Prop firm rules, side by side. Sourced.

We score each firm's 50K plan from 0 to 100 on five things: cost to get funded (30%), drawdown room (20%), payout speed and terms (20%), published pass and payout evidence (15%) and Trustpilot rating (15%). Cost uses each firm's list price plus its activation fee; promo and coupon prices are never scored, because they come and go. That hurts firms like Apex, which shows a 90% coupon almost constantly, so check the coupon row too. If a firm doesn't publish one of these, we leave it out and score the rest. We only rank a firm when we found at least 85% of the 16 data points we track. Firms within 3 points of each other share a tier, and firms in the same tier should be treated as equivalent. All 16 firms are ranked: Tier 1 is Lucid Trading, Topstep and TradeDay; Tier 2 is E8 Markets (Futures), Earn2Trade, FundedNext (Futures) and Tradeify; Tier 3 is MyFundedFutures; Tier 4 is Take Profit Trader; Tier 5 is Alpha Futures; Tier 6 is Apex Trader Funding, Bulenox, FTMO and The5ers; Tier 7 is Funding Pips; Tier 8 is Elite Trader Funding. The exact scores are listed under the table. Partner deals never change a tier.

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Fairness adjustments

Three checks keep the score fair. First, old evidence counts for less: if a firm's published pass or payout rate covers a period that ended more than 18 months before we checked, it gets half credit. Today that applies only to E8, whose 17.7% pass rate covers Jan 2023 to Mar 2024. Second, a firm can't gain by staying quiet: we also score each firm as if each missing item scored the middle (median) value of the ranked firms, and we publish the lower of the two scores. Third, we note recent events, such as rule overhauls or voided payouts, next to the tier with a link to the source. Those notes don't change the score; they're there so you can read them yourself.

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Firm-reported pass and payout rates are unaudited, and firms count them differently, so don't compare them directly. Topstep reports that in 2025, 16.8% of Trading Combines started were passed, and 33.3% of traders who reached the Funded Level received a payout (Topstep, firm-reported, unaudited). Take Profit Trader reports that 36.22% of its Trading Tests were passed in 2025 (firm-reported, unaudited; per test, not per trader). TradeDay shows a 36% evaluation pass rate for Jan to Jun 2026 on its How It Works page (firm-reported, unaudited). Trustpilot scores are a search snapshot from Oct 25, 2026.