Is Congress Buying or Selling Stocks?

The count, four ways

Every periodic transaction report lists each trade as a purchase, a sale or an exchange. The table counts the purchases and the sales four ways: all of them, only those in an asset with a ticker symbol (mostly stocks and exchange-traded funds, leaving out bonds, Treasuries and private holdings), all of them without the largest filer, and those in the latest 90 days of filings. Trades in a spouse’s or dependent child’s account are on the member’s report and are counted with it.

The largest filer is Rohit Khanna (D-CA), whose reports list 8,814 purchases and 4,225 sales, 67.6% purchases. That one household is 50% of every purchase on record and 36% of every sale, so the total for Congress leans the way its reports lean. The other 219 members with a purchase or a sale on record disclosed 8,654 purchases and 7,630 sales between them. The full ranking by number of trades is in the most active stock traders in Congress.

Member by member

Counting each member once gives a different picture from counting each trade once. 220 members have at least one purchase or sale on record, and 122 have 10 or more. Among those 122, 59 disclosed more purchases than sales, 61 disclosed more sales than purchases, and 2 disclosed the same number of each. For the median member in that group, 49.9% of the trades were purchases. Across all 220, 27 have only purchases on record and 57 have only sales.

Year by year

The table groups the same purchases and sales by the year the trade was made. 2026 is incomplete: members have up to 45 days to report a trade, and some report later, so recent months are still filling in. Senate reports enter Coldpine’s record in January 2026, which adds senators to the latest year and not to the earlier ones.

By dollar range

A filing gives each trade a dollar range, not an amount, so the dollars can only be bounded. Taking the bottom of every range, the 13,713 purchases of ticker-listed assets come to at least $178.2 million and the 10,028 sales to at least $178.3 million: on that measure the sales add up to more than the purchases. Without the largest filer the floors are $158.1 million bought and $169.7 million sold. The true totals are higher on both sides and the gap between them is not known, because a trade reported as $1,001 to $15,000 could be either end of that range. Assets without a ticker are left out of this measure because a few very large entries, such as money market funds and private partnerships reported at over $50 million, would outweigh everything else. The ranges themselves are counted in how big Congress’s stock trades are.

By party

92 Democrats disclosed 11,361 purchases and 6,782 sales, 62.6% purchases. 123 Republicans disclosed 6,104 purchases and 5,056 sales, 54.7% purchases. The largest filer is one of the Democrats; without that filer the party’s count is 2,547 purchases and 2,557 sales, 49.9% purchases. What each party’s purchases did afterward is measured in do Democrats or Republicans trade stocks better.

What this does and does not show

The number of purchases against the number of sales describes what the reports list. It is not a reading of what members expect from the market. A purchase reported at over $1 million counts the same as one reported at $1,001, an account that buys in many small lots lists a line for each, and a member who sells one large position files a single line. A person who holds stocks for years also has to buy before selling, so a record that starts in 2023 catches some purchases whose sales have not happened yet. What the sold stocks went on to do is measured separately in does Congress sell before the drop, and what the purchases did in does Congress beat the stock market. Which stocks were bought by the most members on the latest reports is in what stocks Congress is buying right now. None of these counts is evidence of wrongdoing by any member.

Methodology and honest caveats

The figures cover periodic transaction reports filed from January 1, 2023 through October 29, 2026. Coldpine’s House record goes back to January 2023 and its Senate record begins with reports filed in January 2026. Each line a report marks as a purchase or a sale counts once, whatever its size. The 167 lines marked as exchanges are left out. Members are counted per person, and a member who appears under two spellings is counted once. The year table uses the trade date and covers trades dated from January 1, 2023; trades with an earlier date or no readable date are in the totals and not in that table. The latest 90 days are counted by the date the report was filed, whenever the trade took place. Dollar floors add the lower bound of each reported range over transactions with a ticker symbol; 281 of those have no readable range and add nothing. How we parse filings is set out in our methodology. Figures are computed live and update as new filings arrive, so they may differ from the ones quoted the day this was published.