A Congressional Trade Report Is a Range, Not a Number

When a headline says a member of Congress bought $5 million of a stock last week, two things in that sentence are not in the filing. The amount is a bracket, not a number. The date is a deadline, not a timestamp. The STOCK Act put those trades on a 30 and 45 day reporting clock in 2012. The value bands are older and separate: they come from the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, now 5 U.S.C. §13104(d), and took their present shape in 1995. Between them they define the amount and the date loosely enough that a precise-sounding headline is always an interpretation someone made.

This is not a complaint about the law. It is the shape of the data, and if you trade on congressional disclosures without knowing that shape you are reading confidence into a document that does not contain any.

What a congressional trade report actually discloses

A member of Congress files a Periodic Transaction Report when they, their spouse, or a dependent child buys or sells a security worth more than $1,000. Three parts of that regime decide how much a single report can tell you.

The amount is a band. Values are reported in ranges, not figures. The smallest band runs from $1,001 to $15,000. Higher up they widen sharply. The $1,000,001 to $5,000,000 band is $4,000,000 wide, four times its own floor, so a trade reported there could be a position worth one million or five and nothing in the filing distinguishes them.

The date is a ceiling. The report is due within 30 days of the member being notified of the transaction, and in no case later than 45 days after the trade itself. So a filing that appears today describes something that happened at some point in the previous six weeks. “Bought last week” is a guess unless the transaction date is read directly off the form, which is where it actually lives.

The name may not be the trader. Spouse and dependent-child transactions are reportable and appear under the member’s filing. A report under a senator’s name can describe an account the senator does not direct.

The routine enforcement matches the looseness. A report filed more than 30 days past its deadline draws a minimum $200 fee under 5 U.S.C. §13106(d), which the supervising ethics office can waive, and which the House Ethics Committee’s guidance says repeat late filing can increase. Larger penalties exist separately: §13106(a) lets the Attorney General sue someone who knowingly and wilfully fails to file, for a civil penalty of up to $50,000.

And the deadline is missed often. Across the 65,697 congressional transactions we hold, filed by 383 members between January 2013 and August 2026, 16.5% were disclosed more than 45 days after the trade. The median disclosure takes 28 days. So the typical filing arrives four weeks after the fact, and roughly one in six arrives past the 45-day outer limit. That is a floor on lateness rather than the whole of it: a report is also late if it misses the 30-day notification deadline, and nothing on the form shows when the member was notified, so those misses are invisible to us.

What the Stop Insider Trading Act would change

On July 22, 2026, the House passed H.R. 7008, the Stop Insider Trading Act, by 232 to 198. Sponsored by Rep. Bryan Steil, it would stop members, their spouses and their dependent children from buying individual stocks while in office. Existing holdings can be kept, and sold, but only after filing public notice of the intent to sell between 7 and 14 days beforehand. It is now with the Senate, where its path is unclear, partly because the trading ban was bundled with an unrelated voter ID provision and the vote went mostly along party lines.

Read that pre-sale notice provision again, because it inverts the whole regime. Today you learn about a trade up to 45 days after it happened. Under the bill you would learn about a sale up to 14 days before it happens. The disclosure stops being a record and becomes a signal, published while the member still holds the position.

If that passes, understanding the current data gets more important rather than less. Everything before the effective date stays bracketed and backdated, and that history is what any claim about how members trade has to be built on.

How to read a congressional trade report

The useful question is never “how much did they buy”. It is whether a disclosure is unusual against that member’s own history, which is a question about pattern rather than amount:

• Compare the band to their normal band. A member who files in the $1,001 to $15,000 range twenty times a year and then files once in the $250,001 to $500,000 range has done something different. The exact figure does not matter to that reading.
• Read the transaction date, not the filing date. They can be six weeks apart. Any timing claim built on the filing date is measuring the paperwork.
• Check whose account it is. The form distinguishes the member, the spouse and dependent children. Coverage frequently does not.
• Treat a late filing as its own data point. It is cheap to be late, so lateness is a choice.

We hold filings from 383 members of Congress going back to 2013, across 65,697 transactions, which is the only reason the pattern question is answerable at all: one filing tells you almost nothing, and a member’s full filing history tells you what normal looks like for them. The per-member views are the House and Senate trackers.

How US disclosure compares to European directors’ dealings

A German reader coming to this from Directors’ Dealings will find the American regime much looser than the one they know. Under Article 19 of the Market Abuse Regulation, a manager at a listed company reports the actual price and the actual volume, and does it within three business days of the trade. The issuer then publishes within two business days of receiving that notice. The EU Listing Act raised the default reporting threshold from €5,000 to €20,000 per calendar year and let each national supervisor set it anywhere between €10,000 and €50,000. Germany took the top of that range: BaFin moved the threshold to €50,000 by general decree, in force since 1 January 2026.

Exact figures, public inside a week, on one side of the Atlantic. A bracket in up to 45 days on the other. Any tool that presents both as the same kind of fact is flattening a real difference, and any claim that congressional disclosure is a strong transparency regime is comparing it to nothing.

Our methodology page covers how we score what comes out of these filings. If a reading of ours looks wrong, the original document is public: check us against the filing rather than against another tracker.