The Consolidated Audit Trail is the securities industry's central trade-tracking system, operated by national market system plan participants. The Commission approved the amendment on March 27, 2026, alongside exemptive relief from certain requirements of Rule 17a-1 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.
The approved changes allow plan participants to, among other things, stop creating interim lifecycle linkages absent a request from an authorized regulatory user, delete CAT data older than three years, ease re-processing requirements for late records, discontinue certain functionality tied to the online targeted query tool, stop reporting rejected messages received by plan participants, relax certain processing deadlines, revise the approach for generating anonymized customer identifiers, and implement a spending cap on future changes to the CAT.
The Commission estimates the amendment will also produce approximately $19.4 to $24.1 million in incremental additional savings beyond those already projected from exemptive relief the Commission granted in 2025. The SEC characterized the action as building on cost-reduction measures approved that year.
SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins said the amendment builds on last year's progress toward a more efficient and cost-effective CAT after a decade of increasing costs, and described it as a step in the right direction while noting that many more steps remain. He added that the Commission's ongoing comprehensive review of the CAT will consider the sustainability of the CAT's budget, and that the Commission expects plan participants and the industry to work together toward further cost savings.
Jamie Selway, Director of the SEC's Division of Trading and Markets, said the Division supports efforts by the CAT NMS Plan Participants to control the sizeable costs of operating the CAT, expects those efforts to continue, and looks forward to additional progress.