House members reported more than 1,000 trades over a month late

We read every electronic trade report filed with the House since January 2025. Two in five of the members who file them reported at least one trade late, and the House doesn’t publish who paid the late fee or who was excused.

Reported and edited by Sam Calder

Published November 4, 2026Updated November 5, 202610 min read

Since January 2025, 130 current and former members of the House have filed electronic reports of their stock and other securities trades. Fifty-three of them, 24 Democrats and 29 Republicans, reported at least one trade after the deadline the law sets, according to a review by The Countersign of every one of those reports.^{Source 1}

The reports list 11,297 trades that can be checked against the deadline. Of those, 2,116 were reported late, nearly one in five. More than a thousand, 1,059 or about one in ten, came in more than 30 days past the deadline, on 42 reports. That is the point at which the law charges a late fee, at least $200 a report.^{Source 2}^{Source 3} Six members account for 839 of those trades.

Whether any of them paid the fee isn’t public. The House Ethics Committee can waive it “in extraordinary circumstances,” but, its instructions say, “Neither the request nor the Committee’s response will be made publicly available.”^{Source 3} At a House hearing in November 2025, James Copland of the Manhattan Institute testified that no public records exist “indicating whether officials have ever paid statutory fines for STOCK Act disclosure errors.”^{Source 4}

Six members filed 839 of the 1,059 trades that came in more than 30 days late

Stock and other trades reported more than 30 days after the legal deadline, 2025 and 2026 to date

Deadline: the earlier of 30 days after the member learned of the trade and 45 days after the trade (where the date of learning is before the trade, an apparent typing error, the 45-day limit). Electronic reports only; the 122 scanned paper reports have no text layer and were not read. Amended and deleted entries are left out.

Source: periodic transaction reports filed with the Clerk of the House ^{Source 1}; analysis by The Countersign.

Member	Trades filed more than 30 days late
Val Hoyle (D-OR)	207
Julia Letlow (R-LA)	205
Sheri Biggs (R-SC)	171
Lisa McClain (R-MI)	97
Ritchie Torres (D-NY)	83
Julie Johnson (D-TX)	76
32 other members	220

What the law requires

The STOCK Act of 2012 requires members of Congress to report any purchase or sale of stocks, bonds and other securities worth more than $1,000, whether it is theirs, their spouse’s or a dependent child’s.^{Source 5}^{Source 6} The report is due within 30 days of the member learning of the trade, and in no case later than 45 days after it.^{Source 7} The Clerk of the House must then post it publicly within 30 days.^{Source 3}

The reports give values in bands, such as “$15,001 - $50,000,” not exact amounts.^{Source 6} Owning and trading individual stocks is legal for members: “Neither current law nor House or Senate rules prohibit Members” from it, Jacob Straus of the Congressional Research Service told the same hearing.^{Source 4} Trading on inside information is not. The STOCK Act says members owe “a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence” with respect to nonpublic information they learn in office.^{Source 5}

Filing late is not the same as trading on inside information. A 2026 working paper on members’ trades from 2012 to 2023 found “no evidence that delayed disclosure is associated with informed trading.”^{Source 8}

What the late reports say

Most of the late trades come from a few large reports: five reports hold more than two-thirds of them.^{Source 1} In some, the member filed promptly once they say they learned of the trades, and missed only the law’s outer limit of 45 days after each trade. In others, the report came in late even by the member’s own dates.

The biggest, from Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI), lists 722 trades in her spouse’s accounts, 545 of them late, and notes that three accounts were consolidated into one in 2025. She filed within two days of the dates she gives for learning of them, but many of the trades were by then months old; 97 came in more than 30 days past the deadline.^{Source 9}

A report from Rep. Jefferson Shreve (R-IN) lists 296 trades in his own accounts, mostly described as an account closing or a portfolio rebalance; 294 of them were filed eight days late.^{Source 10}

A report from Rep. Val Hoyle (D-OR) has the most trades that came in more than 30 days late. It lists 230 trades in her spouse’s retirement account made between October 2024 and August 2025. Every line gives the same date for when she learned of the trade, September 11, 2025, and she filed the next day.^{Source 11} By then most of the trades were more than 45 days old: 221 of the 230 were late. The report says the trades “were made by my spouse’s financial broker, and were not specifically requested by me or my spouse,” and that she has “implemented thorough procedures” so that her disclosure preparer “will be notified of all transactions in a timely manner.”^{Source 11}

Rep. Julia Letlow (R-LA) filed a report on January 13, 2026, listing 224 trades in her own investment account, going back to October 2024. The dates she gives for learning of them run from August 2025 to January 1, 2026, and even by those dates all 211 of the late trades were reported more than 30 days after she learned of them.^{Source 12} So were all 76 jointly held trades on a report Rep. Julie Johnson (D-TX) filed in August 2026.^{Source 13}

