Congressional stock trading statistics 2026

Key statistics

One line each, ready to quote. Data as of Oct 29, 2026. How those members' purchases performed against the index: the Congress vs S&P 500 scorecard.

Every figure on this page is recomputed each time the page loads. Amounts in these filings are disclosed as brackets, so dollar totals are published as ranges. The numbers are free to cite with a link back.

Which members of Congress trade stocks the most?

Gil Cisneros has the most disclosed trades on file, with 303. Trade counts measure activity, not returns. A single filing can report dozens of separate transactions, so a member who files one broad disclosure covering a managed account will outrank an active trader who reports one position at a time.

Which stocks does Congress trade most?

MSFT is held by more tracked members than any other stock, appearing in disclosures from 18 of them. This table is ranked by the number of separate members who traded a stock, not by raw trade count, because those two answer different questions. TKNO has the highest raw count at 43 trades, but every one of them came from a single member, which makes it a story about one portfolio rather than about Congress. Large-cap technology names lead once concentration is stripped out, which is what ordinary portfolio allocation alone would predict. Appearing here measures how widely a stock is held, not anything about the company.

Do members of Congress buy or sell more?

Sales run modestly ahead of purchases, 1,115 to 772. That is a much narrower split than corporate insider filings show, where sales outnumber purchases by roughly nine to one, because executives receive stock as pay and members of Congress do not. The comparison sits on our insider trading tracker.

Do members trade in the industries their committees oversee?

Yes, regularly. Of the 1,681 tracked trades where we know both the company’s sector and the member’s committee seats, 263 were in a sector a committee that member sits on writes law over. That is 15.6 percent of them, spread across 34 of the 89 tracked members.

An overlap is a statement about jurisdiction and nothing more. It is not evidence that a member used non-public information, and it is not an accusation of one. Many members hold stock through managed accounts, index funds, and spousal portfolios they do not direct, and a trade that lines up with a committee assignment is far more often a diversified portfolio doing ordinary things than anything else. What the table shows is where the question is worth asking.

One row per member, committee, and sector. The trade count is every disclosed transaction in that combination.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is the loose end in any count like this one. Its jurisdiction genuinely runs from power plants to drug approvals to telecom, so almost any large-cap trade by one of its members lands inside it. Excluding trades that match only through that committee, the overlap rate falls to 11.7 percent. Both numbers are published because neither one alone is the honest answer.

How committees are matched to sectors

Committee seats come from the public congress-legislators dataset. Sector and industry labels come from Yahoo Finance. The map between them is our editorial judgment, so it is published in full here rather than left implicit. Only committees with clear primary jurisdiction over an industry are included. Appropriations, Budget, Rules, Ethics, Judiciary, Oversight, Homeland Security, and Foreign Affairs are all left out, because a committee that touches everything makes the statistic meaningless.

How large are congressional stock trades?

Most are small. The STOCK Act requires only a bracket, and the $1,001 - $15,000 band accounts for 1313 of the 1,903 trades on file. Only 18 carry a disclosed upper bound of $1 million or more.

How late are congressional stock disclosures?

The median trade reached the public 26 days after it happened. The STOCK Act sets an outer limit of 45 days from the transaction, and 27.9 percent of tracked trades were disclosed after that point. The longest gap on file is 880 days.

Read that figure carefully before quoting it as a violation rate. The law requires a report within 30 days of the member being notified of a trade, and no later than 45 days after it occurs, so a managed account that notifies its owner slowly can produce a long gap without a late filing. What the number does show is how stale this information is by the time anyone outside Congress can act on it.

What do the disclosure rules require?

The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 requires members of Congress to report any stock, bond, or commodity transaction over $1,000 made by themselves, a spouse, or a dependent child. Reports go to the House Clerk or the Senate Office of Public Records as periodic transaction reports. Amounts are disclosed in brackets rather than exact figures, which is why no dollar total on this page is a single number. The penalty for filing late is a $200 fee.

Methodology and limits

These counts come from periodic transaction reports filed under the STOCK Act, collected through Financial Modeling Prep and accumulated since March 2024. Four limits matter if you are citing this page.

• It is a tracked subset. The figures cover 89 members with filings on file, not all 535 members of Congress. Treat every total as a floor.
• Amounts are brackets. A filing says $1,001 to $15,000, never $7,400. Dollar totals here are the sum of the lower bounds and the sum of the upper bounds, with no midpoint estimate.
• One filing can hold many trades. Each row counted here is a single transaction, so trade counts run well ahead of filing counts.
• A trade is not a position. Disclosures report transactions, not holdings, so nothing here shows what a member currently owns or what any of it returned. Performance is measured separately on the tracker methodology page.

Frequently asked questions

Data from public STOCK Act periodic transaction reports (House Clerk and Senate eFD), via Financial Modeling Prep. Reported with up to a 45-day delay, and amounts are disclosed ranges. Past performance does not predict future results, and none of this is investment advice.