GUIDE
Form 4: how US insiders report their trades
Directors, officers and holders of more than 10% of a US-listed company's shares report their trades in it to the SEC on Form 4.
The rules
- Who files: insiders under Section 16 of the Securities Exchange Act, that is directors, officers and holders of more than 10% of the shares.
- Deadline: Form 4 is due before the end of the second business day after the trade and is public on the SEC's EDGAR system once filed.
- Related forms: Form 3 when someone becomes an insider; Form 5 once a year for the few trades that may be reported late.
- Threshold: none.
- Trading plans: trades under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 plan are reported too, and Form 4 has a box to mark them.
What the filings show
2024-10-18 – 2026-10-16: this site holds 31,325 purchase filings at 3,836 companies. Median time from trade to publication: 1 business day; 10% took longer than 2 business days.
Dates are the ones stated in the filing. Where a filing gave no separate trade date, most sources repeat the publication date, so same-day figures are overstated and the share that took longer is a lower bound. Gaps under zero or over 250 business days are treated as date errors and left out. A late filing can have an ordinary cause, such as a correction of an earlier notice.