The State of Prop Firms 2026: What 79 Firms Actually Publish

What this is. We read the published terms of every prop trading firm we review, field by field, and store six facts per firm with the source URL each one came from: maximum advertised profit split, payout processing time, drawdown type, cheapest entry cost in USD, whether that cost is one-off or recurring, and the platforms offered. This piece reports what that register shows. Every number traces either to the stored record or to our own editorial exclusion flags. Where a field is blank, we say it is blank instead of estimating it.

Update, 29 September 2026. An earlier draft of this piece covered 20 firms, a quarter of the set. The register is now complete at 79 of 79. Two headline findings changed once the sample filled out, and both are marked below. We are leaving the corrections visible rather than quietly restating them.

Method and sample size: read this before the numbers

• Population and sample. 79 prop firm reviews in the active research set, and all 79 now carry a fact record. This is full coverage of what we review, not of the market.
• Dates. Records were verified between 11 and 25 September 2026: 15 on 11 Sep, 55 on 15 Sep, 6 on 22 Sep, 1 on 23 Sep, 2 on 25 Sep. This is a snapshot over a fortnight, not a trend line.
• Completeness is itself a finding. Of the 79 records, 33 are complete, 33 are marked partial because the firm does not publish everything we look for, and 13 are marked defunct (5), rebranded (4), unreachable (3) or warning (1). Fewer than half the firms we review publish a full set of basic terms.
• Sourcing rule. A field is recorded only if we found it on a page we could fetch, and the source URL is stored alongside it. Nothing here is modelled, averaged in from other comparison sites, or inferred from a firm's marketing claims about itself.
• Separate failure set. 14 prop firm review pages are flagged to be kept out of our rankings because the firm went dark, shut down, paused, merged, or carries unresolved payout complaints. Those 14 are named in Finding 1.
• How to check us. Every figure below is visible on the individual review page it came from, with its source link. If a number here disagrees with a firm's current terms, the firm changed them after our check date and we want to know.

Coverage at a glance

Before the findings, here is how much of each field the 79 firms actually publish. Every later number in this piece is a slice of this table.

Platforms are the only field every firm publishes, because it is a selling point. The four below it are the terms you are judged against once you have paid, and each one is missing from between 14 and 43 per cent of the firms we review.

Finding 1: fourteen firms we review have failed, paused, or carry payout warnings

These are firms with a live review page on this site that we have flagged as unsafe to put in a comparison table. The middle column is what our own records say, unedited in substance.

The gap in our own records. We hold a date for four of these fourteen. For the other ten we recorded the condition when we found it and not when it happened, which means we cannot tell you how fast this market turns over — only that it does. That is a defect in our method and we are stating it rather than inventing dates. Records created from now on carry a date.

It is not only prop firms. Running the same exclusion test across the 123 forex brokers we review flagged a further six: CLMarkets, GMI Edge, Vital Markets, Axiance, KOT4X and TriumphFX. One of them still scored 4.6 out of 5 on our own rating at the time we flagged it, which is exactly the trap this exercise exists to catch — a score measures how good the offer looked, not whether the company is still answering the phone.

Finding 2: the median advertised split is 90 per cent, and 100 per cent is usually for sale

This finding changed. At 19 records the median advertised maximum was 100 per cent. At 68 records it is 90 per cent. The small sample flattered the market, which is a useful caution about every prop firm comparison table built on a handful of big names.

n=68. Eleven records carry no split figure at all.

The distribution alone still misleads, because the note field is where the real finding sits. In 8 records we documented that the headline split is not the standard account: it requires a paid add-on at checkout, a specific reward cycle, or a scaling tier reached months later. Goat Funded Trader's standard is 80 per cent. FXIFY's 90 per cent forex ceiling needs a paid add-on. FundedNext's 95 comes via a paid Lifetime Reward option on a base of 80. FundingPips gates 100 per cent behind the monthly reward cycle, which also carries a seven-profitable-day requirement and a consistency score.

