What Percentage of Traders Pass Prop Firm Challenges? Data vs Chance

About 1 in 6 prop firm challenge attempts passes at the two firms that report attempts and people for the same period: Topstep reports that 16.8% of the Trading Combines started in 2025 were completed, and Tradeify reports 17.2% of evaluations from August 2025 to July 2026. Counted per person rather than per attempt, the share is two to three times higher (51.8% of Topstep's 2025 participants passed at least once), because many people buy several attempts. A prop firm challenge (an evaluation, or Combine at Topstep) is a simulated account where you must hit a profit target before a loss limit to earn a funded account.

Key takeaway

Firms that publish their own numbers report that 8.89% (Earn2Trade) to 36.22% (Take Profit Trader) of evaluation attempts passed in 2025, with Topstep at 16.8%, while 19.97% to 51.8% of people pass at least once. Chaining pass and payout shares gives about 8 to 17 paid traders per 100 who start. Topstep's 16.8% per Combine sits below the 26.2% to 31.0% our simulation gives a zero-edge trader under its $50K rules before costs (at illustrative $250 to $1,000 daily swings), so one pass is weak evidence of skill.

FTMO, Apex and most other firms we checked publish no pass-rate disclosure. The fee model behind these numbers is covered in how futures prop firms work.

What percentage of prop firm challenge attempts pass?

Between 8.89% and 36.22% of attempts passed at the four futures firms we found that publish a per-attempt figure. The two that share one disclosure template sit at about 1 in 6. Topstep's 2025 trader performance disclosure states that "16.8% of all Trading Combines initiated were successfully completed and afforded the opportunity to advance to the Funded Level". Every Combine started is in the denominator, so an abandoned one counts as a failure.

The table lists each firm's latest first-party pass figure we found on its website as of October 2026.

Firm	Share that passed	Counted per	Period
Topstep	16.8% / 51.8%	Combine / person	2025
Tradeify	17.2% / 40.3%	evaluation / person	Aug 2025 to Jul 2026
My Funded Futures	19.97%	person	not stated
Earn2Trade	8.89%	subscription	2025
Take Profit Trader	36.22%	Trading Test	2025
TradeDay	36%	not defined	Jan to Jun 2026
Hola Prime	35%	customer who traded an evaluation	Nov 2024 to May 2025

Take Profit Trader's 36.22% is more than double the 16.86% that an earlier FAQ page gave for 2024, and the firm does not say why. Its homepage adds a different denominator: 20.37% of registered users for January to August 2023. Earn2Trade's note reads: "Percentage is based on subscriptions passed against new subscriptions." All of these are self-reported and no disclosure page we fetched mentions an audit, so verify a firm before you pay.

What percentage of traders get funded at least once?

Between 19.97% and 51.8% of people passed at least one evaluation at the firms that count per person, led by Topstep at 51.8% and Tradeify at 40.3%. That is why one page says half of traders pass and another says 1 in 6: Topstep's 51.8% and 16.8% describe the same 2025 traders, counted by person and by Combine.

The gap is repeat buying. Topstep's 51.8 passers per 100 participants, at 16.8% per Combine, imply at least 308 Combines, or 3.08 per participant. Independent 16.8% draws would need 3.97 attempts each to reach 51.8%. Tradeify publishes the count directly: "participants may purchase multiple evaluations and resets, and initiated a median of 3 each over the period".

Tradeify's own ratio, 40.3 / 17.2, gives a floor of 2.34, consistent with that median. One Topstep-specific guide says the average eventual passer buys roughly three Combines, but the 3.08 ratio averages over everyone who started, including the 48.2% who never passed.

Picture one Topstep disclosure read four ways, each over its own denominator: 16.8% of Combines passed, 51.8% of people passed at least once, 33.3% of funded-level people were paid, and 0.71% of Express Funded traders were called up to live. Tradeify's version reads 17.2%, 40.3%, 28.5% and 3.0%.

The same firm's pass rate reads as 17% or 52% depending on whether you count Combines or people. The ratio between the two is repeat buying, not skill.

What percentage of funded traders get a payout?

Between 28.5% and 39.2% of funded traders received at least one payout at the three futures firms we found that publish it per person: Topstep 33.3% in 2025, Tradeify 28.5% and My Funded Futures 39.2%. Multiplied by each firm's pass share, that makes 17.25, 11.49 and 7.82 paid traders per 100 starters.

