trades are overrepresented by construction. The 25 percent is real as a description of what crossed our desk in six weeks. It is not an estimate of how often Congress misses the deadline, and anyone quoting it that way, including us, would be overstating it.

Measuring the true rate requires following complete cohorts: take every transaction from a given month, wait out the full 45 days plus a margin for late arrivals, and only then count. That is a longer study, and when we have the history to do it properly we will publish it with the same method attached.

We also excluded one record from every figure above. A single filing carried a filing date four days before its own transaction date. The underlying document is a scanned form rather than a text filing, so we could not verify whether the error is in the source or in our reading of it. One record out of 449 does not move any of these numbers, and publishing a negative lag without being able to explain it would be worse than dropping it.

Where the raw data lives

Every PTR is public. The House publishes them through the Clerk's financial disclosure portal at disclosures-clerk.house.gov. The Senate publishes them through its electronic financial disclosure system at efdsearch.senate.gov. Both are free, and no account is needed to search, though the Senate system asks you to accept an access agreement each session.

Each PTR contains what you need: a transaction date per trade, a filing date for the report, the asset with a ticker where one applies, the transaction type, and an amount range rather than an exact figure. The ranges are bands like $1,001 to $15,000, then $15,001 to $50,000, and upward. You never see the exact amount.

If you want to reproduce our figures, the method is the five steps below. If you would rather check our arithmetic than repeat it, the transactions behind these numbers are listed with their source filings on our late-filing tracker.

How to measure the lag yourself

First, collect the PTRs. The House Clerk site offers yearly index files listing every disclosure with links to the documents. The Senate site is searchable by date range. Most recent House PTRs are electronic and parseable. Some, especially older ones, are scanned paper documents that need OCR or manual reading, and any serious measurement should state how it handled them. Ours excludes one such document, as described above.

Second, extract both dates for every transaction, not every document. One PTR can contain many trades with different transaction dates.

Third, look at the distribution rather than one summary number. The mean gets dragged around by a handful of very late filings, as ours does. The median tells you what a typical trade looks like. The 90th percentile tells you how bad the tail is.

Fourth, handle amendments carefully. Members sometimes file an amended PTR that corrects or adds trades from months earlier. Treating an amendment as a first disclosure inflates the lag. That delay is real information about when the trade reached the public, but original filings and amendments tell different stories and should be separated.

Fifth, decide which date you actually care about. The filing date is when the document was submitted. The date the portal published it, and the date a tracker picked it up, add more delay. If your question is when a follower could realistically have acted, measure to the moment the data was retrievable, not the moment it was signed.

What the ceiling means for followers

If a trade can be a month old when you see it, what is left?

Compare this to corporate insiders. Officers and directors report on Form 4, generally due within two business days. The SEC covers this on its Form 4 overview. Two business days against a median of 27 calendar days is an enormous difference. Insider filings are near real time. Congressional filings are history.

Short-term information decays fast. If a trade was driven by something the market learned within days, the disclosure arrives long after the move, and copying it means buying old news. The lag alone kills most fast edges before you even ask whether an edge existed.

Longer-horizon positioning decays slowly. A position built to hold for quarters or years survives a few weeks of delay. The disclosure still shows you where a well-connected person put real money for the long run.

Aggregation beats single filings. One delayed trade is weak evidence. Several members buying the same name or sector inside a window is more interesting even when seen late, because clusters change slowly.

And the lag is itself a behavioral signal. Because members choose when to file inside the window, a member who consistently files within days is easier to follow than one who files on day 44 or amends a year later. Measuring lag per member is also building a reliability score. Our sample covers 51 members, which is enough to see the spread but not enough to rank individuals fairly, so we are not publishing per-member medians yet either.

Honest limits

PTRs do not state why a trade happened. Many congressional trades are made by spouses, advisers or managed accounts the member does not direct day to day. Some members use blind trusts or broad funds that generate little tradeable information at all. Academic studies disagree on whether congressional portfolios beat the market once you account for risk and timing.

Our own numbers carry the limits stated above: a six-week filing window, one excluded record, and no violation rate. The disclosures are a transparency tool first. Any signal you extract from them is a hypothesis to test, not a guarantee. Nothing here is investment advice.

The takeaway is simple enough. The 45-day rule describes the worst case, not the typical one. The typical case, in the filings we measured, is 27 days, with a tail that runs to 619. The age of the information is as important as the information itself, and it is measurable, so measure it before trusting any strategy built on following these trades.

Our Congress Stock Trades report tracks new PTR filings, records both the transaction and disclosure dates, and scores every trade with the filing lag built in, so you always know how fresh a signal really is. See the current data on the Congress Stock Trades report.

Want the signal instead of the raw filings? Get the free Congress Trades preview. Prefer the tool to the write-up? Browse all data feeds or connect the free MCP server.