SEC Form 4 Timing: Transaction Dates, Filing Dates and Acceptance Times

This descriptive study distinguishes reported transaction dates, official filing dates and recorded EDGAR acceptance times in 487,715 original SEC Form 4 filings with official filing dates from January 2024 through September 2026. Acceptance occurred at or after 16:00 New York time in 80.37% of filings. For filing-by-reported-date-by-code observations of non-derivative purchases and sales, the median calendar-day gap to acceptance was two days in both groups, with different distributions and sensitivity to filing weighting. Exact-accession source checks identified 288 acceptance timestamps requiring UTC correction. After these analytical replacements, a predefined simple random sample of 2,000 original filings showed no residual timestamp disagreement against SEC submission headers; the exact one-sided 95% upper population disagreement bound is 0.149%. The study measures recorded acceptance events, not first public availability, provider receipt or executable trading opportunities. The PDF includes the full article, methodology and validation record. Research disclosure: InsiderFilings.info maintains the database and publishes this analysis. Validation is internal, not an external audit. Generative AI tools assisted with research planning, code development, analysis, drafting and revision. The author is responsible for the content and conclusions. The accompanying article page provides the study data and reproduction code:https://insiderfilings.info/research/sec-form-4-timing/