How to Pass a Prop Firm Challenge: What 22.4 Million Simulated Challenges Say About Risk, Drawdown and Fees

00The short answer

• Your edge decides almost everything. Under the same two-phase rules and the same risk (0.5% a trade), a break-even trader passed both phases 30.4% of the time, one with a small edge 65.1%, one with a good edge 96.5%, and one whose results are slightly negative after costs only 7.7%. No sizing trick comes close to that difference.
• If you have an edge, risk less. On futures-style rules the trader with a good edge passed 87.0% of challenges at 0.25% risk a trade and only 31.3% at 2%. Without an edge, the size of the bet barely mattered: about 26% at any risk up to 1%.
• Size your trades from the daily loss limit. When a full day of losing trades can reach the daily limit, that limit ends most attempts: 90.4% of them in our strict one-phase case at 1% risk with three trades a day.
• Trailing drawdowns, consistency rules and time limits all cost the most when you bet big, and a time limit is the one rule that pushes you to bet bigger.
• Passing is not getting paid. A break-even trader who passed 27.0% of futures-style challenges reached a first payout in only 12.3% of attempts. Published industry figures look much the same.

01Who we are, and why you can check these numbers

RIP Backtest is an independent site run by one retail futures trader. We test the trading strategies, indicators and claims that people share, under one fixed protocol: the rules are written down and dated before any data is run, costs are charged on every trade, every result is compared with random entries, and every version we try is reported, including the ones that fail. So far that is 404 strategy variants in 59 tests, and 2 of them have passed every gate. Most strategies get buried here, and we publish the burial together with the code and the trade logs.

We are not a prop firm and we have nothing to sell you. We do not sell challenges, courses, signals or bots. There are no affiliate links on this site, no firm pays us, and we do not rank or review firms. That matters for an article like this one, because most pages that rank for “how to pass a prop firm challenge” are written by firms that sell challenges, by platforms that sell to those firms, or by sites that are paid when you buy one. None of that makes their tips wrong. It does mean nobody has much reason to show you the parts of the arithmetic that make a challenge look less attractive. We do.

Every number in this article comes from a simulation whose scenarios we fixed in writing before running it. The specification, the code, a self-test against a textbook formula and an independent second implementation, and the complete results are linked at the end. You can rerun all of it, or change the rules to match the firm you are looking at in our free prop firm simulator. Read more about the site and our testing protocol.

02How a prop firm challenge works

A prop firm challenge (also called an evaluation or a combine) is a paid test on a simulated or demo account. You pay a fee, trade under a set of rules, and if you reach a profit target without breaking any loss rule, you get a “funded” account in which part of your profits can be paid out to you. Firms combine the same few building blocks in different ways, and they change them often, so always read the current rules of the firm you are considering. These are the building blocks:

• Profit target. The profit you must reach, usually 6% to 10% of the account. It is usually checked on closed trades, and often only at the end of a trading day.
• Maximum loss (drawdown). The lowest your account may go. A static limit stays where it starts: on a $100,000 account with a 10% limit, the floor is $90,000 for the whole challenge. A trailing limit follows your highest balance upward: make $1,000 and the floor rises by $1,000. Most trailing limits stop rising once the floor reaches the starting balance. End-of-day trailing moves the floor only on the closing balance of each day; intraday trailing moves it with every new high, so a winning trade that comes back can end the challenge.
• Daily loss limit. A maximum loss within one day, usually measured from the balance at the start of the day. Breaking it ends the challenge even if the overall limit is far away.
• Minimum trading days. You must trade on a minimum number of days before a pass counts, often 4 or 5.
• Time limit. Some challenges must be completed within 30 or 60 days; many now have no limit.
• Consistency rule. Some firms do not let one day carry the result: the best single day must be at most a set share of the total profit, often 30% to 50%. If it is larger, you usually do not fail; you must keep trading until the share falls below the line.
• One or two phases. A two-phase challenge asks you to pass a second, usually easier, target after the first, under the same loss rules.
• The funded account. After passing, the same kind of loss rules apply in the funded account, and a payout usually requires a minimum profit and a minimum number of trading days. Lose the account and the process starts again, with a new fee.
• Fees and resets. You pay per attempt; many firms sell resets or discounted retries. The fee is the only certain cost of a challenge.

03What the industry says about pass rates

Few firms publish their pass rates, and the figures in circulation are either self-reported or secondhand. Two are worth knowing, because they come from large datasets and say what they count:

• FPFX Tech, a software provider to prop firms, analysed more than 300,000 accounts belonging to 100,000 traders at 10 firms. According to its CEO, 14% of traders passed the challenge and got a funded account, and about 45% of those received a payout: about 7% of all traders (Finance Magnates, 18 September 2024).
• Topstep publishes its own figures for 2025: 16.8% of the Trading Combines started were completed, 51.8% of the individual participants passed at least one Combine, and 33.3% of the participants at the funded level received a payout. Topstep notes that the figures mix simulated and live trading and are not indicative of future results (Topstep, 2025 trader performance statistics).

