Best Congress Stock Trackers, Compared

Members of Congress have up to 45 days to disclose a stock trade, so no tracker can show you one in real time. Every tool in this roundup starts from the same two free government databases.

The real differences are verification, coverage, how clearly the delay is shown, and price. For most readers a free tool that links to the filing is enough; pay only for alerts or an API. Below, we price out a year of each paid option and show you the one column that tells you how stale a trade was.

Watch it play outEvery tracker waits on the same two government databases

A member of Congress makes a stock trade.

The law gives them up to 45 days to disclose it. Each dot is a day nobody can see the trade.

Then the filing lands in one of two free government databases: the House Clerk or the Senate eFD.

Every tool in this roundup starts from those same two databases. None can show a trade in real time.

Replay

The short version

• Free: the House Clerk and Senate eFD sites, Capitol Trades, and Yield Theory's tracker.
• Alerts: Unusual Whales puts politician data in paid tiers from $42–50 a month, with 25 custom alerts on the cheapest.

Watch it play outA year of alerts costs about $504; the source data is free

Unusual Whales' cheapest plan with custom alerts costs $42 a month, billed annually.

Twelve of those months make one bill.

Pour them into one pool: about $504 a year, for 25 custom alerts.

The cheapest API, Quiver's Hobbyist tier, is about $300 a year, with no commercial rights. Areas follow cost.

Every one of these plans reads data the House Clerk and Senate eFD give away free.

Replay

• API: Quiver Quantitative's starts at $30 a month; Unusual Whales' at $150.
• No tool escapes the 45-day filing window or the value ranges that replace share counts.

Check the claimThree tracker claims, tested

ClaimA paid tracker shows congressional trades in real time.Tap to checkMythMembers have up to 45 days to file. A faster refresh only shortens the gap between the filing being posted and you seeing it.Flip backClaimA tracker's "trade volume" is what the member spent.Tap to checkMythFilings report value ranges, not share counts, so any volume or dollar total is an estimate built from bands.Flip backClaimYou need to pay to see what Congress trades.Tap to checkMythThe House Clerk and Senate eFD are free and authoritative, and Capitol Trades and Yield Theory's tracker are free too.Flip back

How to judge a tracker

We scored each tool on six things: source and verification, coverage, lag display, alerts, API, and price.

Two limits apply to every tool. Under the STOCK Act, members may file up to 45 days after a trade, so the public record itself is late. Filings also report value ranges, not share counts, so any "volume" figure is an estimate. Our guide to how to read congressional disclosures covers each field.

Every tracker sits downstream of the same free filings

1. Member trades to PTR filed (Up to 45 days later)
2. PTR filed (Up to 45 days later) to House Clerk, Senate eFD (Free official record)
3. House Clerk, Senate eFD (Free official record) to Trackers (Same filings, repackaged): Ranges, not shares

The official House and Senate sites

The government publishes filings free, in two unconnected systems. The House Clerk's Financial Disclosure Reports page cites Section 8 of the STOCK Act as its authority. It offers a search of individual reports and year-by-year bulk downloads for 2008 through 2026. Periodic Transaction Reports (PTRs, the forms members file for each trade) are PDFs, and some are scanned images rather than machine-readable text.

The Senate's Electronic Financial Disclosure system, or eFD, holds reports for senators, former senators, and Senate candidates filed from 2012 onward. Senator reports stay available for six years after leaving office. Before you search, eFD makes you accept an Ethics in Government Act clause barring use of reports for commercial purposes, credit decisions, or fundraising, with a civil penalty of up to $10,000.

Two official systems, neither with alerts or an API

System	House Clerk	Senate eFD
History	Bulk downloads, 2008–2026	Reports filed from 2012
Format	PDFs, some scanned images	Electronic reports
Before you search	—	Accept a no-commercial-use clause
Alerts or API	None	None
Price	Free	Free

Neither offers alerts, an API, or a merged view, and the Clerk states no posting cadence. They are the verification layer for everything else: if a tracker row can't be traced to a PDF here, treat it as unverified.

Capitol Trades

Capitol Trades is a free site run by 2iQ Research. Its about page describes "an established and proven process combining automated and manual record collection" and says "2iQ's data analysts take great care to ensure that the data we publish is always accurate."

It covers both chambers, but the footer says "the historical data available on our website is restricted to the past 3 years." On September 20, 2026 the trades page showed 37,037 trades from 1,815 filings by 211 politicians in that window.