Picture 100 Topstep starters as a funnel through four gates: 51.8 reach the Funded Level, about 17.25 are paid, and a thread of about 0.37 reaches a Live Funded Account. Tradeify's funnel runs 100, 40.3, 11.49 and 1.21, and My Funded Futures' runs 100, 19.95, 7.82 and 0.84.

Half of Topstep's starters reached a funded account in 2025, one in three of those was paid, and almost none reached live capital. Paid and live counts are approximate because a year's funded pool includes earlier passers.

Computed by Phoenix Technologies as 100 x share passed at least once x share of funded traders paid (or called up to live). The counts are approximate: a year's funded pool includes earlier passers, Topstep's 0.71% covers Express Funded traders only (0.37 assumes all were Express), and My Funded Futures' 19.95% is the share reaching its simulated Funded Stage.

Two thirds of Topstep's funded-level traders went unpaid in 2025; the six ways funded traders fail covers why. A payout share also says nothing about payout size, which what funded traders actually earn works through. Earn2Trade's figures do not chain: its 8.89% is per subscription, while its withdrawal shares (18.04% of Live and 18.20% of LiveSim accounts in 2025) are per account.

Passing rarely means trading real money: only 0.71% of Topstep's Express Funded traders moved to a live account, against 3.0% at Tradeify and 4.2% at My Funded Futures. Of Earn2Trade's passers, 5.23% traded Live and 94.77% LiveSim. My Funded Futures states: "All results occurred solely within a simulated environment and are not indicative of future results." What to check in your firm's terms covers the difference.

Which prop firm pass rate statistics can you trust?

Trust a figure only when you can read the firm's own sentence with its denominator and period; three of the most-quoted numbers (5 to 10% pass, 7% of passers paid, FTMO near 35%) fail that test. Below the seven firm disclosures sit vendor datasets, second-hand firm claims and figures with no traceable source.

The largest vendor dataset we could trace is FPFX Tech's, reported by Finance Magnates (Chmiel, 2024): more than 300,000 accounts of 100,000 traders at 10 unnamed firms, where "14% of traders passed the challenge and obtained a funded account" and 7% of all traders were paid. The arithmetic is loose: 14% passed times about 45% of them paid is 6.3%, not 7%. The period and firms are not public, and the headline says accounts where the body says traders.

Second-hand firm claims come without method. Figures from The Funded Trader's CEO work out to 1% to 2% of its clients paid (as calculated by Finance Magnates, March 2025), and PipFarm claimed that 41% of its clients reach the payout stage.

The table traces the most-repeated figures as far back as we could.

Claim	Traced to	What the evidence shows
5 to 10% pass, industry-wide	The Funded Trader, one forex firm, second-hand	Publishing futures firms: 8.89% to 36.22% per attempt, 19.97% to 51.8% per person
7% of passers get paid	An Apex-branded resources page: "Only 7% of traders who pass the evaluation ever receive a withdrawal."	FPFX's 7% is of all traders; publishing firms report 28.5% to 39.2% of funded traders paid
FTMO: Stage 1 near 35%, about 10% overall	Third-party pages citing a 2023 FTMO snapshot	FTMO's homepage and About page show none, and 32 to 37% times 50 to 60% is 16.0% to 22.2%, not 10%
Apex: 15 to 20% on the first attempt	An Apex-branded resources page, unsourced	The page's own phase table (1 to 5%, then 10 to 15% of those) implies 0.10% to 0.75%
71% of failures are daily drawdown breaches	hoc-trade.com (July 2026), a "widely cited industry breakdown" with no source named	OneFunded reports 78.7% at a firm where the daily limit fails the account; Topstep's Daily Loss Limit is optional and only pauses the session
1% keep their funded accounts	Lux Trading Firm (May 2022), via EarnForex	One firm; the original could not be retrieved

Rates also differ for reasons unrelated to difficulty: denominator, product mix, period and self-reporting. As of October 2026 we found no first-party pass-rate disclosure on the websites of FTMO (which lists 4.5M+ traders and $650M+ paid in rewards), Apex Trader Funding, FundedNext, Bulenox, Alpha Futures, Funded Futures Family, BluSky, Phidias, OneUp Trader, Top One Futures or The5ers.

Picture every figure on one 0 to 60% axis, coloured by grade: solid first-party bars per attempt and per person, a grey strip for vendor and second-hand figures such as ATFunded's about 6%, and empty stubs for FTMO, Apex and FundedNext.

Per-person bars sit two to three times above the per-attempt bars from the same firms. The most-quoted numbers come from the grey strip or from no source at all.

Is the prop firm pass rate better than pure chance?

