House members must report a stock trade by the earlier of two dates: 30 days after they are notified of it, or 45 days after the trade itself. Most use a good part of that window. A smaller group goes far past it. Most of the late trades come from three filings.
I read a lot of periodic transaction reports. For this piece I went through the 359 electronically filed reports in my dataset, covering filings from January 1 through October 15, 2026. They hold 3,520 trades, each with a trade date on the report. Reports that were filed as scans are left out of the timing figures, because their dates had to be read by hand from images.
THE TYPICAL TRADE IS ABOUT A MONTH OLD
Measured from the trade date to the day the report was filed, the median was 25 days. Only 7.2% of trades were reported within a week. About 21% were reported within two weeks, 66% within 30 days, and 88% within 45 days.
So when you read a new filing, the typical trade in it is about 25 days old. That fits the rule.
THE TAIL
Of the 3,520 trades, 436 (12.4%) were reported more than 45 days after the trade. Add the 16 trades that missed the separate 30-days-after-notification deadline and the total is 452 trades, from 21 members, across 25 filings. Eleven of those 452 are automatic dividend reinvestments that may not need to be reported at all, so the real count could be a little lower.
I am calling these apparent late disclosures. They come from the dates printed on the reports, and I am not claiming that any of them is a violation. Members can have reasons I cannot see, including corrected and re-filed reports. No trade was counted twice, and every late trade was first disclosed in the filing that lists it, not in a corrected re-report of a trade already filed on time. One row was left out of the late count because its trade date, more than two years before the filing, looked like an error.
Among the 452, the median gap between trade and filing was 279 days. The longest was 690.
THREE FILINGS ARE MOST OF IT
The 452 late trades sit in just 25 filings, about 7% of the 359 reports I read. Three of those filings hold 339 of the trades, which is 75%. The largest, House Clerk filing 20030977, lists 209 trades on its own. The next two, 20035035 and 20035190, list 76 and 54.
Most of the late trades in this sample come from three large, catch-up-style filings.
WHOSE TRADES
Of the 452 late trades, 315 carried no owner code (the member's own), 94 were joint, 42 were a spouse's, and 1 was a dependent child's.
TAKEAWAYS
A filing shows what a member did weeks ago, not what they are doing now. At the median, the position you are reading about is already 25 days old.
A headline count of late trades can hide how few filings are behind it. Here, three reports account for three quarters of the total.
Amounts are reported in ranges, so I did not estimate trade sizes or returns.
HOW I DID THIS
For every trade in the 359 electronic reports, I compared the trade date with the filing date listed in the House Clerk's index. I left out scanned reports from the timing figures. Every figure above can be traced to a House Clerk filing ID.
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