Share of Members of Congress Holding S&P 500 Stocks (Annual Reports)

## What this measures

The percentage of members of the U.S. House and Senate whose annual financial disclosure report lists shares or options of at least one S&P 500 company, held by the member, a spouse or a dependent child. One value per report year, from 2016, dated December 31 of the year the reports cover. The base is every member whose electronically filed report for that year Palanor has read.

## Why it matters

Whether members of Congress should own individual stocks is a live policy question. This is the plain count behind it: how common direct ownership of large listed companies is among lawmakers, year by year, without singling out anyone.

## How to read it

Higher means more members hold at least one S&P 500 stock. It is a share of members, so it holds up when the number of reports read changes. Compare years; a move of a few points reflects a few dozen members. The members counted and the reports read are in each observation's metadata.

## What it does not say

Holding is not trading, and a single share counts the same as a large position. A stock listed with no value at year end (usually sold during the year and reported for its income) does not count. Funds, bonds and private companies are left out, and S&P 500 membership is today's list applied to every year. Reports filed on paper (a small and shrinking share, listed in the metadata) are not read, so those members are missing from the base. Qualified blind trusts are not itemized on the reports. A year appears once its filing season closes in mid-August of the following year. Every member and every party counts the same way.

## Source

Annual financial disclosure reports filed with the Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives (disclosures-clerk.house.gov, Schedule A) and the Secretary of the Senate, Office of Public Records (efdsearch.senate.gov, Part 3), parsed by Palanor from the electronically filed reports; the latest report or amendment per member and year counts (see palanor.com/congress-trades/holdings#methodology). U.S. Government works. Use is governed by the Ethics in Government Act, 5 U.S.C. §13107(c), which bars commercial use other than by news and communications media for dissemination to the general public; Palanor publishes these aggregates under that news-media exception, free and public. Member data: congress-legislators (CC0).

## Revision — 2026-09-26

Universe updated to current S&P 500 constituents (8 out, 3 in). Out: Builders FirstSource, Molson Coors and The Trade Desk, which left the index on 21 September 2026; Electronic Arts, which was taken private and left on 5 August 2026; and MongoDB, Cloudflare, Snowflake and Zoom, which were never members and had been included in error since May 2026. In: Bloom Energy, Everpure and Illumina, which joined on 21 September 2026. Membership now comes from a dated constituent list refreshed monthly. The corrected list applies from 26 September 2026. Readings before that date are unchanged.