Why congressional stock trades are reported as ranges, and how to use them anyway

The ten bands

The bands come from the Ethics in Government Act and were carried into the STOCK Act unchanged. 69% of all congressional transactions fall in the smallest band, $1,001–$15,000. Another 17% are $15,001–$50,000. Everything above $250,000 together makes up 3.5% of filings, and transactions over $5 million are rare (62 in twelve years).

Why ranges exist

Congress designed the disclosure system to reveal conflicts, not net worth. A band is enough to show that a member has a meaningful position in a company they regulate, without publishing a precise personal balance sheet. Whether that trade-off still makes sense is a live political debate; for data users it is simply the constraint to design around.

The midpoint mistake

The most common error in coverage of congressional trading is to treat a range as its midpoint, then sum midpoints into a headline figure. Two problems: the widest bands span a factor of five or more, and the distribution inside a band is not uniform. A $1,001–$15,000 filing is far more likely to be $2,000 than $14,000, because small periodic rebalances dominate that band. Midpoint sums therefore overstate small portfolios and understate large ones.

What ranges are still good for

A worked example

Suppose a representative files three purchases of the same stock on one day: $15,001–$50,000, $15,001–$50,000 and $1,001–$15,000. The honest statement is "between $31,003 and $115,000", with an upper bound of $115,000. Saying "about $73,000" (the midpoint sum) adds no information and invites a false sense of precision. Hillradar AI's filters let you set a minimum band so you decide what counts as material.

For the full field-by-field walkthrough of a filing, see how to read a Periodic Transaction Report.

Where the bands came from

The ranges predate the STOCK Act by decades. The Ethics in Government Act of 1978 created annual financial disclosure for federal officials and chose bands as a compromise between transparency and privacy; later amendments added the upper tiers as portfolios grew. When Congress added transaction reporting in 2012 it reused the same categories so that PTRs and annual reports would be comparable. Proposals to require exact amounts, or at least narrower bands at the low end where 69% of transactions sit, have been introduced several times without passing.

The systematic bias in band data

Because managed accounts generate many small trades, the lowest band is crowded near its floor, while the rare large transactions tend to sit anywhere in their wide bands. Any method that assigns one number per band will therefore overstate small portfolios and understate the dispersion of large ones. The upper-bound approach at least errs in a known direction. For comparisons between lawmakers, the fairest measures are counts within bands ("how many trades above $100,000") rather than summed dollar figures of any kind.

Practical filters that work

• Minimum band $50,001 removes about 86% of all transactions and nearly all routine rebalancing.
• Minimum band $250,001 leaves 2,005 transactions across twelve years, a list short enough to read in full.
• Band jumps: a member's first-ever filing in a band two steps above their usual one is a reliable "look here" flag.
• Buy/sell asymmetry by band: large sells with small buys usually mean an exit; the reverse means accumulation.