The STOCK Act's 45-day rule, and how late congress actually files

August 10, 2026·8 min read

The rule is usually quoted as “45 days.” The statute says something more specific than that, and the difference decides whether a given filing was late. Here is what the STOCK Act requires, what it costs to ignore, and how often it gets ignored.

How long does congress have to disclose stock trades?

A member of Congress must report a stock trade over $1,000 within 30 days of being made aware of it, and in no case later than 45 days after the transaction — whichever comes first. The deadline covers a spouse or dependent child too. Reports are public.

That “whichever comes first” is the whole thing. The 45-day figure is a ceiling, not the deadline. For a trade a member places themselves, notification and transaction fall on the same day, so the 30-day clock binds and 45 days never enters into it. The ceiling only does work when notification lags — an account run by an outside manager, say, where the member hears about the trade weeks later.

What the STOCK Act requires

The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act was signed on 4 April 2012 as Public Law 112-105. It did not ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks. It did two things: it confirmed that members are not exempt from insider trading law, and it added a fast reporting deadline for transactions that until then were disclosed once a year.

Section 6 of the Act inserted that deadline into the Ethics in Government Act. In its current codification at 5 U.S.C. § 13105(l) it reads: “Not later than 30 days after receiving notification of any transaction required to be reported under section 13104(a)(5)(B), but in no case later than 45 days after such transaction … shall file a report of the transaction.”

The House Committee on Ethics states the same test in plainer language in its January 2023 memo announcing a PTR due-date calculator: “A PTR must be filed by the earlier of these two dates: (a) 30 days from being made aware of the transaction or (b) 45 days from the transaction.” If you want one sentence to carry away from this page, that is the one.

What has to be reported

• Transactions over $1,000 in stocks, bonds and other covered securities — purchases, sales and exchanges. Per the same House Ethics memo, this covers “all House Members, officers, and employees paid at the senior staff rate.”
• Trades by a spouse or dependent child, reported on the member’s own filing. A large share of congressional trading data describes accounts the member does not personally direct.
• The report is a Periodic Transaction Report (PTR), filed with the Clerk of the House or the Secretary of the Senate and published free of charge by both chambers.

What is outside the requirement

Mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, real property, certificates of deposit and the federal Thrift Savings Plan generate no PTR at all, and neither does anything under the $1,000 threshold. The form itself asks for a value bracket rather than an amount — the lowest is $1,001–$15,000, the highest is simply over $50,000,000 — and does not ask for an execution price or a share count. What the filings contain and what they omit is covered in more detail in our guide to how to track congress stock trades.

How late they actually file

There is no official compliance scoreboard. Neither chamber publishes a count of late PTRs, so every figure below comes from journalists and watchdogs assembling one by hand, and each is a snapshot of a specific year rather than a running rate.

• 78 members were late in a single year. Business Insider’s “Conflicted Congress” investigation identified 78 members of Congress who failed to properly report their financial trades; Forbes, summarising the tally on 24 December 2025, pins it to 2021 and puts it at 14% of lawmakers.
• The volume behind those deadlines is large. Common Cause counted 13,324 congressional trades worth $635.57 million during 2025 in a report published 12 December 2025. Forbes reported the same dataset on 24 December 2025 as roughly 13,300 trades and $635.6 million.
• One filing can carry hundreds of late trades. In January 2026 Rep. Julia Letlow filed a PTR disclosing 224 transactions, of which 211 had been executed more than 45 days earlier, with a combined value between $266,000 and $3.5 million (Forbes, 15 January 2026). Her office attributed the delay to a third-party manager moving an account into individual stocks.

Why you often cannot tell whether a filing was late

This follows directly from the two-part deadline, and it is the reason every published late-filing count should be read as a floor. A PTR carries two dates: when the transaction happened and when the filer was notified of it. The 30-day clock runs from the second one — and the notification date is asserted by the filer, with nothing in the process reconciling it against a broker’s records.

