What Is the Disclosure Gap?
The disclosure gap is the number of calendar days between when a member of Congress executes a stock trade
and when that trade is filed publicly under the STOCK Act. The law gives members 45 days. GovGreed
calculates this gap for every one of the 189,595 disclosures in its database and stores it as
historical_trades.disclosure_gap_days.
It is GovGreed's signature metric because it turns a binary compliance question — was this filed on time or not? —
into a continuous measurement of how much visibility is being withheld, and from whom. A 3-day gap and a 300-day
gap are both technically "disclosed" but they communicate radically different postures toward the public record.
Who Files Latest
The worst offenders split cleanly by the kind of violation. One group files a single trade spectacularly late.
Another files many trades chronically late. The third files nearly everything late as a pattern. Examples from GovGreed's database:
| Politician |
Party-State |
Measure |
Value |
Type of Violation |
| Rick Allen |
R-GA |
Worst single gap |
997 days |
Spectacular outlier |
| Thomas Suozzi |
D-NY |
Average gap across trades |
396 days |
Chronic pattern (86.4% late) |
| Michael McCaul |
R-TX |
Total late filings |
6,670 |
Volume (20.7% of 32,302 trades) |
| Tommy Tuberville |
R-AL |
Frequently cited in media |
~10% |
Near-average rate despite opposing ban |
| Ro Khanna |
D-CA |
Total trades overall |
48,257 |
Volume elevator; most on time |
See per-politician deep dives: Tuberville,
McCaul, Khanna,
Pelosi. Full compliance rankings: Late Filings tracker.
Why the 44.9-Day Average Is Not an Accident
If congressional filings were randomly distributed across the 45-day window, the mean (44.9 days)
and median (28 days) would be close to each other. They are not. The 17-day gap between them is evidence
of a long right tail: a disciplined core that files in the first 2-3 weeks, and a chronic tail that
waits months or years. The mean gets dragged to the legal ceiling because of how that tail accumulates, not
because most members are cutting it close.
Put differently: half of Congress files at 28 days or better. The other half files in a distribution that
stretches out to 997 days at the extreme. Averaging those two halves produces 44.9 — which happens to equal the
legal maximum. The math is not cosmetic. It's structural.
How GovGreed Measures the Gap
For each of the 189,595 trades in the database, we take the trade_date
(day of execution) and the filed_date
(day of STOCK Act submission to the House or Senate clerk) and compute the difference in calendar days. The result is stored per-trade
and aggregated into per-politician, per-party, per-sector, and per-month rollups.
- Data sources: FMP Ultimate STOCK Act feed (primary), QuiverQuant disclosures (reconciliation), House & Senate clerk PDFs (source of truth).
- Refresh cadence: daily, via the prediction pipeline.
- Reconciliation: when a trade is filed and then amended, we track both dates but report the earlier filing as the official gap.
- Coverage: 343 of 538 members (63.8%) — the remainder have filed zero trades in the 2012–2026 window.
Why the Disclosure Gap Matters to Traders
If you follow congressional trading to inform your own trades, the disclosure gap is the ceiling on how timely your information can be.
When a 45-day law produces a 44.9-day average, you are reading trades that are nearly six weeks old by the time you see them.
Markets routinely move more than 10% in that window. The alpha in copying Congress isn't in the filings themselves — it's in
cross-referencing the filings with committee activity, bill timing, and herd behavior so that a pattern surfaces before the next filing drops.
This is why GovGreed's 4 prediction engines look forward from committee markup schedules and recurring-buy patterns rather than
chasing disclosed trades. See the methodology for the full scoring weights. Not financial advice.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the disclosure gap? ▾
The disclosure gap is the number of days between the execution of a stock trade by a member of Congress and the date that trade is publicly filed under the STOCK Act. The STOCK Act of 2012 sets a 45-day legal deadline. GovGreed calculates this gap for every one of the 189,595 trades in its database and uses it as a core compliance metric. Across all trades, the average disclosure gap is 44.9 days — roughly the entire window Congress is given. The median is 28 days, meaning half of all trades are filed within 4 weeks. But the tail is extreme: 23,426 trades (12.5%) breach the 45-day limit, and the worst single gap on record is 997 days, attributed to Rep. Rick Allen (R-GA). The disclosure gap is GovGreed's signature metric because it turns a binary compliance question (late/on-time) into a continuous measurement of how much public visibility is being withheld, and from whom.
