Key points
- 15.4% of tracked trades, as of September 14, 2026
- 183 of 1,186 trades, across 31 members
- Drop one broad committee and the rate falls to 10.4%
- Overlap is jurisdiction, not evidence of wrongdoing
Among the 75 members in our tracker, 183 of 1,186 classified trades fell within a sector overseen by at least one committee on which the member serves. As of September 14, 2026, that is 15.4 percent of them, spread across 31 of those 75 members.
Those figures are a snapshot taken on September 14, 2026, covering disclosures filed through August 28. We publish them dated because our congressional trading statistics page recomputes every figure when it loads, so the live percentage moves as new filings arrive. This article is the version you can cite and come back to.
What an overlap is, and what it is not
An overlap means one thing: a member traded a company whose sector falls under a committee that member sits on. It's a statement about jurisdiction. It is not evidence that anyone used non-public information, and it is not an accusation that they did.
The reason to be careful is that an overlap can have ordinary explanations. Plenty of members hold individual stocks through managed accounts or spousal portfolios they don't direct. A senator on the health committee who owns four large pharmaceutical companies may simply own a diversified portfolio, and a diversified portfolio will always contain something a given committee oversees. What the overlap rate does is show you where the question is worth asking.
One committee does a lot of the work in that number. House Energy and Commerce has unusually broad jurisdiction. It covers energy, utilities, healthcare, communication services and technology, which is a large share of the S&P 500. Almost any big-company trade by one of its members lands inside it.
Strip out the trades that match only through that committee and the overlap rate falls from 15.4 percent to 10.4 percent. Both numbers are published because neither one on its own is the honest answer. If you're quoting a single figure, 15.4 percent is the headline rate on September 14, 2026 and 10.4 percent is the narrower one.
Where the overlaps concentrate
The overlaps aren't spread evenly. Six member-and-committee pairings account for a large share of them.
| Member | Committee | Sector traded | Trades |
|---|---|---|---|
| April Delaney | House Science, Space, and Technology | Technology | 16 |
| Michael Rulli | House Energy and Commerce | Technology | 15 |
| Dave McCormick | Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs | Financial Services | 13 |
| Alan Armstrong | Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions | Healthcare | 12 |
| Tommy Tuberville | Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions | Healthcare | 10 |
| Gil Cisneros | House Armed Services | Aerospace & Defense | 7 |
How the number is built
The matching rules decide the number, so they're published in full rather than left implicit. Committee assignments come from the public congress-legislators dataset. Sector and industry labels come from Yahoo Finance. The map between the two is our editorial judgment.
Only committees with clear primary jurisdiction over an industry are counted. Appropriations, Budget, Rules, Ethics, Judiciary, Oversight, Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs are all excluded, because a committee that touches everything makes the statistic meaningless. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions counts as overseeing healthcare. House Financial Services and Senate Banking count as financial services and real estate. House Science, Space, and Technology counts as technology. The full map is on the statistics page.
Two limits matter here. The first is that we track 75 members, not all 535, so every total here is a floor rather than a complete count of congressional trading. The second is that the 1,186 figure only includes trades where both the sector and the committee seats resolved cleanly. Trades on tickers we couldn't classify are left out of both the numerator and the denominator rather than counted as non-overlaps, which avoids asserting a classification we don't have. Each trade is counted once in that 183, even when it overlaps with more than one committee seat. The table above is built differently, grouping by member, committee and sector, so a single trade matching two committees appears in two rows there.
None of this would be countable without the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act. Passed in 2012, it requires covered transactions over $1,000 to be reported within 30 days of the filer learning of them, and no later than 45 days after the trade, in public filings called periodic transaction reports. The reports give a date, a ticker, a transaction type and a dollar range rather than an exact amount, which is why trade counts are more reliable than dollar totals in this dataset.
That outer deadline matters for anyone reading a filing. A disclosure published today can describe a trade made a month and a half ago, so the data is a record of what happened, not a signal about what is happening. Our Congress trading tracker carries the individual filings, and our guide to tracking them covers where the raw documents live.
Anyone is welcome to cite these figures. They are published under a CC BY 4.0 data license with the underlying numbers available as a CSV from the statistics page, and we would ask only that the date is carried along with the number, since the live rate changes as filings come in.
