How can you track Congress stock trades?

Where are Congress stock trades published?

Members of the House file their reports with the Office of the Clerk, and the Clerk's financial disclosure page offers a search of the reports and a download of them. Senators file through the Senate's electronic financial disclosure site, which has its own search; it refused our automated requests when we tried, so open it in a browser. Both sources are free, and both show each report as the member filed it.

Each report is a separate filing. Following one member, or one company across many members, means opening the reports one by one and copying the lines out. That is the work trackers do for you, and it is also where their differences come from.

What does a periodic transaction report contain?

The House Ethics Committee's form and instructions ask, for each transaction, for the asset, the type of transaction (a purchase, a sale or an exchange), the date of the transaction, the date the filer was notified of it, and the amount as a category, such as $1,001-$15,000 or $15,001-$50,000, not as an exact figure. An optional ownership column can mark the asset as a spouse's (SP), a dependent child's (DC) or jointly held (JT). The report covers securities owned by the member, a spouse or dependent children when the transaction exceeds $1,000.

Because the amount is a category, two trades in the same category can differ by tens of thousands of dollars. How to read the categories, and why a single figure for a trade is always an estimate, is in what the dollar ranges mean.

How late do the reports arrive?

The STOCK Act of 2012 added a rule to the Ethics in Government Act: a covered transaction must be reported not later than 30 days after the filer receives notification of it, and in no case later than 45 days after the transaction (the law's text). A trade can therefore become public about six weeks after it happened, and a report filed late arrives later still.

Every tracker that uses these reports inherits the delay. None of them can show a trade before the member files it, so the date that matters for a reader is the filing date, not only the trade date.

What do trackers add to the official reports?

Trackers read the reports, turn each line into a row, and let you search by member, company or date across years of filings, sometimes with alerts or extra numbers. The table records what four of them say about Congress trades on their own pages, read on 2 November 2026. The OQRO row is our own description of OQRO. The table is not a ranking.

Prices change and pages are rewritten, so check the linked pages before you rely on a figure.

Which questions help when choosing a tracker?

The useful questions are practical ones. Does each row link to the official report, so you can check it yourself? Does it keep the amount as the filed range, or replace it with a single estimate? Does it cover both chambers, and from what year? How soon after a report is filed does the trade appear? Does it add numbers the report does not contain, such as estimated returns, and does it say how they are computed? And what does it cost?

Our dated comparison of disclosure trackers answers these from each product's own pages, for Form 4 and 13F data as well as Congress. The free official sources are listed separately, for readers who prefer to go to the filings directly.

What this does not tell you

A periodic transaction report is a disclosure, not an allegation. It does not say who decided the trade, whether the member knew of it in advance, or why it happened, and a spouse's trade appears because the law requires the member to report it. The amount is a range, so any single dollar figure for a trade is an estimate. Reports filed on paper and scanned are not machine-readable, and a tracker may leave them out or read them with errors; OQRO leaves them out. Returns shown by any tracker, OQRO included, are computed by that tracker from market prices, not taken from the report.

OQRO lists the reports on its politician trades page as filed, keeps ranges as ranges and links every row to the filing. The filing is the authority, and it is the place to check any line before you draw a conclusion from it.