How is the disclosure gap calculated? ▾
For each trade, GovGreed takes the trade_date (the day the transaction was executed) and subtracts it from the filed_date (the day the STOCK Act disclosure was submitted to the House or Senate clerk). The result, measured in calendar days, is stored in the historical_trades.disclosure_gap_days column. A gap of 0 means the member filed on the same day as the trade. A gap of 45 is the last legal day. Anything above 45 is a violation, though the $200 fine is rarely enforced and can be waived by ethics committees. GovGreed aggregates these gaps across every politician, calculates averages and medians, flags outliers, and publishes per-politician compliance rankings. The data is refreshed daily from FMP's STOCK Act feed and QuiverQuant's disclosure tracker.
Who has the worst disclosure gap in Congress? ▾
Three politicians consistently rank worst by different measures. By single-trade severity, Rep. Rick Allen (R-GA) holds the record at 997 days — nearly 2 years and 9 months between executing a trade and disclosing it. By chronic delay, Rep. Thomas Suozzi (D-NY) has filed 86.4% of his trades late with an average 396-day gap. By volume of violations, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) has 6,670 late filings — more than any other member — representing 20.7% of his 32,302 total trades. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is frequently cited in media but his rate is closer to the congressional average. See the full rankings on the
late-filings tracker. All data is sourced from public STOCK Act filings via the House and Senate clerks.
Why does the 44.9-day average matter if the limit is 45 days? ▾
Because the average was designed to hit the ceiling. Congress set its own 45-day window, then filed its trades with an average gap of 44.9 days — consuming virtually the entire legal buffer on average. This matters for three reasons. First, it means roughly half of the market-moving period after an insider trade has already passed before the public ever sees the filing. Second, the 44.9-day figure is dragged down by members who file quickly; the late filers (who average 200+ days) pull the upper half of the distribution far past the deadline. Third, the behavior is structural, not accidental: if filings were randomly distributed, you would expect the average to cluster around the median (28 days), not the legal maximum. The gap between mean and median is evidence of a long, deliberate tail.
How many congressional trades are filed late? ▾
Based on GovGreed's analysis of 189,595 congressional trades from 2012 through April 2026, exactly 23,426 trades (12.5%) were filed after the 45-day STOCK Act deadline. That figure counts only confirmed violations where the gap between trade_date and filed_date exceeds 45 calendar days. The true number may be higher because some filings are amended weeks or months after the original submission, and the amended date is not always reflected in public records. GovGreed's late filings tracker ranks every politician by violation count, late filing rate, and average gap. The $200 statutory fine per late filing has generated minimal deterrence, and no member of Congress has ever been criminally prosecuted for a STOCK Act compliance violation.
Does party affiliation affect the disclosure gap? ▾
Across GovGreed's full dataset, the disclosure gap by party is remarkably symmetric. Both Republican and Democratic members average within 3 days of each other when trade volume is weighted, and both parties have members in the worst-10-offenders list. Of the top late-filers cited in media investigations, approximately half are Republicans (Tuberville R-AL, McCaul R-TX, Rick Allen R-GA) and half are Democrats (Suozzi D-NY, Khanna D-CA by volume, Pelosi D-CA by trade size). This symmetry is one reason GovGreed's brand voice treats disclosure compliance as a structural problem, not a partisan one. Voters across both parties — 86% of Americans in recent polling — support a complete ban on congressional stock trading, suggesting the issue has moved past the usual partisan gravity wells.
What is the penalty for a large disclosure gap? ▾
Under the STOCK Act, the penalty for filing a trade disclosure late is a $200 fine, regardless of whether the gap is 46 days or 997 days. The fine can be waived by the House or Senate Ethics Committee for a first offense, and in practice waivers are common. There is no escalating penalty scale, no disclosure-value-based fee, and no automatic referral to law enforcement. For comparison, an SEC insider trading violation by a private-sector executive can carry up to 20 years in prison and $5 million in fines. No sitting member of Congress has been criminally prosecuted under the STOCK Act, even for gaps exceeding 900 days. Reform bills such as the ETHICS Act and the Stop Insider Trading Act propose stronger penalties but none have passed as of April 2026.
Can the disclosure gap predict insider trading? ▾
GovGreed's 7-layer signal engine uses disclosure gap as one input among many, not a standalone predictor. A large gap is often correlated with other insider indicators — trades in sectors the politician's committee regulates, trades preceding known bill activity by industry lobbyists, and unusual volume concentration. Combined with committee alignment, campaign contribution patterns, and bill investability scoring, disclosure gap contributes to the composite master score that generates A+ and S tier signals. Those A+ signals historically produce a 72.7% win rate with +10.7% average 30-day returns. But a late filing alone is a compliance issue, not a trading signal. The predictive power comes from convergence across multiple layers. See the
methodology page for the full weighting breakdown.