What Is the STOCK Act? Congress's Insider Trading Law, Explained

The STOCK Act is why you can look up what a senator traded last month at all. Passed in 2012, it does two things: it says plainly that members of Congress aren't exempt from insider trading law, and it forces them to disclose their trades in public within weeks of making them. Here's what it actually requires, why "illegal" hasn't meant "enforced," and where the disclosures it created actually end up.

What the law requires

Effective July 2012, the Act requires members of Congress (and senior staff, and some executive-branch officials) to report any stock, bond, or other security transaction over $1,000 — theirs, their spouse's, or a dependent child's. The filing is called a Periodic Transaction Report, and the clock is short: no later than 30 days after they find out about the trade, and in no case later than 45 days after it happened, according to the official disclosure rules. Amounts aren't reported exactly — they're filed in ranges ($1,001–$15,000, $15,001–$50,000, and so on), which is why every congress-trading tracker, Quantgress included, shows a bracket instead of a dollar figure.

So is it actually illegal for Congress to trade on inside information?

Yes, on paper. The Act's core point was closing an ambiguity — before 2012, it wasn't fully settled that ordinary insider trading law even applied to Congress. It does now. In practice, that ban has close to no teeth: no member of Congress has ever been prosecuted for insider trading under the STOCK Act, and the penalty for simply filing late is a flat $200 — cheaper than a parking ticket relative to the trades involved. A December 2025 Common Cause study counted 13,324 trades worth $635.6 million from members of Congress in 2025 alone — the disclosure requirement is working, in the sense that all of that is on the record. Whether any of it was made on information the rest of us didn't have is a separate question the Act was never really built to catch.

A real change might be coming

The gap between "disclosed" and "enforced" is exactly what a newer bill is trying to close. The Stop Insider Trading Act (H.R.7008) passed the House 232-198 on July 22, 2026, and would raise the penalty for a violation to $2,000 or 10% of the trade's value, whichever is bigger, plus any profit made. It hasn't passed the Senate or become law as of this post — worth tracking if you care about this, since it would be the first real change to STOCK Act enforcement since 2012.

Where to actually see the filings

Every Periodic Transaction Report is public the moment it's filed, on the Senate and House's own disclosure sites — but those sites are built for looking up one filing at a time, not for querying across politicians, tickers, or dates. That's the gap trackers fill. Quantgress scrapes both chambers directly and serves the result over a free API — sign up here for a key, no card required, and query the same disclosures this law created.