Prop firm questions, answered from the data
Every answer below is counted from the terms each firm publishes on its own site, at the moment this page was built. That means the figures change when the firms change them, and it means an answer will sometimes be "the firm doesn't publish that" — which is itself the answer worth having.
Where does TradeMoneta's prop firm data come from?
Every figure is read off the firm's own pricing, rules or help-centre pages while logged out, dated, and in most cases backed by a screenshot taken at the moment we read it. We track 25 firms; 22 were re-checked within the last 45 days and show a Verified badge, the rest say Provisional until someone re-reads them. There is no third-party API for prop-firm terms, no scraping of other comparison sites, and no firm can pay to appear, to rank higher, or to have a figure changed.
How the PFM Score is calculated →Which prop firm has the cheapest evaluation?
Of the firms we track, Moneta Funded lists the cheapest entry at $30 for its smallest account, though we have not re-verified that price inside our 45-day window — the cheapest we have confirmed recently is FundingPips at $33. Either way that is the entry price, not the cost of getting funded: an evaluation fee can be followed by a monthly rebill, an activation fee on passing, and a reset fee if you fail. The cheapest entry and the cheapest path to a first payout are usually different firms.
Cheapest evaluations, ranked →Which prop firms have no activation fee?
7 firms state on their own pages that there is no fee to activate a funded account after passing: Alpha Futures, Earn2Trade, Funded Trading Plus, Lucid Trading, MyFundedFutures, Tradeify and Uprofit. We only count a firm here when it publishes that zero — silence is not the same as free. Separately, 3 firms (Apex Trader Funding, Bulenox and Leeloo Trading) charge an activation fee whose amount they never print, which is why their month-one total on our pages reads "at least".
Firms with no activation fee →Which prop firms charge monthly and which are a one-time fee?
Among the 23 firms whose pricing pages we have read, 16 publish a one-time fee with no recurring charge and 6 bill monthly (Alpha Futures, Earn2Trade, Elite Trader Funding, TakeProfit Trader, Topstep and Uprofit). The distinction decides what a slow pass costs you: a monthly evaluation charges again every month you take, while a one-time fee usually comes with an expiry date instead. Several firms moved from monthly to one-time during 2026, so check the date on any comparison you read, including ours.
One-time fee firms, ranked →How long does it actually take to get a first payout?
Longer than the payout speed firms advertise, which describes only the wire at the end. Counting the minimum days to pass the evaluation, the minimum days on the funded account and the processing time, the 18 firms that publish enough of their rules total between 2 and 26 trading days (FundedNext is the longest). Only 6 publish every step, so for the rest the total is a floor: the real wait can only be longer, never shorter.
Every firm's fees and payout path →Which prop firm pays out the fastest?
11 firms advertise the quickest processing at 1 day: AquaFunded, Audacity Capital, BrightFunded, FTMO, FundedNext, FunderPro, Hantec Trader, Lucid Trading, MyFundedFutures, TakeProfit Trader and Uprofit. Treat that as the last step rather than the whole wait — the same firms differ by days or weeks in how long they make you trade before a first request is allowed, and some require a profit buffer on top. Our fastest-payouts ranking shows the advertised speed next to the minimum path so the two are never confused.
Fastest payouts, ranked →Which prop firm has the highest profit split?
13 firms publish a 90% split: Alpha Futures, Apex Trader Funding, AquaFunded, Audacity Capital, Bulenox, FTMO, FundedNext, Leeloo Trading, Lucid Trading, MyFundedFutures, Topstep, Tradeify and Uprofit. A split is a ceiling on the share you keep, not a promise about the amount: payout caps, consistency rules and profit buffers decide how much is withdrawable in the first place, and at some firms the headline percentage is a paid add-on rather than the default. Two firms at the same percentage can pay very differently on the same trading.
Highest profit splits, ranked →Which prop firms use a static drawdown instead of a trailing one?
8 use static, 11 use end-of-day and 6 use trailing, out of 25 firms tracked. A static maximum loss is drawn once from the starting balance and never moves, so giving back an open profit costs you nothing extra. A trailing limit follows your peak — intraday in the harshest version, on the closing balance in the gentler one — which is how a winning trade that reverses can fail an account. It is the single rule most worth checking before you pay.
Static drawdown firms, ranked →Which prop firms allow news trading, weekend holding and EAs?
Of 25 firms tracked, 21 allow trading through scheduled news, 13 allow positions to be held over the weekend and 20 allow expert advisors or bots. We record the rule that applies once you are funded, not the looser one that applies during the evaluation, because that is the stage where a breach costs you a payout. Where a firm sells the permission as a paid add-on, we count it as not allowed by default.
Firms that allow news trading →Do prop firms hide fees, and which ones?
Some do, and it is visible in what their pricing pages omit rather than in what they say. 3 firms charge a fee before a first payout whose amount they do not publish: Apex Trader Funding, Bulenox and Leeloo Trading. We mark that as "Not disclosed" — a finding about the firm — and keep it separate from "Not verified", which means we have not checked yet and is a gap of ours. Both make a total a floor rather than a figure.
What each firm publishes, and what it doesn't →Which trading platforms do prop firms support?
Across the firms we track the most common front ends are MetaTrader 5 at 12, Tradovate at 11, TradingView at 11 and cTrader at 9. Futures firms cluster on NinjaTrader, Tradovate and TradingView; forex firms on MetaTrader 5, cTrader and the newer web platforms. The platform decides your order types, your charting and — on futures — your data feed and per-side commissions, and switching mid-evaluation usually means starting over, so it is worth filtering on before price.
Rankings by platform →What does it cost to get funded on a 50K account?
Across the firms whose fees are fully published for a $50K account, month one — the entry fee plus any activation fee — runs from 129 to 384 US dollars. We deliberately do not multiply a monthly fee by a guessed number of months, because how long a trader takes to pass is unknowable and an average would be a number we made up. Where a fee exists but is unpublished, the total is shown as "at least".
The full cost table →Why are there no star ratings or trader reviews on this site?
Because a reader cannot check them. A pricing screenshot is reproducible — open the firm's page and look — but a redacted payout receipt from an anonymous trader is unfalsifiable, so an honest submission and an invented one look identical on screen. Who submits is self-selected too: promoters, often affiliates on commission, and the burned, never the quiet majority. So we publish no star rating, no review count and no trader sentiment in the score, permanently; documented experience goes in our sourced news feed instead.
What the score does and does not include →How current is this data?
The newest verification in the dataset is Sep 14, 2026, and 22 of 25 firms sit inside our 45-day freshness window. Each firm page prints the date its inputs were last read and links the screenshot taken that day, so a figure can be checked against what the firm actually published rather than taken on trust. Prop-firm terms change often — several prices and two whole pricing models changed in the six weeks before Sep 14, 2026 — so always confirm on the firm's own site before you buy.
Every firm, with its verification date →Still deciding?
The three things worth reading before you pay are what a funded account actually is, how the drawdown model behaves, and which rules void a payout. They decide more outcomes than the price does.