Not at Topstep, the firm we modelled. Its 16.8% per Combine is below the 26.2% to 31.0% that a trader with zero edge (an average trade that earns nothing) passes under its $50K rules before costs, in our simulation. It is also below the 19.2% to 21.6% for its $100K Combine.

Topstep's help center, as of October 2026, gives the $50K Combine a $3,000 profit target and a $2,000 Maximum Loss Limit, the floor that ends the Combine: "The MLL is a trailing limit. It rises as your end-of-day balance grows, but never moves down." It locks at the starting balance and counts open losses in real time; check the current rules before buying.

With a fixed floor, the zero-edge pass chance is buffer / (target + buffer), the gambler's ruin result derived in the zero-edge evaluation math, which is why the target-to-drawdown ratio sets the baseline. A trailing floor needs a simulation. The table sets both against the observed 16.8%.

Floor rule	Daily P&L swing	$50K: $3,000 target, $2,000 limit	Gap to 16.8%	Target twice the limit ($6,000 / $3,000)	Gap to 16.8%
Fixed, never moves	any	40.0%	23.2 pts	33.3%	16.5 pts
Trails every tick	any	24.5%	7.7 pts	18.4%	1.6 pts
Trails end of day (Topstep)	$250	26.2%	9.4 pts	19.2%	2.4 pts
Trails end of day (Topstep)	$500	27.9%	11.1 pts	20.0%	3.2 pts
Trails end of day (Topstep)	$1,000	31.0%	14.2 pts	21.6%	4.8 pts

Computed by Phoenix Technologies: fixed and tick rows by closed form (D / (D + T); e^-1 x D / T), end-of-day rows by seeded Monte Carlo of 200,000 zero-edge random walks in $50 steps (150,000 for the larger size), no costs, standard error about 0.1 point. Daily swings (the standard deviation of daily P&L) are illustrative; the $6,000 target for the $100K Combine is from Topstep's consistency article as of October 2026.

Step by step for the $50K Combine:

Fixed floor: $2,000 / ($2,000 + $3,000) = 40.0%.
Tick-by-tick trail: the high must first climb $2,000 without a $2,000 drawdown (e^-1 = 36.8%). Then, with the floor locked at the start, the balance must reach +$3,000 before falling back ($2,000 / $3,000). Together: 36.8% x 2/3 = 24.5%.
Topstep's end-of-day trail ignores intraday highs, so it is gentler: 26.2% at an illustrative $250 daily swing, 27.9% at $500, 31.0% at $1,000.
Observed: 16.8% of all 2025 Combines, 9.4 to 14.2 points below the $50K baseline and 2.4 to 4.8 points below the $100K baseline. Topstep does not publish its size mix, so the true gap lies somewhere between about 2 and 14 points.

Costs, rule breaches and abandoned attempts can explain the shortfall: they count as failures in the 16.8% but not in the model, and Topstep does not publish how its failures split. Topstep's consistency target (best day at or below 55% of the profit target) can raise the target, so the true zero-edge baseline sits somewhat lower than the table shows.

Picture the table's rows as bars on one axis, with the observed 16.8% below every zero-edge bar and the gap labelled costs, consistency target, rule breaches and abandoned attempts.

A trader with no edge would pass more often than the average Topstep attempt did in 2025. Costs, rule breaches and quitting can explain the shortfall, and with chance this high a single pass says little about skill.

None of this shows an evaluation is rigged. Studies find few retail day traders with a persistent edge after costs (see the day trader loss-rate studies). Low pass rates fit the fee model laid out in how prop firms make money.

Do one-step challenges have a higher pass rate than two-step?

In the only dataset we found that splits them, yes, by about 1.7 to 1.9 times, though two reports of the same vendor data disagree on the levels. For Swiset's clients from August 2024 to April 2025, Finance Magnates reported 20.3% funded in one-phase tests and 11.8% in two-phase (nearly 10,000 traders). FinanceFeeds reported 17.5% and 9.1% (9,876 users).

The circulating claim that one-step challenges are 72% more likely to pass is 20.3 / 11.8 = 1.72; the second pair gives 1.92. The sample leans to Latin America (Colombia was almost 15% of clients), and we could not find the report itself. The same coverage gives 1.6 challenges per user, 68% of users buying just one, and about six days to funding for successful traders.

Two steps multiply: ATFunded's June 2025 figures, 22.6% reaching Phase 2 and 26.9% of those funded, give 6.08% overall for one month at one firm. Cost per funded account by format is compared in 1-step vs 2-step evaluations.

How many attempts does it take to pass a prop firm challenge?

