How the STOCK Act 45-Day Disclosure Works

1. What the STOCK Act is

The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act (STOCK Act), signed in 2012, amended the Ethics in Government Act to require covered officials to report certain securities transactions, and it affirmed that members of Congress, congressional employees, and other federal officials are not exempt from insider-trading laws. The disclosure part of the law is the engine behind every politician trade page on this site: without a filed report, there is nothing to track.

2. Who has to file

The reporting requirement covers members of Congress, officers, and certain employees of the House and Senate, along with related legislative-branch offices. In practice, the pages on this site follow members of the House and Senate. Transactions by a filer’s spouse or dependent child can also be reportable, because the same conflict-of-interest question arises even when the member is not the person placing the trade. Senior staff are covered too, but their filings are a separate stream from the member pages tracked here.

3. What triggers a Periodic Transaction Report

A Periodic Transaction Report (PTR) is the filing itself. A filer must report a purchase, sale, or exchange of covered securities — stocks, bonds, commodity futures, and other securities — when the transaction exceeds $1,000. For a sale, the threshold is based on the total dollar value of the transaction, not on the gain or loss. Not every asset needs a PTR: widely held investment funds such as mutual funds and exchange-traded funds are generally not reportable on a PTR, which is why a member’s portfolio can be much larger than the sum of their PTR trades.

4. The two clocks: 30 days from notice, 45 days from the trade

This is the part most summaries get wrong, because there are two clocks and the earlier one wins. Under the House Committee on Ethics’ statement of the rule, a transaction over $1,000 must be disclosed by the earlier of:

• 30 days from being made aware of the transaction, or
• 45 days from the transaction date.

The statute phrases the same rule as “not later than 30 days after receiving notification” of a transaction, “but in no case later than 45 days after such transaction.” The 45-day figure that headlines most coverage is therefore a ceiling, not the standard allowance: if the filer learns of a trade quickly, the 30-day clock can expire first. The House Ethics Committee publishes a PTR due-date calculator that applies exactly this earlier-of test.

Worked example (illustration, not a real filing). Suppose a member’s account executes a trade on January 5 and the member is notified of it on January 6. The 30-day clock runs to February 5; the 45-day clock runs to February 19. The earlier date — February 5 — is the deadline. If notification arrived much later, say February 10, the 30-day clock would run to March 12, but the 45-day ceiling would still cut it off at February 19. Either way, the public record can legally appear up to six and a half weeks after the trade happened, and any analysis that treats the filing date as the trade date is misdating the trade by that gap.

5. What a PTR actually shows — and what it does not

A PTR shows the security, the type of transaction (purchase, sale, or exchange), the transaction date, the filing date, and an amount range rather than an exact dollar value. It does not show the exact price paid, the exact number of shares, or the reason for the trade. Amount ranges are broad — a single range can span tens of thousands of dollars — so two trades in the same range can be very different in size. A PTR also does not show holdings: it records transactions in a window, not a portfolio at a point in time. For holdings, the separate annual financial disclosure is the relevant document.

6. Where the reports live: House and Senate systems

House PTRs are filed with the Clerk of the House and published through the House disclosure system; Senate PTRs are filed with the Secretary of the Senate and published through the Senate’s electronic filing system. The two systems are run separately and look different to a reader, and House PTRs have historically included scanned-image filings that cannot always be machine-read — those are excluded from this site’s tallies, never estimated. That is one reason a member’s page here can show fewer trades than a raw count of their filings would suggest.

7. How to read a politician trade page without fooling yourself

Four habits keep the 45-day rule from misleading you:

• Use the transaction date for price context, not the filing date. A stock’s price on the filing date tells you nothing about what the member paid.
• Treat the filing date as the moment the information became public. Any “reaction” to a trade can only start after that date.
• Expect the gap to vary. Some filings land within days; others arrive near the deadline. A cluster of filings on one date usually means one PTR covering several trades, not several decisions made that day.
• Remember what is missing. Trades under $1,000, fund transactions, and holdings are outside the PTR frame. Absence from a PTR page is not evidence of absence from a portfolio.

GetCoattail snapshot box (as of 2026-10-03)

The figures below describe this site’s own House snapshot, not the law. They show the scale of the data behind the member pages.

See also: Politicians · Track Record · Methodology.

Frequently asked questions

Does the STOCK Act ban members of Congress from trading stocks?
No. It requires disclosure of covered transactions and affirms that insider-trading laws apply to members. It does not prohibit stock ownership or trading as such.

Is 45 days the deadline for every trade?
No. The deadline is the earlier of 30 days from being made aware of the transaction and 45 days from the transaction date. Forty-five days is the outer ceiling.

Why does a trade I read about today show a trade date from last month?
Because the filer had up to the earlier-of deadline to file, and the filing date is when the report reached the public system. The gap between the two dates is the disclosure lag.

Does a PTR show how much a member made on a trade?
No. It shows an amount range for the transaction, not a price, share count, or profit. Gains can only be estimated from market prices, and any such estimate is an approximation, not a disclosed fact.

Where can I read the original filing?
House PTRs are published by the Clerk of the House and Senate PTRs through the Senate’s disclosure system. Member pages on this site link to the source filings they are built from.

Sources

• U.S. House Committee on Ethics, Financial Disclosure: transactions over $1,000 must be disclosed by the earlier of 30 days from being made aware of the transaction or 45 days from the transaction; PTRs are filed with the Clerk of the House. ethics.house.gov/financial-disclosure (checked 2026-10-29)
• U.S. House Committee on Ethics, Periodic Transaction Report Calculator: same earlier-of rule, with a calculator applying it. ethics.house.gov/periodic-transaction-report-calculator (checked 2026-10-29)
• 5 U.S.C. § 13105(l) (Periodic Transaction Reports): the statutory text sets the same two clocks — 30 days after notification, capped at 45 days after the transaction. govregs.com/uscode/5/13105 (checked 2026-10-29)
• Congressional Research Service testimony on the STOCK Act: covered individuals must report transactions exceeding $1,000 within 45 days, and reports are available from the Clerk of the House or the Secretary of the Senate. congress.gov — TE10119 (checked 2026-10-29)
• GetCoattail House PTR snapshot, as of 2026-10-03 (site’s own aggregation; 407 PTR documents, 49 members, window from 2026-04-01).

Last updated: 2026-10-29. This is general information about a disclosure rule, not tax, investment, or legal advice.

For education only — not investment advice. How every number on this site is measured: Methodology.