Nearly all the trades on the reports of Rep. Sheri Biggs (R-SC) are her spouse’s, and most are described as made in a “professionally managed account.”^{Source 14} Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) wrote that the holdings on his late report sit in an independently managed portfolio “over which I have no authority to exercise control,” and he filed within 30 days of the dates he gives for learning of nearly all of them.^{Source 15} Rep. Scott Franklin (R-FL) wrote that a broker bought shares in his spouse’s retirement account “in order to rebalance the portfolio” and “failed to notify me”; his report gives May 19, 2025, as the date he learned of them, and he filed on July 3.^{Source 16}

None of the reports from Letlow, McClain, Johnson, Shreve or Biggs gives a reason for the delay. A later report of Hoyle’s, adding a sale “inadvertently omitted” from her main one, says she and her spouse “no longer hold any stocks.”^{Source 17}

How we counted

We downloaded all 968 periodic transaction reports in the House Clerk’s indexes for 2025 and 2026, filed from January 1, 2025, to November 3, 2026, and read the 846 filed electronically. The other 122 are scanned images of paper forms, with no text layer, so we didn’t read them and they are not in our counts.^{Source 1}

For each trade, the deadline is the earlier of 30 days after the date the member says they learned of it and 45 days after the trade. A trade is late if the report was filed after that. Where a member’s date of learning is earlier than the trade itself, an apparent typing error, we used the 45-day limit. We left out 26 amended or deleted entries and 4 trades made before the member took office. The dates of learning come from the members themselves; if one is wrong, a trade can look on time or late when it isn’t.

We checked that the number of trades we read from each electronic report matched the report itself, and matched members to their names and parties using the public-domain congress-legislators dataset.^{Source 18} For the years before 2025, we did the same with every report back to 2014.

Our full method, our data and the code that produced every figure are on the story’s data and method page.

Has it always been like this?

Yes. We applied the same test to every electronic report filed since 2014, nearly 57,000 trades in all. In every year, between a tenth and a third of the trades were reported late. In the worst year, 2021, 22% came in more than 30 days past the deadline.^{Source 1}

Late reporting is not new: every year since 2014, a tenth to a third of trades came in late

Share of trades on electronic reports filed after the deadline, by year filed (2026 to November 3)

Same deadline rule as above. Electronic reports only; scanned paper reports are not counted. Years are the year each report was filed.

Source: periodic transaction reports filed with the Clerk of the House ^{Source 1}; analysis by The Countersign.

Show the numbers

Year	Trades checked	Filed late	More than 30 days late
2014	1,908	25.5%	15.3%
2015	3,883	19.1%	4.8%
2016	3,923	21.1%	6.4%
2017	3,803	22.5%	13.5%
2018	4,253	27.0%	16.1%
2019	5,231	19.8%	3.3%
2020	6,962	25.8%	11.8%
2021	5,433	32.8%	22.1%
2022	3,376	15.7%	8.6%
2023	4,123	10.2%	7.0%
2024	2,729	18.5%	15.6%
2025	7,654	21.6%	9.2%
2026	3,643	12.6%	9.7%

Trading itself is concentrated in a few hands. Of the 56,921 trades on electronic reports since 2014, 19 members made half, and the typical member who reported trades made 25 over the period.^{Source 1} The most active, Tom MacArthur, a New Jersey Republican who served from 2015 to early 2019, reported 4,195.^{Source 1}^{Source 18}

Ten members made 36% of the trades reported electronically since 2014

Trades on electronic reports, 2014 to November 3, 2026, by member (56,921 in all)

Amended and deleted entries are left out. Members who file on paper, including Ro Khanna and Michael McCaul, are not counted, because their scanned reports have no text layer and were not read.

Source: periodic transaction reports filed with the Clerk of the House ^{Source 1}; analysis by The Countersign.

Member	Trades reported, 2014 to 2026
Tom MacArthur (R-NJ)	4,195
Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ)	3,610
Gilbert Cisneros (D-CA)	2,812
Lois Frankel (D-FL)	1,543
Alan Lowenthal (D-CA)	1,486
Lisa McClain (R-MI)	1,443
Michael Conaway (R-TX)	1,441
Greg Gianforte (R-MT)	1,427
Daniel Goldman (D-NY)	1,307
Susie Lee (D-NV)	1,288
304 other members	36,369

Paper reports are fading, but more than one in ten still arrives as a scan

Periodic transaction reports filed with the House each year, electronic and scanned paper (2026 to November 3)

Source: periodic transaction reports filed with the Clerk of the House ^{Source 1}; analysis by The Countersign.

