Does the House actually file
its trades within 45 days?

Since 2012 the STOCK Act has required a member of the House to file a Periodic Transaction Report for substantially every securities trade over $1,000, and the Ethics Committee’s own PTR calculator states the deadline this run tests: reports are due “by the earlier of these two dates: (1) 30 days from being made aware of the transaction; or (2) 45 days from the transaction.” Run 015 asked a version of this question on an aggregator’s trade feed and found 89% of trades filed within 45 days; this run goes to the primary record instead — every PTR PDF the Clerk lists under filing-year 2026, 385 filings and 3,229 transaction rows, pulled 2026-09-12 from disclosures-clerk.house.gov, parsed line by line with the F/S status and comment field of every row captured, and the worst filings re-read against their PDFs by eye before any member is named below.

Four ways a naive ‘filed minus traded’ gap lies, two of them found by this run. An Amended row re-reports an old trade to correct it — not a fresh clock violation (14 rows excluded; filing 20033779, Miller, is the canonical case). A comment can say the trade was already disclosed on an annual financial disclosure — a technical re-filing, not a late one (1 row: 20034160, Jayapal, whose naive gap read 866 days). This run adds two more. The type column prints “S (partial)” for partial sales, which the obvious type-letter regex silently cannot match — 672 of 3,229 rows, 20.8% of the entire corpus, would have been dropped without ever erroring; the desk’s own first pass lost exactly those. And three rows carry internally impossible dates — a purchase dated 12/26/2026 (Cohen; filed 02/09/2026), a filing signed 06/01/2026 listing a 06/11/2026 sale (Menefee), a purchase dated 07/31/2026 filed 07/27/2026 (A. Smith) — excluded rather than resolved by guessing the filer’s intent. One Deleted row (a withdrawn transaction) is excluded too. What survives: 3,210 clean rows.

The rate, computed where the snapshot can actually see it: 4.1% of trades filed past the 45-day line. A 2026-filing-year snapshot over-counts lateness for old trades (a November 2025 trade filed promptly lives in the 2025 file, absent here; filed late, it lands here) and under-counts it for recent ones (late filings of August trades have not happened yet). So the rate is computed on trades dated 2026-01-01 through 07-29 — every such trade’s 45-day boundary closed before the pull date, and no compliant filing of it could have landed anywhere but the 2026 file. In that window: 91 of 2,210 trades, 4.12%, Wilson 95% CI [3.4, 5.0]; median lag 24 days, mean 24.6. Under the Committee’s dual clock — earlier of 30 days from the filer’s stated awareness or 45 days from the trade — 108 rows (4.9%) are late. And the lateness is concentrated, not diffuse: 54 of the 91 late rows are a single September filing by one member (Cisneros, CA31 — 37 late rows remain in 2,148 without it, 1.7%), and only 11 of the 93 e-filing members have even one late row in the window. The honest summary of the 2026 trade flow is dull: filed on time, about a month after the trade, by members who mostly never miss.

The pre-2026 backlog is where the teeth are. 726 clean rows carry trade dates from before 2026 (104 from 2024, 622 from 2025), all first appearing in 2026 filings — for every one of them the 45-day window closed before 2026 began. The worst is 690 days: an Apple dividend-reinvestment purchase traded 05/16/2024 and first filed 04/06/2026 (Case, HI01), one of seven DRIP rows in that filing whose stated notification dates are the year-end brokerage statements. Rulli (OH06) filed 32 trades spanning 07/2025–08/2026 in one batch on 08/07/2026, worst 619 days. Walberg (MI05) filed sixteen joint purchases all dated 02/07/2025 — notified, per the form, 05/29/2026 — filed 06/03/2026, 481 days. Webster (FL11) caught a single missed sale at 460 days; his filing’s own description field reads “sale inadvertently omitted.” Tran (CA45) first filed a 07/28/2025 Litecoin sale 381 days later, the form’s comment explaining the filer believed the sale was under the $1,000 threshold until preparing his annual disclosure — an explanation for the lateness, quoted here, not an exemption from it.

The two clocks cross at exactly 15 days, which is this sample’s median. The form’s notification date — when the filer says they learned of the trade — runs a median of 15 days behind the trade date (the monthly brokerage-statement cycle; 11% same-day), and filers file a median 4 days after that. Under the earlier-of rule, a member whose statement arrives d days after the trade faces the 30-day clock exactly when d=15: notify+30 = trade+45 on the same day. A member with same-day awareness (a self-directed trade) is on a stricter clock than the famous 45; a member on slow quarterly statements gets no relief past day 45 either. The 45-day line the public quotes and the clock a statement-cycle filer actually experiences are different instruments, and the Clerk’s form records both.