Congress trades

Congress stock trades

Congressional stock trades are the individual securities transactions that members of Congress, their spouses and dependent children must disclose publicly under the STOCK Act. Any purchase, sale or exchange over $1,000 is reported on a Periodic Transaction Report, filed with the House Clerk or the Senate, within 45 days of the trade.

Governing law

STOCK Act, signed 4 April 2012

Reporting threshold

Transactions over $1,000

Deadline

30 days from notification, never later than 45 days from the trade

What is disclosed

Asset, transaction type, dates, value bracket

What is not disclosed

Price, share count, reason for the trade

Cost to read the filings

Free — both chambers publish them

How the disclosures work

The STOCK Act did not stop members of Congress from trading individual stocks. It made them file. Whenever a member, their spouse or a dependent child buys, sells or exchanges more than $1,000 of a security, that transaction goes on a Periodic Transaction Report — a short form listing the asset, the transaction type, the transaction date, the date the filer was notified, and a value bracket.

A bracket is not a number. The lowest rung is $1,001 to $15,000 and the top one is simply over $50,000,000, and the form asks for no execution price and no share count. Mutual funds, ETFs, real estate and the federal Thrift Savings Plan are outside the reporting requirement entirely, so a PTR is a filtered view of a portfolio rather than a picture of one.

The deadline is the part most summaries get wrong. It is not a flat 45 days: a filer has 30 days from being notified of a transaction, and in no case later than 45 days after the transaction itself — whichever comes first. That distinction is why two trackers can disagree about whether the same filing was late.

The deadline, the penalty for missing it, and how often it is actually missed are covered in full in our guide to STOCK Act disclosure rules.

Reading the filings yourself

Nothing stands between you and the primary source. The House publishes at disclosures-clerk.house.gov and the Senate at efdsearch.senate.gov, both free, both without an account. The cost is usability: the two systems do not share a search, you look up a person rather than a ticker, House filings arrive as one PDF per report, paper filings are still permitted and land as unsearchable scans, and neither portal will ever notify you that something new was filed.

That is the entire reason tracker sites and apps exist, and it is also the reason to keep the portals bookmarked: they are the only place to verify a row that looks wrong, whoever showed it to you.

We wrote up all three routes — the portals, the tracker websites, and the apps — in how to track congress stock trades.

How StockPlus shows congress trades

StockPlus is our app, so treat this section as a description rather than a recommendation. Congressional disclosures sit in a Congress tab alongside insider filings. The feed itself is free on both plans — it is not the thing we charge for.

What the paid plan adds is alert coverage. Opt in and StockPlus pushes a notification when a new disclosure touches a ticker on your watchlist: three watchlist tickers on the free plan, every one of them on Pro. The alert is off until you switch it on, in Profile, because a feed that notifies you about 535 people by default is a feed you mute in a week.

In the app today

A Congress tab with the disclosure feed, free on both plans, and opt-in push alerts when a filing touches a watchlist ticker.

Not in the app yet

Per-politician pages, congressional activity on the stock detail screen, and any aggregate or historical view. If you need those, a specialist data platform is the honest answer.

Not shown at all

Dollar amounts. The filing gives a bracket, and turning a bracket into a number means picking a point inside it — an estimate dressed as a fact.

We put StockPlus seventh of nine, on stated criteria and against dated prices, in our ranking of the best congress stock trackers — including the four whose prices we could not verify.

Where the data comes from, and how current it is

StockPlus receives congressional trade data through a third-party aggregator that compiles the House and Senate disclosures. We do not read the two filing portals directly. The underlying records are the same public STOCK Act filings either way; the aggregation layer is what turns thousands of documents into rows, and it is also a place where a parsing mistake can enter. If a row in the app disagrees with the original filing, the filing is right.

Currency is bounded by the law, not by our refresh rate. Even a filing that arrives the instant it is published can describe a trade from up to 45 days earlier, and late filings push it further. No tracker, ours included, can be fresher than the deadline the filer was working to. Treat the feed as context on what is being disclosed, not as a live signal — and nothing here is investment advice.

Questions people ask