Show the numbers

Year	Electronic	Scanned paper	Share on paper
2014	285	382	57.3%
2015	390	341	46.6%
2016	450	327	42.1%
2017	506	297	37.0%
2018	533	299	35.9%
2019	520	171	24.7%
2020	597	138	18.8%
2021	565	118	17.3%
2022	505	116	18.7%
2023	388	81	17.3%
2024	394	51	11.5%
2025	449	69	13.3%
2026	397	62	13.5%

Do they beat the market?

The filings can’t say whether members get rich from trading: they list trades rather than holdings, and value bands rather than amounts.^{Source 6} Answering that takes daily stock prices and careful statistics, and several teams of economists have tried.

The first studies found an edge. A portfolio copying senators’ stock purchases from 1993 to 1998 beat the market by 85 basis points a month, and one copying House members’ purchases from 1985 to 2001 by 55 basis points a month, about 6% a year.^{Source 19}^{Source 20} Later work disputed that. Andrew Eggers and Jens Hainmueller reinterpreted those studies and found no information advantage, and found that from 2004 to 2008 members’ portfolios lagged a passive index fund by 2 to 3% a year.^{Source 21}

Before the 2012 law, studies found an edge. Since, most find none.

The years each study examined, and what it found about members’ stock trades compared with the market

Working papers have not been through peer review. Wei and Zhou compare future leaders with similar members before and after they took leadership posts; 20 of the leaders they studied traded in both periods.

Sources: the studies, as listed under Sources ^{Source 19} ^{Source 20} ^{Source 21} ^{Source 22} ^{Source 8} ^{Source 23} ^{Source 24}.

Show the numbers

Study	Years	Who	Finding	Status
Ziobrowski et al. 2011	1985–2001	House	A portfolio mimicking House members' purchases beat the market by 55 basis points a month (about 6% a year)	peer reviewed (Business and Politics)
Ziobrowski et al. 2004	1993–1998	Senate	A portfolio mimicking senators' purchases beat the market by 85 basis points a month	peer reviewed (Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis)
Wei and Zhou 2025	1995–2021	Members who became party leaders	After becoming leaders, outperformed matched peers by up to 47 percentage points a year (20 leaders traded before and after)	NBER working paper (not peer reviewed)
Eggers and Hainmueller 2013	2004–2008	House and Senate	Members' portfolios underperformed a passive index fund by 2-3% a year; no information advantage in 1985-2001 either	peer reviewed (Journal of Politics)
Belmont et al. 2022	2012–2020	House and Senate	No evidence of superior investment performance; House purchases underperformed by 26 basis points over six months	peer reviewed (Journal of Public Economics)
Belmont et al. 2020	2012–2020	Senate	Purchases slightly underperformed; stocks sold after a 24 January 2020 COVID briefing went on to underperform by 9%	NBER working paper
Chen and Sacerdote 2026	2012–2023	House and Senate	Trades slightly underperformed the market at every horizon, by 0.26% over one year	NBER working paper (not peer reviewed)

Since the STOCK Act took effect, most of the evidence points one way. A peer-reviewed study of 2012 to 2020 found “no evidence of superior investment performance.”^{Source 22} A 2026 working paper by Haotian Chen and Bruce Sacerdote, covering every member and their families from 2012 to 2023, found their trades slightly underperformed the market, by 0.26% over the year after each trade.^{Source 8} Party leaders and trades in industries a member’s committee oversees did worse, not better. Trades disclosed after the 45-day limit did no better than those disclosed on time: the authors found “no meaningful difference between the two groups.”

In 2012-2023, members’ trades did no better than the market, and party leaders did worse

How the stocks did in the year after a member traded them, compared with the whole US market (positive means the trade was well timed)

Average buy-and-hold return over the year after each trade, minus the return of the value-weighted index of all US stocks; for sales, the sign is flipped so that a positive number means the stock did worse after it was sold. Each trade counts equally except in the size-weighted row. Lines show 95% intervals computed from the published standard errors.

Source: Chen and Sacerdote, “Capital in the Capitol,” NBER Working Paper 35041 (2026), Table 1 ^{Source 8}. Chart by The Countersign.

