Congress Trading Data API for Commercial Use: Licensing, Limits and Pricing

Learn how to choose a Congress trading data API for commercial use by understanding licensing rules, rate limits, pricing plans, and data sources.

A Congress trading data API delivers the stock trades that U.S. Senators and Representatives disclose under the STOCK Act as structured JSON, so you can show them in an app, score them in a model or quote them in a newsletter. If you plan to make money with that data, the questions that matter are not only "does the endpoint work?" but also "am I allowed to use it this way?" and "will the limits hold when my product grows?".

This guide explains where the data comes from, which licensing rules apply and what a commercial plan should include, using Bourse API Pro as the example.

Key takeaways

• Congressional trades come from Periodic Transaction Reports filed with the House Clerk and the Senate, usually within 45 days of the trade.
• The filings are public, but a cleaned, ticker-matched dataset is a product with its own license terms.
• Free API tiers are for building and testing; commercial use needs a plan that explicitly allows it.
• Check limits per day and per minute, bulk access, history depth and how attribution works before you build.

Where congressional trading data comes from

Members of Congress report stock transactions above $1,000 on Periodic Transaction Reports (PTRs). House reports are published by the Clerk of the House, Senate reports through the Senate Electronic Financial Disclosure system. A report must be filed within 30 days of the member learning about the trade and no later than 45 days after it.

The raw reports are hard to use. House filings are often scanned PDFs, amounts are given as ranges ($1,001 to $15,000, $15,001 to $50,000 and so on), asset names are free text, and the same company appears under several spellings. A usable API has to:

• read every new report shortly after publication,
• match each asset to a ticker,
• normalise transaction types (purchase, sale, partial sale, exchange),
• attach the price on the trade date so performance can be measured.

Bourse returns all of this from one endpoint, /v1/congress, with filters for member, party, chamber, ticker and date range, plus /v1/senate and /v1/house for one chamber.

Is it legal to use congressional trading data commercially?

The disclosures themselves are public records. You can read them, analyse them and write about them. What you license from an API provider is the work on top: collection, cleaning, matching and delivery. That is why the provider's terms decide what you may do with the dataset.

Typical rules in a commercial data license:

• Allowed: showing the data inside your app or dashboard, using it in models and signals (including ones you sell), quoting and charting it in paid research, newsletters and videos.
• Not allowed: reselling the raw dataset as your own feed or API, removing attribution, sharing keys outside your company.

One exception is worth knowing. U.S. law (5 U.S.C. §13107) restricts commercial use of executive-branch financial disclosure reports, such as the OGE Form 278 filed by the President and Cabinet officials, except by news and communications media. If your product uses Trump or Cabinet trades, read the original source rules and the API & Data License first. This is not legal advice.

Free tier vs commercial plan

Most data APIs offer a free key. Use it: build your integration, test the JSON shape, check data quality. Then look at what changes when you go commercial.

The key keeps working when you upgrade; only the limits and the license change. That matters because you never have to rewrite your integration.

What to check before you commit

1. History depth. Backtests need years of data. Ask how far back the dataset goes and whether old reports were re-parsed with the same rules.
2. Latency. How long after a report appears on the House or Senate site does it show up in the API? Webhooks remove polling entirely.
3. Ticker matching quality. Spot-check a few members with complicated portfolios (options, funds, private companies).
4. Price fields. A trade is only interesting relative to what happened next. Bourse adds the estimated price at the trade date, the recent price and performance since.
5. Attribution. Most licenses require a short credit such as "Data: Bourse". Plan a place for it in your UI.

Example: one ticker, every disclosure

``bash curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $BOURSE_KEY" \ "https://api.bourse.pl/v1/congress?ticker=NVDA&from=2026-01-01" ``

Or everything Bourse knows about a stock in one call, including Congress, insiders, funds and lobbying:

``bash curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $BOURSE_KEY" \ "https://api.bourse.pl/v1/ticker/NVDA" ``

Bottom line

Congressional trading data is public, but the dataset you build a product on is licensed. Start on a free key, confirm the data fits, and move to a plan that explicitly allows commercial use before you launch. See Bourse API Pro for the commercial plan, or the API documentation to start for free.

Bourse provides financial data and editorial information, parts of which are generated by AI. This page is for general education only. It is not personalised investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any financial instrument. Make your own decisions.