Congress trading data: the official files, an API and an alert layer
The House posts a yearly index and one PDF per trade report, the Senate runs its own system, and Quiver sells a parsed API. AyeWatch sends new filings to your webhook.
By ClaudeGPT Si Newsroom, Editorial team
3 min read
Congress trading data starts in two official places: the House Clerk's financial disclosure files and the Senate's eFD database, both required by the STOCK Act. You can parse them yourself, buy a cleaned dataset such as Quiver's API, or skip the pipeline and let AyeWatch send new filings and news to a webhook or Slack channel, which is the quickest route if all you need is to react to new trades.
The House: a yearly index plus one PDF per report
The Clerk's financial disclosure page offers a download for each year from 2008 on. The 2026 download, last updated in early November 2026, is a zip holding the same index twice, once as tab-separated text and once as XML. The columns are the filer's prefix, last name, first name, suffix, filing type, state and district, year, filing date and a document ID.
Rows with filing type P are periodic transaction reports. Each one is a PDF you can fetch by year and document ID:
https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/financial-pdfs/2026FD.zip
https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2026/<DocID>.pdf
The index tells you who filed and when. The trades themselves are inside the PDF, one line each, with an owner code (SP for spouse, DC for dependent child, JT for joint), the asset, the transaction type, the trade date, the date the filer was notified and an amount range. That PDF parsing is where most of the work sits, and the amounts you get out are bands such as $15,001 to $50,000 rather than numbers.
The Senate: a separate search system
Senators file through the Senate's eFD search at efdsearch.senate.gov, run by the Secretary of the Senate. Section 8 of the STOCK Act, as amended, is why both chambers put members' reports online, but the Senate system is separate from the House files, with its own formats and access rules. Read its current terms before you automate requests against it, and budget time for a second parser.
Rules that apply to every pipeline
The Clerk's search page quotes the law: the reports may not be used for any unlawful purpose, for credit ratings, for soliciting money, or for any commercial purpose other than by news media for dissemination to the public. If your product is commercial, read that before you build it on raw filings.
Timing matters too. Members file within 30 days of learning about a trade and no later than 45 days after it, so a perfect pipeline is still weeks behind the market.
Your options compared
| Approach | You get | Effort | Cost, as of November 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| AyeWatch | Alerts with a summary and sources, sent to push, Slack, Discord, email, webhooks or the API | Minutes | Free preview; paid plans from $9 a month |
| Parse the House files | Every House PTR, structured your way | PDF parsing and upkeep | Free |
| Senate eFD | Senate reports | Separate system to handle | Free |
| Quiver API | Parsed Congress trading data | API integration | Hobbyist from $25 a month billed annually, no commercial use rights |
Quiver's API pricing page lists a Trader tier at $62.50 a month billed annually and a Startup tier with commercial rights for companies under $1 million in annual revenue.
The alert layer without a parser
Most internal tools only need one signal: a member of Congress traded something we hold, or someone reported it. AyeWatch handles that without a scraper:
- Create a topic monitor in plain English, such as "New STOCK Act disclosures or news reports of members of Congress trading AAPL, MSFT or NVDA."
- Add webpage monitors for public tracker pages your team already checks.
- Send matches to a webhook, Slack or Discord channel, or pull them through the REST API; those channels are on paid plans, while push and the in-app feed come with every plan.
Each alert carries a short summary and source links, so the person on call can open the filing in one click.
When to build or buy instead
AyeWatch does not keep a structured table of trades, so it will not give you a row per transaction for analysis. If you need that, parse the House files and handle the Senate separately, or pay for Quiver's API and let them do the parsing. For a team that just wants to know quickly, start with AyeWatch's free preview and one monitor. Nothing here is investment advice.