Report
How late does Congress disclose its stock trades?
The STOCK Act gives a member of Congress 45 days to report a stock trade. We measured every House disclosure from 2024 through mid-2026 against that deadline — using the date each report actually became public, not the date the member says a broker told them.
Published July 2026 · Data through July 20, 2026 · Source: U.S. House Clerk
Scope: 9,356 purchases and sales of publicly traded stock and options, across 750 of the 1,278 Periodic Transaction Reports in the Clerk’s 2024–2026 index, filed by 124 U.S. House members and former members. Bonds, funds, and the U.S. Senate are out of scope. Full method and the reasons for the excluded reports are below.
Two honest numbers, not one
There are two fair ways to count lateness, and they answer different questions — so we report both. 14.1% of individual trades reached the public after the 45-day deadline. But a single late report can bundle hundreds of trades, so counting trades over-weights a few members with big portfolios. Counting reports — one filing is one decision to file on time or not — gives 7.5% late. Neither number is wrong; quoting only the scarier one would be.
Most trades cluster right at the deadline
The striking pattern isn’t rampant lateness — it’s how many filings arrive in the final days before the clock runs out. 24.4% of all transactions land in the 31–45 day window, the single largest bucket after 15–30 days. Compliance is real, but it runs close to the edge.
Each bar is a range of days between a stock transaction and the date its report reached the House Clerk. 24.4% of transactions land in the 31–45 day window — right up against the deadline. Everything below the dashed line was filed after the STOCK Act’s 45-day limit.
Who files late — and it’s both parties
Among the 19 members with at least one late report (limited to those who filed 5+ reports, so a single stray filing can’t top the list), the split is 11 Republicans and 8 Democrats. Late disclosure is a bipartisan habit, not a partisan story. Each row links to the filing behind that member’s longest lag, so you can check the dates yourself.
| Member | Reports | Late | Late % | Worst lag | Filing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RepublicanDaniel MeuserPA | 8 | 2 | 25% | 371d | view |
| DemocratDwight EvansPA | 8 | 2 | 25% | 175d | view |
| RepublicanNeal P. DunnFL | 8 | 2 | 25% | 76d | view |
| RepublicanLaurel M. LeeFL | 9 | 2 | 22.2% | 591d | view |
| RepublicanLisa C. McClainMI | 5 | 1 | 20% | 520d | view |
| DemocratSteve CohenTN | 5 | 1 | 20% | 140d | view |
| RepublicanRichard McCormickGA | 6 | 1 | 16.7% | 917d | view |
| RepublicanAugust PflugerTX | 6 | 1 | 16.7% | 337d | view |
| RepublicanScott FranklinFL | 15 | 2 | 13.3% | 520d | view |
| DemocratDebbie Wasserman SchultzFL | 15 | 2 | 13.3% | 489d | view |
| DemocratJared MoskowitzFL | 15 | 2 | 13.3% | 404d | view |
| DemocratGreg LandsmanOH | 9 | 1 | 11.1% | 580d | view |
| RepublicanDavid J. TaylorOH | 22 | 2 | 9.1% | 63d | view |
| DemocratGilbert Ray Cisneros, Jr.CA | 18 | 1 | 5.6% | 66d | view |
| RepublicanTim MooreNC | 20 | 1 | 5% | 73d | view |
| RepublicanRick W. AllenGA | 23 | 1 | 4.3% | 51d | view |
| DemocratJonathan L. JacksonIL | 27 | 1 | 3.7% | 124d | view |
| RepublicanThomas H. Kean, Jr.NJ | 29 | 1 | 3.4% | 49d | view |
| DemocratJosh GottheimerNJ | 31 | 1 | 3.2% | 388d | view |
“Worst lag” is the longest gap found in any single report that member filed, and the link goes to that report. A high worst-lag with few late reports usually means one old holding disclosed years after purchase — late by the letter, but not necessarily a pattern.
Year by year
Late-filing rates have held fairly steady. The trade-level rate looks higher in older years because those reports have had longer to accumulate late stragglers; 2026 is a partial year.
| Filing year | Reports | Late reports | Trades | Late trades |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 251 | 15 (6.0%) | 2,207 | 369 (16.7%) |
| 2025 | 318 | 26 (8.2%) | 4,997 | 720 (14.4%) |
| 2026 (partial) | 181 | 15 (8.3%) | 2,152 | 230 (10.7%) |
How we measured this
The deadline. The STOCK Act of 2012 requires a member to report a covered securities transaction within 30 days of being notified, and no later than 45 days after the trade. We test the 45-day outer bound — the most conservative reading, and the one that needs no assumption about when a broker made contact.
The clock we use. Lag is measured from the transaction date to the date the report was filed with the Clerk and became public — taken from the Clerk’s annual bulk disclosure archive. We deliberately do not use the “notification date” printed on the form: it is self-reported, unverifiable, and on this data it understates the true lag by about two weeks on average.
Before-office trades excluded. A report sometimes discloses a purchase made years before the filer was in Congress (typically an old lot sold while in office). Those carried no STOCK Act duty, so we drop any transaction dated before the member’s congressional service began.
Ranking members fairly. The late-filer table counts reports, not trades, and only includes members with 5+ reports, so a single stray filing can’t crown someone the “worst.”
What this does and doesn’t show
- House only. The Senate files on a different system and is not in this dataset. This is a House analysis.
- Stock and option trades only. Bonds, mutual funds, and other asset classes are excluded, as are transfers that are not a purchase or a sale (a share exchange forced by a corporate action, for example). Trade counts are therefore lower than a member’s full disclosed activity.
- Paper filings can’t be read, and they are not counted. 156 of the 1,278 reports in the Clerk’s index — 12% — were filed on paper and published as scanned images with no machine-readable text. Nothing in them can be measured. If members who file on paper are systematically later than members who file electronically, our late rates are too low, not too high.
- Most of the remaining gap is reports with nothing in scope. Another 372 reports were machine-readable but disclosed no stock or option purchase or sale — Treasury securities, bank accounts, and funds. That accounts for every report in the index: 156 unreadable + 372 out of scope + 750 scored = 1,278.
- Late ≠ illegal, and late ≠ insider trading. A missed deadline is a paperwork violation carrying a nominal fee — not evidence of trading on inside information. For that distinction, read our explainer on signal and noise.
- 3 pre-service transactions were excluded as described in the method above.
Sources
- U.S. House Clerk — Financial Disclosure (Periodic Transaction Reports and the annual bulk filing-date archive)
- unitedstates/congress-legislators (service dates and party, current and historical)
- Our own Trades feed and methodology page
Corrections and questions: how we handle them. This report is a snapshot; the underlying trades data updates continuously.