Spot the red flag

A Capitol Trades row shows these fields. Which one tells you how stale the trade was when it became public?

Capitol Trades row

Traded dateHalf of the answer: it tells you when the trade happened, not when the public learned of it.OwnerWhose account traded, worth checking, but it says nothing about timing.Size rangeA value band, not a dollar figure or a date.Reference priceA price for context, not the disclosure lag."Filed after" day countThe days between the trade and the filing, on every row.

Tap the line you think is the tell.

Spotted it.Not that line. The "filed after" count. It puts the disclosure lag on every row, which makes it the best thing on the page.

Explain every lineHide the other explanations

Rows show published and traded dates, owner, type, size range, a reference price, and a "filed after" day count. That last column is the best thing on the page: it puts the disclosure lag on every row.

Alerts are a Twitter feed and a weekly newsletter, not per-member or per-ticker. The site returned "page not found" for /pricing and /faq, so no API or paid tier is published. Our Capitol Trades comparison goes deeper.

Quiver Quantitative

Quiver publishes a Congress Trading dashboard covering both chambers. On September 20, 2026 its most-active list mixed House and Senate members, each with a trade count and an "estimated trade volume."

The data "is parsed from congressional disclosures by Quiver Quantitative," but no manual verification step is described and dashboard rows don't link to filings. Marketing copy says users can react to trades "within moments of being filed," but no cadence is published.

Alerts are premium. Website premium pricing isn't public: /pricing redirects to a sign-up form. The API is priced openly on api.quiverquant.com/pricing:

The API page shows a sample Senate trade with ReportDate, TransactionDate, Ticker, Range, House, Party, and derived fields such as ExcessReturn. The return fields are Quiver's calculations, not disclosed facts.

Unusual Whales

Unusual Whales is mainly an options-flow platform. Its politics page, titled "Track Congressional & Senate Stock Trades," shows trade date, filing date, value range, asset type, and filing-status notes, plus top-trader lists and an annual Congressional Trading Report.

The pricing page includes "politician trade information" in all three paid Dashboard & Tools tiers:

A free account gets "limited data" with 15-minute delayed market data, and politician data isn't listed as free. The API is sold separately, without the website: API Basic is $150 a month with a 7-day trial and 40,000 requests per day, and API Advanced is $375 with unlimited requests. Both include "Congressional and Insider Trades." Commercial plans start at $625 a month, billed annually.

Unusual Whales' API costs three times its cheapest web plan

100200300$4000

$50

$75

$120

$150

$375

Retail BasicRetail ProRetail MaxAPI BasicAPI Advanced

No verification method appears on the pages we fetched. Unusual Whales historically supplied disclosure data to the NANC and KRUZ ETFs; the funds' July 2026 SEC filing says that arrangement has ended, as covered in our NANC and KRUZ explainer. See also our Unusual Whales comparison.

Member research: Top-trader lists show who bought what, not whether the business is worth owning at today's price. Our free NVIDIA issue, NVIDIA's growth has a financing bill, shows that second step: working backward from a test price to the revenue and margins it would require.

Yield Theory's tracker

This one is ours. The politician-trades directory and congressional-trades dataset cover both chambers for 2025–2026 filings. A weekday job parses every machine-readable PTR in the Clerk's 2025 and 2026 indexes and publishes a new snapshot only when filings change; a separate job reads electronically filed Senate PTRs from eFD for the same years. As of the September 28, 2026 snapshots:

• House: 918 filings by 142 members. 798 PDFs were machine-readable and produced 11,015 normalized rows.
• Senate: 238 electronic filings producing 2,321 rows from 34 senators.

Every row keeps the original filing URL, owner code, value range, transaction date, and filing date. Member and ticker pages show median filing lag and flag rows filed after the 45-day deadline. The most-active ranking and ticker index use the same rows. Browsing and CSV or JSON downloads are free.

The trade-offs are deliberate: two filing years, refreshed on weekdays. Image-only House PDFs are left out rather than OCR-guessed, so affected members' totals run low, and the page says so. There are no alerts or API; in exchange, every number traces to a government-hosted PDF and ranges stay ranges.

798 of 918 House PDFs were machine-readable

House filings, Sept 28, 2026 snapshot918

• 87%798Machine-readable, parsed
• 13%120Left out rather than OCR-guessed

How the tools compare

None can beat the 45-day statutory window, and none publishes a refresh SLA, a guaranteed update speed.