The two counts differ in a way that matters. A rate per attempt (16.8% of Combines) is much lower than a rate per person (51.8% passed at least once), because many people buy several attempts until one passes. Both are true at once: a single attempt usually fails, and persistent buyers usually pass eventually. Whether they then get paid is a separate question, and the figures above answer it the same way: roughly a third to a half of those who pass reach a payout.

Those are the outcomes of real traders under real rules. They cannot tell you why traders fail, or what would have happened with a different risk per trade. A simulation can, because in a simulation we decide the trader's edge and change one rule at a time.

04How we simulated it

We wrote down every scenario before running anything (pc_spec.md, frozen 14 October 2026). The rules are generic types, not copies of any firm:

• Four traders. Every trade either wins 1.5 times the amount risked or loses it, and the four traders differ only in how often they win: 38% (a slightly negative result after costs, −0.05 R a trade), 40% (break-even: exactly zero after costs), 42% (a small edge, +0.05 R) and 46% (a good edge, +0.15 R). R is the amount risked on a trade. These results are net of costs, so “break-even” means exactly zero after commissions and slippage, which is better than most traders manage.
• Four sizes: 0.25%, 0.5%, 1% and 2% of the starting balance risked on every trade, the same all the way through. Three trades a day, every trading day, for up to a year (260 trading days).
• The funded stage: after a pass, a new funded account under the same loss rules; the first payout comes when it reaches half the challenge target in profit, with at least 5 trading days.
• 22.4 million simulated challenges: 100,000 for each of 224 combinations, with fixed random seeds.
• Checks before any result: the simulator matches the textbook gambler's-ruin formula, reproduces the published numbers of our earlier prop firm post exactly, handles the consistency rule correctly on hand-made sequences, and agrees with a second implementation written separately (self-test result).

05Finding 1: your edge decides the result

Same rules, same risk (0.5% of the account a trade), four traders:

The gap between the traders is far larger than anything a change of risk or rules produces in this study. A trader who is slightly negative after costs, which is where many traders end up once commissions and slippage are counted, needs about 13 attempts on average to pass the two-phase challenge once; a trader with a good edge passes almost every time. This is the uncomfortable centre of the whole subject: a challenge does not create an edge, it measures one, noisily. If you do not know whether you have an edge, everything below is about how to lose less money while you find out.

How do you know? Not from a few good weeks. Our tests of popular strategies show how rarely an idea survives costs and a fair comparison with chance: 2 of 404 variants so far (see what all our tests found). The honest route is a backtest with costs and rules fixed in advance, followed by a forward test on a demo account with the same rules, before you pay for a challenge. If you cannot show a positive result after costs over at least a few hundred trades, plan as if you were the break-even trader in these tables, or worse.

06Finding 2: risk less if you have an edge, and know why

U1 rules: $50,000, $3,000 target, $2,000 trailing at the end of the day. Probability of passing, 100,000 simulated challenges per point.

Three patterns, each with a simple reason:

• With an edge, smaller is better. An edge shows up over many trades. Small bets give it the time to show before a losing streak reaches the loss limit; big bets let one bad streak end the challenge first. The good-edge trader passed U1 87.0% of the time at 0.25% and 31.3% at 2%.
• Without an edge, size hardly matters (U1: 25.8%, 27.0%, 25.9%, 18.0%). A break-even trader is a random walk between the floor and the target, and the odds depend mostly on how far each is, not on the step size. Small bets only make it slower: on the F1 rules at 0.25%, 52.8% of the no-edge challenges were still running after a year.
• With a negative edge, small bets make it worse. More trades give the losing edge more time to work. The slightly negative trader passed F1 phase 1 4.2% of the time at 0.25% and 31.3% at 1%. This is why a challenge can look like it rewards aggressive trading: for traders without an edge, a few big bets are the best lottery ticket. It is still a lottery ticket.

So the common advice to “risk 0.5% to 1%” is right for some traders and pointless for others. If you have a measured edge, risk at the small end and accept that passing takes longer (the median pass came after 42 trading days at 0.25% and 15 at 0.5% for the good-edge trader on U1). If you do not, no risk level turns a challenge into a good bet.

07Finding 3: the daily loss limit decides how big you can bet

In the strict one-phase rules (F2: 3% daily limit, 6% trailing maximum loss), the break-even trader, three trades a day:

At 1% risk, three losing trades in one day add up to exactly the daily limit, and three losses in a row happen often: with a 40% win rate, about 22% of days have three losing trades. The pass rate drops from 23.7% at 0.5% to 8.9% at 1%, and 90.4% of the attempts end on the daily limit. The same happens on the F1 rules at 2% risk, where three losses (6%) exceed the 5% daily limit: 60.1% of even the good-edge trader's attempts end there.