At 16.8% per attempt, a first pass takes 5.95 attempts on average (1 / 0.168, the mean of a geometric distribution), 3.77 for an even chance and 12.52 for a 90% chance. Those numbers describe the average attempt, not your next one.

The chance of at least one pass in n independent attempts is 1 - 0.832^n: 16.80%, 30.78%, 42.41%, 52.08% and 60.13% for one to five attempts. Picture those five values as rungs of a ladder with Topstep's 51.8% per-person line across it. The line meets the ladder at 3.97 attempts, while the disclosure itself implies at least 3.08 Combines per participant.

About four average attempts turn a 16.8% pass rate into roughly half of people passing. One trader's attempts are not independent, so the ladder describes the population, not your next try.

One trader's attempts are not fresh draws: the same edge, sizing and habits carry from one Combine to the next. Copying the same trades into several evaluations at once does not buy independent tickets either. Identical trades under identical rules pass or fail together.

What should you do with these numbers before you buy a challenge?

Budget from the firm's own disclosure, judge yourself against chance rather than other buyers, and plan for the payout stage rather than the pass:

If the firm publishes no pass rate, budget for about 1 pass in 6 attempts, the Topstep and Tradeify rate, not a figure from a statistics page.
If your budget covers three attempts or fewer, the average buyer is more likely to fail them all than to pass once (42.41% for at least one pass in three). Expected fees per pass are the fee divided by the pass rate, weighed against your own capital in the prop firm vs own money break-even.
If your passes come no more often than the zero-edge baseline for the account (26.2% to 31.0% on Topstep's $50K Combine), treat a pass as luck and size the funded account as if your edge were unproven.
If you pass, plan for the payout stage, where about 1 in 3 of Topstep's funded-level traders were paid in 2025. Your own risk of ruin, from your trade statistics, is a better guide than any firm average.
If a statistic has no firm sentence, denominator or period behind it, leave it out of the decision.

Go deeper

Frequently asked questions

Does FTMO publish its pass rate?

No. As of October 2026, FTMO's homepage and About page show totals such as 4.5M+ customers and $650M+ paid in rewards, but no pass or payout percentage. Any FTMO pass rate you see comes from third parties, and the common version (Stage 1 near 35%, about 10% overall) does not multiply out: 32 to 37% times 50 to 60% is 16.0% to 22.2%.

Does Apex Trader Funding publish its pass rate?

Not as a first-party disclosure. As of October 2026 we found no measured pass rate published by Apex Trader Funding. An Apex-branded resources page says 15 to 20% pass on the first attempt without naming a source, and the same page's phase table (1 to 5%, then 10 to 15% of those) implies 0.10% to 0.75%.

Are prop firm pass rates independently audited?

Not that any firm says. None of the disclosure pages we fetched mentions an audit, so every figure is self-reported. Topstep notes that its statistics reflect both simulated and live trading environments, and My Funded Futures states that all its results occurred in a simulated environment.

How many prop firm challenges does the average trader buy?

Tradeify, the only firm we found that publishes it, reports a median of 3 evaluations per participant for August 2025 to July 2026. Topstep's 2025 figures imply at least 3.08 Combines per participant on average. Swiset's vendor data was lower, at 1.6 challenges per user with 68% buying just one, from a sample leaning to Latin America.

Does hitting Topstep's daily loss limit fail the Combine?

No. Topstep's help center says the Daily Loss Limit is optional in the Trading Combine, and hitting it stops trading for the rest of that session rather than failing the account. The Combine fails at the Maximum Loss Limit, $2,000 on the $50K account as of October 2026.

Do forex prop firms have lower pass rates than futures prop firms?

We found no like-for-like data. Forex figures are mostly second-hand or vendor data, such as The Funded Trader's 5 to 10% and ATFunded's about 6% for one month (FPFX's 14% covers 10 unnamed firms), while futures firms publish first-party rates of 8.89% to 36.22% per attempt. Different denominators and periods make any ranking unreliable.

Does a higher published pass rate mean an easier prop firm?

Not on its own. In the published data a firm's per-person rate runs two to three times its per-attempt rate (51.8% against 16.8% at Topstep), and periods and product mixes differ between firms. Compare like with like, then compare the target-to-loss-limit ratio, which sets the pass rate a trader with no edge would reach.

How long does it take to pass a prop firm challenge?

We found no futures firm that publishes a time to pass. Swiset's vendor data, as reported in June 2025, put successful traders at about six days to funding, from a sample leaning to Latin America. Treat it as one vendor's average, not a plan.