Who has to file
The House Committee on Ethics'
PTR
form and instructions put it plainly: "Members, Officers, and
Employees who qualify as 'senior staff' under the Ethics in Government Act of
1978 are required to file Periodic Transaction Reports." The statute applies
to both chambers, so Senators and senior Senate staff file as well.
- The member reports family trades too. The form covers
securities "owned by you, your spouse, or dependent children". A
spouse's trade in a spouse's account appears on the member's PTR,
usually marked SP.
- Senior staff file as well. Employees paid at or above
the "senior staff rate" set by statute file PTRs. Candidates for the
House do not; principal assistants and shared employees do not unless
they are paid at that rate
(CY2024
Instruction Guide).
- InsiderAlpha covers members. Our pages show the trades
disclosed by members of the House. Staff filings are public on the
Clerk's site but are not part of the tracker.
What counts as a reportable transaction
The statute (5
U.S.C. 13104(a)(5)) reaches any purchase, sale or exchange "exceeding
$1,000" in stocks, bonds, commodities futures and other securities, and in
real property other than a personal residence. The House form narrows that
for PTR purposes and spells out the edges:
- The $1,000 test is the gross amount of a single
transaction, "not your gain or loss made on the sale". A $5,000 sale of
something bought for $7,000 is reportable even though it lost
money.
- Trades inside self-directed retirement accounts such
as a 401(k) or IRA count, and so does rebalancing between holdings
inside them.
- Reinvested dividends count when a single reinvestment
exceeds $1,000.
- "Other securities" includes cryptocurrencies, which
the form names as an example.
The exclusions matter as much as the rule. The form
excludes transactions in a widely held investment fund that
the filer does not control and that is publicly traded or widely diversified,
the carve-out the STOCK Act's own
section
14 wrote for mutual funds and similar vehicles. The House form also lists:
any transaction in a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund, real property,
transactions solely between the filer, spouse and dependent children, the
federal Thrift Savings Plan, stock splits, bequests and inheritances, bank and
money-market accounts, certificates of deposit, and rollovers between
retirement accounts. Assets in a qualified blind trust or an excepted trust
are also outside the PTR requirement. Many of these still appear on the
annual Financial Disclosure report; they simply do not trigger a 45-day
filing.
The deadline: 30 days from notice, 45 days at most
The rule in 5
U.S.C. 13105(l) has two clocks. A report is due "not later than 30 days
after receiving notification" of the transaction, "but in no case later than
45 days after such transaction". The House Committee on Ethics states it as
the earlier of two dates:
"30
days from being made aware of the transaction; or 45 days from the
transaction date". The notification clock exists because a broker, a
money manager or a spouse may execute a trade the member only hears about
later; the 45-day cap exists so that delay cannot run forever. There are no
extensions for PTRs, and a deadline that falls on a weekend or federal holiday
is not pushed to the next business day. The
disclosure
delays guide works through the Committee's own dated examples.
Ranges, not amounts
A PTR never states a dollar figure. It states a category of
value, and the categories come from
5
U.S.C. 13104(d). On the House form they read: $1,001 to $15,000; $15,001
to $50,000; $50,001 to $100,000; $100,001 to $250,000; $250,001 to $500,000;
$500,001 to $1,000,000; $1,000,001 to $5,000,000; $5,000,001 to $25,000,000;
$25,000,001 to $50,000,000; and over $50,000,000. One further column,
"Transaction in a Spouse or Dependent Child Asset over $1,000,000", is
reserved for assets the member has no interest in. The category is chosen on
the gross purchase or sale price; "the amount of any capital gain or loss on
the transaction is irrelevant".
A trade marked $1,001 to $15,000 could be $1,100 or $14,900, and a sum of
several ranged trades is itself a range. InsiderAlpha keeps every amount as
the band the member filed and shows totals as a range, never as a midpoint or
an estimate.
Where the reports are published
House PTRs are filed with the Clerk of the House, not with the Ethics
Committee, either through the electronic system at fd.house.gov or on paper
delivered to the Legislative Resource Center. The Clerk publishes them on its
Financial
Disclosure Reports site, where each filing is a PDF with a numeric filing
ID, and offers a yearly index for download. No attachments are permitted with
an electronic filing, so the PDF is the whole record. Senate reports are
published separately through the Senate's electronic financial disclosure
system at efdsearch.senate.gov.
Late filings and the $200 fee
Under 5
U.S.C. 13106(d), anyone who files a required report more than 30 days
after it was due "shall ... pay a filing fee of $200", which the supervising
ethics office "may waive ... in extraordinary circumstances". The House
Committee's guide adds that the fee is not assessed until the 31st day after
the due date, that every late PTR carries a minimum fee of $200, and that
repeated late filings can cost more. It is a filing fee, not a trading
penalty: the report is still accepted and still published. Separately, the
same section allows a civil penalty of up to $50,000 for knowingly and
willfully falsifying or failing to file, and the form warns filers that 18
U.S.C. 1001 applies to false statements. InsiderAlpha flags a trade disclosed
more than 45 days after it happened as late.
What a PTR does not disclose
Read a PTR for what it is: a notice that a reportable transaction occurred.
It does not give the exact dollar amount, the number of shares, or the price.
It does not say why the trade was made, who decided to make it, or whether an
adviser made it under a standing mandate. It does not carry the Rule 10b5-1
plan checkbox that a corporate insider's
Form 4 carries. It says nothing
about what else the member owns; that is the annual report's job. Treat the ticker, the direction,
the dates and the range as the whole of the evidence, and read the
comparison with
corporate insider filings before treating one like the other.
What InsiderAlpha covers
The Congress trades page lists
House PTRs from 2024 onward, read from the Clerk's published filings.
Electronic filings are parsed line by line; paper filings, which the Clerk
publishes as scans without a text layer, are listed with a link to the scan
rather than guessed at. Every trade links to the official PDF. Senate reports
are not covered yet, because the Senate's disclosure site refuses automated
clients and we do not work around that; each page says which chamber it
covers. Members can open the
Congress tracker for the full
history, filters by member, ticker, party, state and owner, and the Form 4
open-market purchases by corporate insiders in the same companies.
Read a PTR field by field → ·
Why the disclosures arrive late → ·
What corporate insiders file instead →
This article is informational and is not investment advice.