From outside, you can see the transaction date and the filing date. If the gap exceeds 45 days, the filing was unambiguously late. If it is 40 days, you cannot say: it is on time if the member was notified in the last ten days, late if they knew on day one. Every tally of STOCK Act violations is therefore counting breaches of the 45-day ceiling, because 30-day breaches are not countable from the public record.

None of that excuses anyone. It does mean the honest summary is “at least this many were late,” and that a page quoting you a violation rate to one decimal place has computed something the filings cannot support.

What happens when a member files late

A late PTR carries a $200 fee, which is where most write-ups stop. The House Ethics late-fee waiver form sets out the actual schedule, and it escalates:

• First late PTR: $200 “regardless of the number of missed reports.”
• Second through fourth: $200 for each month in which there was a late transaction.
• Fifth and beyond: $200 per late transaction. The form’s own worked example: fifteen late transactions, $3,000 owed.

The fee is not assessed until the 31st day after the due date, though the filing is late from day one, and it cannot be paid with campaign funds (House Committee on Ethics, 2026 instruction guide for calendar year 2025 disclosures). Paying it does not close the matter: the Committee explicitly reserves the right to take other disciplinary action.

On the fee being waived

The Committee can waive the fee, and its own waiver form limits that to “extraordinary circumstances,” requiring a signed written request stating the justification. Business Insider’s reporting describes the penalty as usually small or “waived by House or Senate ethics officials.”

We looked for a number behind that and did not find one. Neither chamber publishes how many waiver requests are filed or granted, so “routinely waived” is a characterisation by reporters on the beat, not a documented rate. The narrower statement is still damning: the ordinary consequence for a first late filing of any size is $200, and there is no public record of how often even that is collected.

Where the law may be going

Restricting congressional stock trading has been live legislation throughout the 119th Congress, and none of it has been enacted. The Restore Trust in Congress Act (H.R. 5106), introduced by Rep. Chip Roy on 3 September 2025, drew 141 cosponsors — 106 Democrats and 35 Republicans — and has not moved since the day it was referred to committee. The End Congressional Stock Trading Act (H.R. 1908) has sat in a Financial Services subcommittee since 28 March 2025. In the Senate, S. 1498 — introduced by Sen. Josh Hawley as the PELOSI Act and reported out as the HONEST Act — was ordered reported favorably on 30 July 2025 and placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar on 10 December 2025. (Congressional bill status records, govinfo, retrieved August 2026.)

The House did pass a trading restriction: H.R. 7008, the Stop Insider Trading Act, on 22 July 2026 by 232 to 198 (Clerk of the House, roll call 280). It would bar members, spouses and dependent children from buying covered investments, require public notice 7 to 14 days before a sale, and replace the $200-scale penalty with a fee of at least $2,000 or 10% of the transaction value, plus any net gain realized.

It is also not only a trading bill, which is why the vote split on party lines. Section 3 of the text as passed by the House is titled “Requiring Voters to Provide Photo Identification” and amends the Help America Vote Act of 2002 so that an election official “may not provide a ballot for an election for Federal office” to an in-person voter who does not present photo ID. Republicans cast 218 of the 232 votes in favour, 13 Democrats and one independent supplied the rest, and all 198 votes against were Democratic. The Senate read the bill a second time on 6 August 2026 and placed it on its Legislative Calendar under General Orders.

Until something is enacted, the 45-day ceiling and the $200 fee are the rules in force.

What this means if you follow congress trades

The deadline sets a floor on how stale the data can be, and no tracker can beat it. A fully compliant filing may describe a trade from six weeks ago; a late one is older still, and the penalty structure means a filer with an unusual reason to be slow is looking at a small, bounded cost. Anything sold to you as a real-time congressional trading signal is describing the delivery of the filing, not the age of the trade.

That does not make the feed worthless — it makes it a record rather than a signal, and a record is still worth reading. None of it is a reason to buy anything, and nothing here is investment advice.