Form 4 by the numbers: what 221,347 insider filings reveal

InsiderAlpha stores the SEC Form 4 filings posted to EDGAR. This study covers the deduplicated corpus as it stood on August 3, 2026: 221,347 primary Form 4 filings by 53,567 insiders across 6,114 companies, from December 2022 to that date. The live corpus is larger and grows every trading day; these figures are frozen so every percentage below stays computed on the same rows. Every number below is computed directly from those filings; the methodology, including every data-quality filter we applied, is at the end.

Download the published aggregate CSV and filing-lag chart. The download records each figure's unit, scope and exclusions. It is a reusable copy of this frozen study, not a current count of filings.

How fast do insiders really file?

Section 16 gives insiders two business days to report a trade. In practice, the median Form 4 arrives 2 calendar days after the earliest transaction it reports, and 90.5% arrive within 4 calendar days (our data records calendar days, so these figures bracket the business-day rule rather than measuring it exactly).

The tail is long: 3.15% of Form 4s arrive more than 10 days after the trade, about 1 in 30, and 1.55% arrive more than 45 calendar days after the earliest transaction. The 99th percentile filing lag is 96 days. A late filing still goes on the record, but a purchase disclosed three months after the trade describes a much older price than one disclosed after two days. Check both dates when reading insider buying signals.