What a year of each paid option costs

Monthly prices hide the real commitment. Here is the arithmetic on the prices above, multiplying each by 12. We read the "billed annually" figure as a monthly rate paid once a year.

Make a guess

What's the cheapest way to get custom alerts on congressional trades for a year?

Tap your guess

Under $100Your guess$100 to $300Your guess$300 to $600Your guessOver $600Your guess

$012345678901234567890123456789Cheapest year of alerts

Spot on.Close, a little low.Close, a little high.Way off, too low.Way off, too high. It was $504.

About $504: Unusual Whales Retail Basic at $42 a month, billed annually. Every one of these plans reads data the Clerk and eFD give away free.

Cheapest year of alerts$504

Cheapest API, a year$300

So the cheapest way to get custom alerts is about $504 a year, and the cheapest API is $300 a year without commercial rights. Every one of those plans reads data the Clerk and eFD give away free.

A year of the cheapest API costs $300, alerts $504

Quiver API Hobbyist$300

Unusual Whales Retail Basic$504

Quiver API Trader$750

Unusual Whales Retail Pro$756

Unusual Whales Retail Max$1,224

Unusual Whales API Basic$1,800

A useful test before paying: divide the annual cost by the number of trades you would realistically act on. Hypothetical example: if $504 of alerts leads you to research 20 trades a year, $504 ÷ 20 = $25.20 per trade before you've bought anything, and each of those trades is already up to 45 days old.

Try it yourself

This takes about 10 minutes and shows you what any tracker is really giving you.

1. Open the most-active ranking and pick a member near the top.
2. On their page, pick one trade and write down the transaction date, the filing date, the owner, and the value range.
3. Subtract the transaction date from the filing date. That is the disclosure lag. Was it inside 45 days?
4. Follow the filing link to the House Clerk or Senate eFD PDF and check that every field matches.
5. Put the range into the range uncertainty calculator to see how wide the possible trade size really is.
6. Find the same trade on Capitol Trades and compare its "filed after" count with your own.

By the end you should be able to answer: did any tool tell you something the free filing didn't, and would you have paid to see it sooner?

Our read

• Browsing what members trade? Start free. Capitol Trades has three years of history with lag on every row; our tracker has filing-linked rows you can download and audit.
• Want alerts? Unusual Whales is the clearest option, with custom alerts on every paid plan. Quiver has them too, but hides the price behind a sign-up.
• Need an API? It's Quiver or Unusual Whales. Quiver is cheaper to start, though its $30 tier has no commercial rights.

Start free; pay only for alerts or an API

Browsing

• Capitol Trades: three years, lag on every row
• Yield Theory: filing-linked rows you can download

Free

Alerts

• Unusual Whales: custom alerts on every paid plan
• Quiver: premium, price behind a sign-up

From $504 a year

API

• Quiver: cheaper to start, no commercial rights at $30
• Unusual Whales: $150 a month

From $300 a year

Whatever you pick, check anything you act on against the official filing. We'd trust Quiver and Unusual Whales more if either published a verification method or linked every row to its filing.

Questions readers ask

Is there a free congressional stock tracker?

Yes. The House Clerk and Senate eFD sites are free and authoritative but separate. Capitol Trades and Yield Theory's tracker are free and cover both chambers, and both show filing lag on each row.

Can any tracker show congressional trades in real time?

No. Members have up to 45 days to file under the STOCK Act, so every tracker is at least as late as the filing. A faster refresh only shortens the gap between the filing being posted and you seeing it.

Why do trackers show different totals for the same member?

Filings report value ranges, so any dollar total is an estimate built from bands. Coverage windows differ too: Capitol Trades limits history to three years, and our tracker covers 2025–2026 filings and leaves out image-only House PDFs.

Can I use this data for a business?

Be careful. The eFD terms bar using reports for commercial purposes, credit decisions, or fundraising, with a civil penalty of up to $10,000. Quiver's cheapest API tier also carries no commercial rights.

Go deeper with member research

A tracker tells you what a member of Congress bought. It can't tell you whether the business is worth owning. That's the work our member reports do:

• Meta jumped 11%. What must happen next to justify the price?: Muse, subscription economics, the cash-flow burden, legal costs and the earnings assumptions baked into the new share price.
• The fundamental research course: 40 chapters that take you from reading a 10-K to writing your own research memo. The first chapter is free.

Limits of this data

• Prices and features come from each provider's public pages on September 20, 2026 and may have changed.
• Yield Theory operates one of the tools reviewed.