Can you make money with a prop firm?

Updated 24 September 2026 by the Prop Firm Pal editorial team.

Funded accounts are usually simulated, but the payouts are real money — FTMO, for instance, describes its funded accounts as demo accounts with fictitious capital and pays rewards from them. The question is not whether money is paid but whether it exceeds what you spend.

Your return from a prop firm is what you are paid, minus every fee you spend getting and keeping funded accounts. A worked example, with round numbers chosen to illustrate rather than to describe any firm:

• Evaluation: $400 for a $100,000 account, and a one-in-three chance of passing. Expected cost to get funded: about $1,200.
• Funded account: you make 3% before the account ends, withdraw $3,000 of profit at a 90% split, and are paid $2,700.
• Net: roughly +$1,500 over the cycle. At a one-in-five pass rate the cost to get funded rises to $2,000 and the net falls to about +$700; at one in ten it is −$1,300.

Three numbers dominate. Your pass rate, which depends on how well your strategy fits the drawdown rules; how long a funded account survives, which decides how many payouts you collect; and cost, including resets and monthly fees. Discount codes help at the margin — current ones are on the offers page — but a better pass rate helps far more. Plug in your own figures with the challenge ROI calculator and the challenge pass rate calculator.

There is no reliable average. Firms are not required to publish how many traders are paid or how much, and figures on social media are self-selected. What can be said is the ceiling: payouts equal your profit times the split, capped by the firm’s payout limits and the account size. On a $100,000 account at a 90% split, each 1% of profit withdrawn is $900.

On one $100,000 account at a 90% split, $1,000 a day means about 1.1% profit every trading day — against a typical daily loss limit of a few percent, a return few strategies sustain. Traders who report income on that scale usually run several accounts at once, which multiplies drawdown risk as well. Treat daily-income targets as a reason to size up, which is the most reliable way to lose a funded account.

The traders who profit from prop firms tend to have a strategy with a known edge and shallow drawdowns, trade it with small risk per trade, choose rules that fit it, and treat fees as a business cost. Everyone else is, on average, funding their payouts. Why traders fail prop firm challenges covers the habits that separate the two.

The evaluation fee is the visible cost. The others are easy to leave out of the sum:

• Resets and repeat attempts, which usually outnumber passes.
• Monthly evaluation fees at futures firms, for each month an attempt takes.
• Activation fees on passing.
• Data and platform fees, where the firm passes them on.
• Payout fees and currency conversion on each withdrawal.
• Tax on payouts — see prop firm taxes.

FTMO — how an FTMO Account works technically