Show the numbers

Group	Average	95% interval
All trades	−0.26%	−0.7% to 0.1%
All trades (weighted by size)	+1.15%	0.2% to 2.1%
Purchases	−0.69%	−1.0% to −0.3%
Sales	+0.19%	−0.5% to 0.9%
House	−0.21%	−0.7% to 0.3%
Senate	−0.47%	−1.1% to 0.1%
Democrats	−0.98%	−1.4% to −0.6%
Republicans	+0.39%	−0.3% to 1.1%
Frequent traders (50+ trades a year)	−0.79%	−1.1% to −0.5%
Party leaders	−4.37%	−6.9% to −1.9%
Trades in industries their committees oversee	−2.77%	−3.5% to −2.0%

Some findings cut the other way. In the same paper, weighting trades by their size turned the result positive, 1.15% over a year, suggesting that larger trades did better; the authors say that result should be read cautiously, because a few large trades dominate it.^{Source 8} A 2025 working paper by Shang-Jin Wei and Yifan Zhou found that members who became party leaders went on to beat similar colleagues by up to 47 percentage points a year, a result that rests on the 20 leaders who traded both before and after taking their posts.^{Source 23} And an earlier study found that stocks senators sold after a January 24, 2020, briefing on COVID-19 went on to underperform the market by 9%, while stocks they bought in the same period underperformed by 3%.^{Source 24}

Taken together, the studies find that members as a group have not, on average, beaten the market since 2012.

Unusual Whales, a market-data company, publishes its own rankings of members’ returns. It says 100 of the 311 portfolios it built for current members beat the S&P 500 fund SPY in 2025.^{Source 25}

The Pelosi household

A Senate bill to ban trading was introduced in 2025 as the PELOSI Act.^{Source 26} Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) seven reports since January 2025 list 40 trades, and every one is marked SP, for spouse.^{Source 1} Fourteen are purchases of call options, bets that a stock will rise: on January 14, 2025, for example, her husband bought 50 calls each on Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Tempus AI and Vistra, expiring a year later.^{Source 27} Every trade was reported within 30 days.

Unusual Whales and the press have reported that the household’s trades beat the market by a wide margin. The company estimated that the stock positions it could track in the Pelosis’ disclosures rose 70.9% in 2024, against 24.9% for SPY, a fund that tracks the S&P 500. That ranked the household tenth in Congress, and by the company’s estimate the members of both parties beat the fund on average.^{Source 28} It builds its estimates from the midpoints of the value bands, and its method, as described, makes no adjustment for risk. Its report describes the household’s trades as options on large technology companies, which it calls “the winners of this cycle,” and it is sponsored by an investing app that offers a portfolio copying her disclosed trades.^{Source 28} Estimates differ: the New York Post, citing a Bloomberg tally, put the portfolio’s 2024 gain at 54%. The Post also reported a 16,930% return over her 37 years in Congress. It doesn’t explain that calculation, but the figure matches an estimate of the couple’s stock holdings today divided by the top of what they reported in 1987, which would count any money added along the way as profit.^{Source 29}

In June 2022 the household exercised options to buy 20,000 Nvidia shares, a purchase Fox Business reported as Congress was due to vote on subsidies for chipmakers. On July 26 it sold 25,000 shares, and its report recorded a loss of $341,365.^{Source 30}^{Source 31}^{Source 32}

Her office said in 2022 that she “does not own any stocks” and “has no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in any transactions,” as Fox Business reported.^{Source 31}

Her stated position has changed. Asked in December 2021 why members shouldn’t be barred from trading, she said: “we are a free market economy. They should be able to participate in that.”^{Source 33} In July 2025 she said of the Senate bill, by then renamed the HONEST Act, “I strongly support this legislation.”^{Source 34} In July 2026 she was one of 198 Democrats who voted against the House’s own ban, H.R. 7008, which also required voters to show photo identification. She had first voted for a Democratic motion to send it back to committee.^{Source 35}^{Source 36}^{Source 37}

The ban that stalled

In July, the House passed the Stop Insider Trading Act, H.R. 7008, by 232 votes to 198.^{Source 35} It would bar members, their spouses and dependent children from buying covered investments, and require public notice 7 to 14 days before a sale, but it would not make anyone sell what they already own.^{Source 37} Its third section requires voters to show photo identification in federal elections.^{Source 37}

Thirteen Democrats voted for it. Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), who voted against it, called it “a voter suppression bill in disguise.”^{Source 35}^{Source 38} The White House said it “strongly supports” the bill, and called the current $200 penalty “barely a slap on the wrist.”^{Source 39} On September 30, 53 senators voted to take it up, short of the three-fifths needed: every Republican voted yes, and every Democrat and both independents voted no.^{Source 40}

A stricter House bill that would bar members and their families from owning individual stocks at all, H.R. 5106, has 145 cosponsors from both parties and has not moved since it was introduced in September 2025.^{Source 41}^{Source 42} In a 2023 survey of registered voters by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, 86% favored banning members and the family who live with them from trading individual stocks, including 87% of Republicans and 88% of Democrats. Respondents were first given arguments for and against.^{Source 43}