Short Interest Dates: Settlement, Due Date and Publication

Three dates on every short interest figure

A short interest number has an as-of date, a deadline and a release date, and they are a week and a half apart. FINRA Rule 4560 requires every member firm to keep a record of total short positions in all customer and proprietary accounts and to report them as of a reporting settlement date that FINRA designates. FINRA collects those reports twice a month, and its reporting page says they are due by 6 p.m. Eastern on the second business day after the settlement date. FINRA then publishes the totals on a date set in the same schedule.

One 2026 cycle shows all three. The settlement date was Wednesday 30 September. Firms' reports were due by 6 p.m. Eastern on Friday 2 October. FINRA published the figures on Friday 9 October. A chart that plots short interest on 9 October, or a headline that calls it today's short interest, has the date wrong by more than a week.

The settlement dates follow a fixed pattern. In the 2026 schedule every one is the 15th or the last day of the month, moved to the business day before when that day is a Saturday or Sunday: 15 August 2026 was a Saturday, so that cycle settled on Friday 14 August, and 31 October was a Saturday, so the month-end cycle settled on Friday 30 October.

Which trades a figure includes

Rule 4560 answers this in one line: firms report only those short positions resulting from short sales that have settled or reached settlement date by the close of the reporting settlement date. A short sale reaches its settlement date one business day after the trade, because the SEC moved the standard settlement cycle from two business days to one, with a compliance date of 28 May 2024.

Put the two together and the figure for a settlement date covers short sales traded up to the business day before it. For the 30 September 2026 cycle, a short sale executed on Tuesday 29 September settled on 30 September and counts. One executed on Wednesday 30 September settled on Thursday 1 October and belongs to the 15 October cycle. That is arithmetic on the rule and the settlement cycle, and it is worth doing every time you line a short interest figure up against a price chart.

How old the number is when you read it

We counted business days in FINRA's 2026 schedule, skipping weekends and the New York Stock Exchange holidays. In all 24 cycles the reports were due on the second business day after settlement and the figures were published on the seventh. The year-end cycle shows a holiday at work: settlement on Thursday 31 December 2026, reports due on 5 January and publication on 12 January 2027, the second and seventh business days once New Year's Day is skipped.

So the freshest official figure is old on the day it appears and older the day before it is replaced. The 30 September cycle, published on 9 October, describes trades through 29 September: ten days earlier. The next cycle, settled on 15 October, was published on Monday 26 October. On Friday 23 October, the last business day before that, the freshest official short interest for any stock still described trades from 29 September, 24 days earlier.

A stock that moved 40% in those 24 days may have very different positioning from the published figure, and nothing in the figure itself can tell you how. Read it as a dated snapshot, never as a current reading.

Reading a short interest page

Find the settlement date before you read the number. A page that shows short interest without one is showing a number you cannot place. Compare two figures only when you know both settlement dates, and compare changes between consecutive settlement dates, not between the dates two pages happened to be updated.

Our short interest tool prints the settlement date on every row and in the downloadable file, and says how many days old the current file is. The short interest guide covers what the number measures, days to cover included, and the Form 4 entry covers the insider filings that run on a faster clock: a change in an insider's holdings is due before the end of the second business day after the trade.

What the twice-monthly figure cannot tell you

It cannot show what happened between settlement dates. A short position opened and covered inside one cycle never appears in any published figure, and covering that starts just after a settlement date reaches a published figure more than three weeks later: a move that began on 2 October 2026 first shows up in the figures released on 26 October. FINRA also publishes daily short sale volume, which counts short sales as they trade, not the positions left open, so a high short volume day and a high short interest figure are different facts.

It also counts positions, not people. Rule 4560 has firms record and report all gross short positions in each individual firm or customer account, so the published total is a sum across accounts and firms. It says how many shares were short as of the date. It does not say how many traders held them, when they were opened or at what price.