2026 Prop Firm Transparency Report Shows Wide Gap Between Per-Attempt and Per-Trader Pass Rates

A newly compiled 2026 transparency review of retail forex and futures proprietary trading firms finds that the widely repeated claim that “90% of prop traders fail” conflates single challenge attempts with individual traders. While 64% to 91% of individual evaluation attempts fail, repeat attempts lift per-person funding rates above 40% at two of the largest futures prop firms that disclose both metrics.

The report, compiled by researcher Ilias Ism and in il.ly’s published prop firm pass-rate data, aggregates 12 firm-level disclosure rows alongside multi-firm datasets from back-office technology providers FPFX Tech and Swiset. Every figure was verified against public firm disclosures, help-center disclaimers, corporate filings, and archived web snapshots as of October 2026.

Because no financial regulator requires simulated prop trading firms to disclose evaluation outcomes, reporting standards vary sharply across the industry. Several major forex and futures brands publish lifetime payout totals without stating what share of challengers ever reach a withdrawal.

Per-Attempt vs. Per-Trader Pass Rates

The largest source of confusion for retail forex and futures traders is the denominator each firm chooses to report. Counting individual evaluation attempts produces a much lower figure than counting unique customers who pass after one or more resets.

At Topstep, 16.8% of Trading Combines started in 2025 were passed, yet 51.8% of the people who entered at least one Combine that year earned a funded account. Tradeify shows a similar split between August 2025 and July 2026, reporting a 17.2% pass rate across evaluation accounts started versus 40.3% across individual participants, with traders initiating a median of three evaluations over the period.

Funded Payout Shares and Live Account Call-Ups

Passing an evaluation places a trader into a simulated funded account, where trailing drawdowns, daily loss limits, and consistency rules eliminate roughly two-thirds of funded traders before their first withdrawal. Only four firms publish both funded payout percentages and live brokerage call-up rates.

Combining per-person funding rates with funded payout shares gives an approximate full-funnel view of trader outcomes. At Topstep in 2025, roughly 17.2% of people who started an evaluation — about one in six — collected at least one payout, up from roughly one in eight in 2024. At Tradeify, the combined figure is roughly 11.5%, or about one in nine participants.

Even at the funded payout stage, virtually all activity remains on simulated servers. In 2025, less than 1% of Topstep Express traders and 3% to 5% of funded traders at comparable futures firms transitioned to live brokerage capital.

Multi-Firm Back-Office Benchmarks and Missing Disclosures

Aggregated data from prop-firm technology vendors reinforces the cost of multi-step evaluations for forex and CFD traders:

• Swiset (nearly 10,000 traders, Aug 2024 – Apr 2025): 20.3% of traders reached funded status on one-phase challenges, compared with 11.8% on two-phase challenges (an 88.2% failure rate). Traders bought an average of 1.6 challenges, and successful challengers passed in roughly six days.
• FPFX Tech (300,000+ accounts across 10 firms): 12% to 14% of accounts passed evaluations across its two published releases, while 7% to 8% of total accounts reached a payout, withdrawing an average of 4% of their account size.

By contrast, several of the largest forex prop brands — including FTMO, FundedNext, The5ers, FundingPips, and Goat Funded Trader — publish no current pass-rate percentages. Instead, marketing pages highlight cumulative lifetime payouts such as FTMO’s $650 million banner. Public Czech corporate filings for FTMO s.r.o. show that returning customers generate nearly 80% of revenue, with paid orders rising nearly 50% to 1.27 million in 2025 as revenue reached CZK 8.81 billion.

Daily Loss Breaches and Trailing Drawdown Rules Drive Most Failures

Historical firm breakdowns show that most failed evaluations end abruptly rather than grinding down to maximum loss limits. In The Funded Trader’s disclosed breakdown, 71% of failed traders breached the daily drawdown rule, while only 29% hit the maximum overall drawdown; Topstep’s help center also notes that more than 63% of traders have lost an account in a single trading day.

Two structural rules separate higher-survival evaluations from rapid account blowups:

1. Daily pause vs. hard breach: At most forex CFD prop firms, touching a 5% daily loss limit terminates the evaluation immediately. Several futures evaluations treat the daily limit as a session circuit breaker that flattens open positions and pauses trading until the next session without closing the account.
2. End-of-day vs. intraday trailing floors: An end-of-day (EOD) drawdown floor updates only at market close, whereas an intraday trailing floor ratchets upward with unrealized open profit and penalizes trades that pull back before closing.

As retail prop trading volume expands across both forex CFDs and exchange-listed futures in 2026, comparing per-attempt versus per-trader denominators and drawdown mechanics gives traders a clearer measure of evaluation odds than headline payout totals alone.