The CFTC publishes the Commitments of Traders report every Friday afternoon at 3:30 PM Eastern Time. The data inside it describes open positions as of the close of business on the previous Tuesday. That is a three-day gap between the snapshot and the release, and it is one of the first things new readers of the report notice.
Update (November 2026): the COT report is going twice weekly
On 27 October 2026 the CFTC announced that the COT report will be published twice a week by the end of 2026: positions as of Monday released on Wednesday, positions as of Wednesday released on Friday, both at 3:30 PM Eastern Time — a two-day lag instead of three. No exact start date has been given; until the switch, the Friday schedule described below stays in force.
Why the lag exists
The gap is not arbitrary. Position data has to be collected from every reporting firm — the brokers and clearing members that actually hold the accounts — then validated, reconciled and anonymised before it can be published. Wednesday and Thursday are when that work happens. Friday at 3:30 PM the public file goes out.
The schedule has been stable for decades and is published in advance by the CFTC. Our CFTC Release Schedule page follows the official calendar of the year and marks every week a federal holiday delays (in those weeks the release usually moves to the Monday after), so anyone following the data can plan around it.
A lag that is mostly irrelevant in practice
The three-day gap sounds like a flaw. In practice it rarely is. The positioning information the COT report captures describes slow, deliberate exposure taken by the largest market participants. Those positions are not high-frequency book entries that flip between Tuesday and Friday. They are the kind of exposure that takes weeks to build and weeks to unwind.
Because of that, a three-day delay on a structural picture is mostly noise. A net position that reached a multi-year extreme last Tuesday is usually still near that extreme by the time the data is released. The picture the report paints is simply too slow-moving for a 72-hour delay to materially distort it.
A rhythm the market has learned to live with
The weekly Friday rhythm has become part of how the futures world operates. Research desks build their weekend notes around it. Media outlets write their COT commentary on Friday evenings. Independent observers refresh their mental model of positioning over the weekend and carry it into the new week. The release time is predictable, the format is stable, and the lag — for anyone using the report the way it was intended to be used — is a detail, not a defect.
