How to track congress stock trades (2026)

August 10, 2026·8 min read

Congress members must disclose stock trades within 45 days under the STOCK Act. You can track them three ways: read the filings free at the House Clerk and Senate portals, use a tracker website, or use a phone app that pushes new disclosures to you.

Method 1: read the filings yourself, for free

The disclosures are public records. There is no paywall, no account, and no API key between you and the primary source, and both chambers publish the same document type: a Periodic Transaction Report (PTR), filed whenever a member, their spouse or a dependent child buys, sells or exchanges more than $1,000 of a security.

The House: disclosures-clerk.house.gov

Go to disclosures-clerk.house.gov, open the financial disclosure search, choose a filing year and search by last name. Results come back as a list of filings by type; the ones you want are labelled PTR. Each opens as a PDF hosted under/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/, one document per filing, listing the transactions on it.

The Senate: efdsearch.senate.gov

The Senate runs its own system, Electronic Financial Disclosure (eFD), at efdsearch.senate.gov. You accept a terms-of-use screen first, then search by filer name, filer type and report type. Senate PTRs filed electronically render as HTML tables rather than PDFs, which is marginally friendlier than the House — and completely separate, so a name has to be searched twice to cover Congress.

Why almost nobody does this

The data is free and the experience is the price. Four specific frictions do the damage:

• Two systems, no shared search. There is no single query that covers both chambers, and no way to ask either one the question you actually have — “who traded NVDA last month?” You search by person, not by ticker.
• One document at a time. A filing is a document, not a row. Following 535 members means opening filings one by one, on a schedule nobody publishes, forever.
• Paper filings are still allowed. House filers may submit electronically at fd.house.gov or file paper forms at the Legislative Resource Center. Paper arrives as a scan, so the text is an image — not searchable, and invisible to anything automated.
• No notifications. Neither portal will tell you when something new lands. Checking is on you, which in practice means it does not happen.

None of that makes the portals useless. They are the only place to verify what a tracker told you, they are free forever, and if you follow two or three specific members rather than the whole institution, reading the source directly is genuinely practical.

Method 2: use a tracker website

A tracker is a site that scrapes both portals continuously, parses the filings into rows, and lets you sort them the way you wanted to in the first place — by ticker, by member, by date, by size. Capitol Trades, Quiver Quantitative and Unusual Whales are the established names; Senate Stock Watcher and House Stock Watcher publish the parsed data as open datasets if you would rather write the query yourself.

What you gain and what you give up:

• Gain: ticker-first search, both chambers in one place, member profiles, aggregate views that no filing can give you, and — on some — email alerts.
• Give up:a verification step. You are now reading someone’s parse of a PDF. Parsers mis-handle scans, ambiguous asset names and amended filings, and the trackers rarely surface how they resolved an ambiguity.
• Cost: the free tiers are usually the recent feed; historical depth, ticker alerts and data export tend to sit behind a subscription.

Every serious tracker links back to the source filing. Use that link. The single most useful habit in this whole area is opening the original PTR before you believe a number you read anywhere else, including here.

Method 3: use a phone app

A website tells you when you visit it. The reason to want this on a phone is the notification: a disclosure is an event, and an event you find out about three weeks later has already lost most of whatever value it had.

In StockPlus — our app — congress disclosures sit in a Congress tab alongside insider filings, and the feed itself is free on both plans. What the paid plan adds is coverage of the alert: opt in and StockPlus sends a daily digest when a new disclosure touches a ticker on your watchlist, on three watchlist tickers on the free plan and on every one of them on Pro. The alert is off until you turn it on, in Profile. Our data reaches the app through a third-party aggregator that compiles the House and Senate filings rather than from the two portals directly, so Method 1 remains the authority if a row ever looks wrong. The longer version — what the feed covers, what it does not, and how current it can be — is on our congress stock trades page.