Two firms make the split conditional in ways no comparison table can show. Earn2Trade pays 50 per cent on withdrawals under 1,500 USD and 80 per cent above it. Elite Trader Funding caps simulated profit at 25,000 USD per trader before moving them to a live programme paying 80 per cent.

Read the standard split as 80 to 90 per cent. Ranking these firms on the advertised ceiling ranks them on what their add-ons cost.

Finding 3: payouts are fast when published — and 23 firms publish nothing

n=79. Median of the 56 that publish a figure: 1 day. Thirty of those 56 publish one day or faster.

That reads as a healthy market until you notice the last row. Twenty-three of seventy-nine firms — 29 per cent — publish no request-to-payment duration at all. Some advertise payouts on demand or a first payout in as little as zero days while committing to no actual settlement time. An advertised eligibility window is not a service level, and the difference only becomes visible when you are waiting on money.

A separate problem: four records document a firm contradicting itself on its own pages — a homepage figure that disagrees with the help centre, or two different cycles quoted in two places. In those cases we record the slower figure and say why.

Finding 4: median entry is 59 USD, and 34 firms publish no USD price

Cheapest evaluation, in USD, across the 45 records that carry one. Range 9 to 250 USD. Median 59.

Forty-three per cent of the firms we review do not publish a price we could read in USD. The reasons vary and most are mundane: prices quoted only in euros, or rendered by a script so they appear nowhere in the page a crawler or a cautious reader sees. FTMO is the clearest case — its fees are quoted in EUR and built client-side, and its price list URL returns a 404, so we left the USD figure empty rather than converting a number it never published. A converted price is a guess with a currency symbol on it.

Finding 5: for 21 firms we could not determine the drawdown rule

This is the finding we would most like to be wrong about. Drawdown type is the single rule that decides whether you keep an account: a static limit is measured from your starting balance, while a trailing one follows your equity up, so the same run of trades can pass under one rule and breach under the other. Twenty-seven per cent of firms do not make it determinable from what they publish, and a further four use different rules on different plans under one brand.

Finding 6: MT4 has effectively left prop trading

n=79, platforms are not exclusive. MT4 appears on five of seventy-nine firms. For a platform that was the default in retail forex for two decades, that is close to absence, and it is the clearest structural change in the register. One firm in our failure list above is flagged specifically as paused because of the MetaTrader crackdown. Anyone choosing a prop firm on the assumption they will be trading MT4 should check first rather than assume.

What this adds up to

Four of the six things a trader most needs to know before paying a prop firm are missing from a quarter to a half of published terms: the processing time on a payout (29 per cent missing), a price in a currency you can read (43 per cent), the drawdown rule (27 per cent), and a split figure that applies to the account actually on sale (documented as conditional in 8 records, and absent entirely in 11).

None of that requires bad faith. Most of these firms are small, fast-moving businesses, and terms pages are the last thing to get written. But it does mean the comparison tables published across this industry, ours included, are built on a thinner base than their confident formatting suggests. That is why we publish the source URL next to every figure and mark a record partial when it is partial.

Limitations, stated plainly

• This is not the market. It is the 79 firms we review, chosen over time by reader interest and industry visibility. Firms we have never reviewed are not represented.
• It is a fortnight, not a trend. Records were checked between 11 and 25 September 2026. We cannot yet show change over time, and the missing failure dates in Finding 1 are why.
• Advertised, not achieved. Every figure here is what the firm publishes. We have not verified that any trader received a payout in the advertised time, and nothing here should be read as evidence that they did.
• Some records rely on third-party pages where a firm blocks or no longer serves its own. Those are marked in the individual records.

The companion piece

This survey covered the commercial terms. The rules that end funded accounts covers the other half of the contract, counting the behavioural restrictions across the 94 firms now in our library: consistency rules on 68 of them, but a documented minimum payout threshold on only 16.

Using these figures

You are welcome to cite any statistic on this page with a link back to it. If you want a figure we have not published here, or the underlying per-firm record for a specific firm, it is on that firm's review page with its source link. Corrections are welcome and we will date them.

Related reading: our prop firm ranking, the real cost of the cheapest evaluations, and how a prop firm challenge actually works.