The STOCK Act gives members of Congress 45 days to report a trade. Across 21,917 trades executed since January 2025, the median disclosure arrived on day 25. Most members use more than half the allowed window, and about 9 percent blow through it entirely.
The shape of the delay
Only 22.6 percent of trades were reported within two weeks of execution. By day 30 the share reaches 68 percent. Then comes a bulge just before the deadline: the 90th percentile lands on day 43, two days under the wire. Filing behavior looks less like "report when convenient" and more like "report when the deadline forces it."
Past the deadline, the tail gets long. 1,931 trades, 8.8 percent of the total, were filed later than day 45. One trade in a hundred took more than 200 days to surface. The slowest disclosure in the dataset arrived 547 days after the transaction, a year and a half late.
What lateness costs
The standard penalty for a late Periodic Transaction Report is $200, waivable by the ethics committees. It is charged per report, not per trade, so a single late filing that lists dozens of transactions still costs $200. For comparison, the smallest reportable trade bracket starts at $1,001. The fine is smaller than the smallest trade it can cover.
Why this lag matters for the data
Every congressional trading tracker, this one included, is at minimum weeks behind the market by construction. A trade executed today may legally stay invisible until mid-September. When you look at the latest disclosed trades, you are looking at what Congress just admitted to, not what it just did. The most recent transaction dates in the feed will always trail the most recent filing dates for exactly this reason.
A few methodological notes: we measure the gap from transaction date to the filing date on the report, we count only the latest version of each trade when a member amends a filing, and trades with missing or inconsistent dates are excluded. The deadlines themselves, including the 30-day-from-notice rule that can shorten the window, are covered in our guide to congressional disclosure deadlines.