Other apps cover this too, and the comparison worth making is on the alerting, not the feed — our roundup of the best stock alert apps covers which ones trigger on filings rather than on price.

What a disclosure does and does not contain

This is the part that changes how you read every tracker on the internet, and the part they have the least incentive to explain. The fields below come from the House Committee on Ethics instruction guide for Periodic Transaction Reports and from filed PTRs on the Clerk’s site, both checked in August 2026.

What is on the form

• The asset— “NVIDIA Corporation - Common Stock (NVDA)”, with an asset type code.
• Transaction type — purchase, sale, partial sale, or exchange.
• Two dates — the transaction date and the date the filer was notified of it. The gap between them is often the whole story on a late filing.
• A value bracket— and only a bracket. The ladder runs $1,001–$15,000, $15,001–$50,000, $50,001–$100,000, $100,001–$250,000, $250,001–$500,000, $500,001–$1,000,000, $1,000,001–$5,000,000, $5,000,001–$25,000,000, $25,000,001–$50,000,000, and over $50,000,000. A separate column exists for a transaction over $1,000,000 in an asset owned solely by a spouse or dependent child.
• A capital-gains checkbox — yes or no on whether gains exceeded $200. That is the entire profit-and-loss disclosure.

What is not on the form

• The amount, the price, or the share count. A bracket is not a number. “$1,001–$15,000” spans a 15x range, and the top bracket has no ceiling at all. Filers sometimes volunteer a share count in the free-text comment field; nothing requires it.
• Who decided. The form does not ask whether the member chose the trade. Transactions made by an outside manager with discretion over the account are reported identically to ones the member placed personally.
• Why. There is no rationale field, no thesis, and no holding period. A sale could be a view on the company or a tuition bill.
• Whose account it is, necessarily. House filers maymark a transaction SP, DC or JT for spouse, dependent child or joint — the instruction guide makes it optional, so an unmarked row does not mean the member’s own account.
• Funds, real estate, and the TSP. Mutual funds and ETFs are excluded from PTRs entirely, as are real property, stock splits, inheritances, certificates of deposit and the federal Thrift Savings Plan. A member could move a fortune between index funds and no PTR would ever record it.
• Verification.The filer certifies the report personally, and brokerage statements may not be submitted in place of the form. Nothing reconciles a PTR against the broker’s own records.

Read a leaderboard of “top congressional traders by volume” with that list in mind. Any dollar figure attached to congressional trading is an estimate built by picking a point inside each bracket, and different trackers pick differently.

Everything you read here is already weeks old

The STOCK Act did not ban congressional stock trading. It required disclosure, on a deadline — and the deadline is long. A covered filer reports a transaction within 30 days of being notified of it and never later than 45 days after the trade itself, so a perfectly compliant filing can describe a trade from six weeks ago. Whatever price motivated the position, it is not the price you would pay on the day you read about it. That is the single most important thing to hold in mind while using any of the three methods above.

The deadline is also missed often, and the penalty for missing it is small. We took that apart separately in STOCK Act disclosure rules and the 45-day deadline — what the statute actually requires, how late members really file, and what happens when they do not.

Should you copy congress trades?

The honest answer is that the disclosure regime is not built for it, and the case against is structural rather than moral.

You are seeing a trade up to 45 days after it happened, in a size expressed as a bracket, with no price, no share count, no stated reason, and no way to know from the document whether the member picked the stock or an account manager did. You also see only entries and exits that cross $1,000 in individual securities — never the fund positions that make up most portfolios, never the leverage, never the rest of the allocation. Reconstructing a portfolio from PTRs alone is not possible, which means “copying” a member is really copying a filtered, delayed, imprecise slice of one.

What the feed is genuinely good for is context. A cluster of disclosures in one sector, unusual activity around a company facing a vote, or a member of a committee trading inside the industry it oversees — those are questions worth having, and they are visible in the aggregate in a way no single filing shows. That is a reason to watch the feed; it is not a trading signal, and nothing here is investment advice.