The rule of thumb that follows: risk per trade × the most trades you take in a day must stay well below the daily limit, ideally at half of it. With a 3% daily limit and three trades a day, that is 0.5% a trade, not 1%. A real trader would stop after two losses, which helps, but a rule that depends on you stopping at the right moment on a bad day is a weaker rule than a size that cannot reach the limit.

08Finding 4: trailing drawdowns cost you, intraday trailing a little more

A trailing limit moves the floor up behind your profits, so the room you have left shrinks just when you start to win. Compare the futures-style rules with the floor trailing on the closing balance of each day (U1) and with every new closed-trade high (U2):

Intraday trailing was worse in every one of the 16 combinations, by a few points, and the gap grows with the size of the bet. The bigger difference comes from the rules as a whole: the strict F2 rules (6% trailing, a 3% daily limit) passed the no-edge trader 23.7% of the time at 0.5% risk, the F1 rules (10% static, a 5% daily limit) 47.2%. Before you compare fees, compare the distance from the target to the floor: a $3,000 target over a $2,000 trailing limit is a harder bet than a 10% target over a 10% static one, whatever the price.

Our simulation checks the floor on closed trades. Firms that trail or check on open profit and loss are stricter still, because a trade that goes your way and comes back moves the floor without ever closing.

09Finding 5: a consistency rule punishes big bets, not small ones

With a 40% consistency rule, a pass counts only if the best day is at most 40% of the total profit; otherwise the challenge goes on until it is, or until a loss limit is hit:

At 0.25% and 0.5% risk the rule changed nothing: no pass was even delayed, because no single day was big enough. At 1% and 2% it cut the pass rate by 10% to 41%, because a few large winning days carry the result, and the extra days of trading needed to dilute them give the loss limit another chance. A consistency rule is an argument for small, even sizing; if it bites you, your size was the problem.

10Finding 6: a time limit pushes you to bet bigger

The same F1 phase 1 rules with and without a 30-trading-day limit:

With 30 days and three trades a day, a small bet rarely reaches a 10% target: at 0.25% risk even the good-edge trader passed 1.8% of the time, and the time ran out in 98.2% of attempts. The best size moved up to 1% (74.0%). A time limit is the one rule in this study that rewards bigger bets, which also makes it the rule that rewards luck most. If you can choose, choose no time limit.

11Finding 7: passing is not getting paid

After a pass, the funded account has the same loss rules. U1 rules at 0.5% risk, with the first payout at half the challenge target ($1,500 of profit):

The fee lines use a simple formula you can apply to any firm: on average you need 1 ÷ (pass probability) attempts to pass once, so the fees per pass are the fee divided by the pass probability; to reach a first payout, divide by the probability of passing and getting paid. A break-even trader paying $100 an attempt spends about $370 in fees per pass and about $813 per account that reaches a first payout, before any payout split. Resets, discounts and refunds change the fee, not the probabilities.

Now compare with the industry figures in section 03. FPFX Tech's data had 14% passing and about 7% paid; Topstep reports 16.8% of Combines completed and a third of funded participants paid. Our slightly negative trader on futures-style rules at 0.5% risk passed 16.6% and reached a first payout in 5.7% of attempts. That does not prove that real traders have a negative edge: the people, the rules and the counting differ. It does show that the published outcomes are about what you would expect if most attempts were made without an edge after costs.

12Five things you will read, checked against the numbers

• “Risk 1% per trade.” It depends on the daily limit and on your edge. Under a 3% daily limit with three trades a day, 1% risk took the no-edge trader from 23.7% at 0.5% down to 8.9%, and with an edge the smallest size we tried was the best in every rule set without a time limit.
• “Most traders fail because of psychology.” Some do, but discipline alone does not pass a challenge. Our simulated trader never tilts, never breaks a rule and never changes size, and when it only breaks even it still failed on the maximum loss in 73.0% of futures-style attempts at 0.5% risk. Psychology decides whether you can trade an edge; it cannot replace one.
• “Trade big and pass fast.” For a trader with an edge, big bets cut the odds: the good-edge trader passed U1 87.0% of the time at 0.25% risk and 31.3% at 2%. For a trader without one, big bets are the better lottery ticket, and still a losing one: 18.0% at 2%.
• “A trailing drawdown is about the same as a static one.” It is not. In our earlier simulation of the same $50,000 rules, a break-even coin-flipper passed 28.2% of the time with a static limit and 19.7% with an end-of-day trailing one (Prop Firm Challenge Pass Rate), and intraday trailing was lower still.
• “Once you are funded, you get paid.” Only if you keep the account long enough to reach the payout threshold under the same loss rules. The no-edge trader who passed U1 at 0.5% risk reached a first payout 45.5% of the time; the industry figures in section 03 say a third to a half.

13A plan that follows from the numbers

1. Measure your edge before you pay. Backtest your rules with costs and fixed parameters, then trade them on a demo account under the challenge's rules for at least a few hundred trades. If the result after costs is not clearly positive, a challenge is a lottery ticket: price it like one.
2. Pick rules, not just a price. Prefer a static maximum loss to a trailing one, end-of-day trailing to intraday trailing, no time limit to a time limit, and a wide floor relative to the target.
3. Size from the daily limit. Risk per trade times your maximum trades in a day should be at most half the daily limit.
4. With an edge, size small. 0.25% of the account per trade gave the good-edge trader its best pass rate in every rule set without a time limit, at the cost of more days.
5. Keep the size fixed. Raising the size near the target or after losses turns a measured edge back into a coin flip.
6. Respect the consistency rule by sizing, not by stopping. At 0.25% and 0.5% risk it never delayed a pass in our simulation; at 1% and 2% it did.
7. Set your own stop for the day below the firm's limit, for example after two losses, and never be in a position where one more trade can break a rule.
8. Count the funded stage in the cost. Use the payout probability, not the pass probability, when you work out what a funded account costs you.
9. Read the fine print: whether limits are checked on closed or open profit, when the daily limit resets, what counts as a trading day, news and weekend rules, and how payouts are approved.
10. Run your own numbers. Put your firm's rules and your measured win rate and payoff into the simulator before you buy.

14What these simulations cannot tell you

• Real trades are not fixed bets. Every simulated trade wins 1.5 R or loses 1 R, three times a day; real results vary in size, cluster in streaks, and depend on the market.
• Behaviour is left out. The simulated trader never revenge-trades, never sizes up near the target and never stops early after a bad morning. Real traders do all three, which is a large part of why real pass rates are what they are.
• Each firm's fine print. We model rule types on closed trades. Firms that check open profit, apply rules to equity, add news restrictions or change rules mid-challenge are not modelled.
• The firm itself. Payout approval, payout splits, scaling plans and the firm's own finances are outside this study.
• Your edge. The four traders are assumptions. The study shows what an edge of a given size does under given rules; it cannot tell you what yours is.

This is educational content, not financial advice, and not a recommendation to buy or avoid any challenge.

FAQCommon questions

How do you pass a prop firm challenge?

Have a measured edge after costs, risk a small fixed share of the account per trade, keep your risk times your daily trades well below the daily loss limit, and prefer static or end-of-day drawdowns and no time limit. In our simulation a trader with a good edge passed futures-style challenges 87.0% of the time at 0.25% risk a trade and 31.3% at 2%.

What percentage of traders pass prop firm challenges?

Few firms publish it. FPFX Tech, which supplies software to prop firms, reported that 14% of 100,000 traders at 10 firms passed and about 7% of all traders received a payout (Finance Magnates, September 2024). Topstep reports that 16.8% of the Trading Combines started in 2025 were completed, and that 51.8% of participants passed at least one, because many buy several attempts.

How much should I risk per trade on a prop firm challenge?

If you have a measured edge, little: 0.25% of the account gave the good-edge trader its best pass rate in every rule set without a time limit. In all cases keep risk per trade times your maximum trades a day well below the daily loss limit: with a 3% daily limit and three trades a day, 1% risk sent 90.4% of our no-edge attempts out on the daily limit.

Is a trailing drawdown harder than a static drawdown?

Yes. On the same $50,000 rules a break-even coin-flipper passed 28.2% of the time with a static limit and 19.7% with an end-of-day trailing one, and intraday trailing was lower still in every combination we tried.

What is a consistency rule in a prop firm challenge?

A rule that the best single day may be at most a set share of the total profit, often 30% to 50%. With a 40% rule, our simulated pass rates did not change at 0.25% or 0.5% risk a trade, and fell at 1% and 2%, where a few big days carry the result.

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

On average 1 divided by your pass probability. In our two-phase example at 0.5% risk, a break-even trader needed about 3.3 attempts per pass and a slightly negative trader about 13.

Can you pass a prop firm challenge without an edge?

Yes, by luck: a break-even trader passed about 27.0% of futures-style challenges in our simulation. Getting paid is harder: the same trader reached a first payout in 12.3% of attempts.

Is a prop firm challenge worth it?

It depends on your measured edge and the fee. Divide the fee by your probability of passing and reaching a payout to get the cost per paid account: for a break-even trader at $100 an attempt, about $813 in our futures-style example. Our free simulator runs the same arithmetic on your own rules.

15Check our arithmetic

Code provenance: our own code. The rules are generic types described in this article, not any firm's rules.

16Corrections

None since publication.

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