How much can you realistically earn?

The question, stated properly

"How much can you earn prop trading" has an easy answer that is useless — anything from a large negative number to six figures — and a hard answer that is worth having.

The hard answer requires four inputs, and almost every projection you will see online quietly assumes away the fourth:

Income = monthly return × account size × profit split × months the account survives

Return, size and split are the three everyone models. Months survived is the one that determines the outcome, and it is the one nobody puts a number on. This guide puts numbers on all four.

Start with the clean arithmetic

A $100,000 funded account, an 80% profit split, a 4% monthly return:

• Gross profit: $4,000
• Your share at 80%: $3,200
• Twelve consecutive months: $38,400

That is an excellent year by any professional standard, and it is the number that gets quoted. Now start subtracting.

Subtract what it cost to get there

If it took three attempts at $540 each with a 15% discount, that is $1,377 before the first trade. If the account charges an activation fee, add it. If it charges platform or data fees — significant on futures accounts — add twelve months of those.

Commissions come off the gross profit before the split is applied, so a high-commission account with a 90% headline split can net less than a low-commission account at 80%. At a hundred round turns a month with $7 commissions, that is $8,400 a year deducted before your share is calculated.

Our forex example lands at roughly $37,000 net in a perfect year. Our futures example, with a $130 activation and $85/month data, lands closer to $36,000 — assuming the same return, which futures accounts with tighter drawdowns often do not permit.

Neither number is bad. Both assume something that usually is not true.

The term everyone omits: how long the account survives

Twelve consecutive profitable months with no breach is not an average — it is a sequence, and sequences are fragile. One breach does not cost you a month; it costs you the account, all unwithdrawn profit, and any accumulated scaling progress.

Model it honestly. Suppose a funded trader has a 10% chance of breaching in any given month — which is optimistic for someone in their first year, given that the drawdown allowance is typically a fraction of what a personal account would tolerate.

• Probability of surviving 3 months: 0.9³ ≈ 73%
• Surviving 6 months: 0.9⁶ ≈ 53%
• Surviving 12 months: 0.9¹² ≈ 28%

So the $38,400 year has roughly a one-in-four chance of happening at all, for a trader who is genuinely good enough to average 4% a month. The expected value is far lower than the headline, and the median outcome is an account that ends somewhere around month six.

This is not pessimism. It is the single most important adjustment between a projection and a plan, and it is the reason experienced funded traders withdraw on schedule rather than accumulating — see losing a funded account.

Why every public number misleads

Everything you see is filtered twice.

Survivorship. Traders post payout screenshots. Nobody posts the three evaluations they failed first, the account they breached in week two, or the fourteen months between the first purchase and the first payout. The visible population is the successful tail of a distribution whose body is invisible.

Selection. Firms promote outliers because outliers sell evaluations. A $30,000 payout screenshot is real and completely uninformative about what you should expect. It tells you the ceiling exists. It says nothing about the median, and the median is what you must plan around.

A useful mental test: for every payout screenshot you see, ask how many failed evaluations at the same firm would have to exist for the firm's fee revenue to make sense. The answer is always a large number, and none of those people posted.

What monthly return is actually realistic

Ignore the numbers used in marketing. Anchor on constraints instead.

Your return is capped by what your drawdown allowance permits. If the maximum drawdown is 10% and your strategy's worst historical losing run is 8%, you must size so that run fits — which caps monthly return at a level far below what the same strategy would produce on a personal account with no hard stop.

Working it through: a strategy risking 1% of buffer per trade, 45% win rate, 1.8 reward-to-risk, produces about 0.26R of expectancy per trade. At forty trades a month that is roughly 10R, or about 10% of buffer. On a static account with a $10,000 buffer on $100,000, that is a 1% monthly return on the account — not 4%.

To reach 4% monthly you need either a much better strategy, a much larger buffer relative to the account, or more risk per trade than survival permits. That is why 3–5% consistently is a strong result and 10%+ consistently is rare enough that you should assume it is not you until proven otherwise.

Trailing accounts are harder still, because the buffer does not grow with profit — see static vs trailing drawdown.

A worked expected value

Put the pieces together for a realistic first-year scenario. A trader who is genuinely competent, buying a $100,000 evaluation at $459 after discount:

• Probability of passing at all: generously, 25% per attempt. Over three attempts, roughly 58%. Cost of three attempts: $1,377.
• If funded: 3% monthly on $100,000 at 80% = $2,400/month.
• Expected months survived at 10% monthly breach risk: about 9.5 months on average, though the median is around 6.
• Expected gross earnings if funded: roughly $22,800 over the account's life.

Expected value across all outcomes: (0.58 × $22,800) − $1,377 ≈ $11,850 in year one, with wide variance and a meaningful chance of ending the year down by the fee.

That is a real and respectable number for a side activity requiring no capital at risk. It is also less than a third of the $38,400 headline, and the difference is entirely in the two terms the headline ignores.

Run the components with your own figures in the payout projection calculator and the true cost calculator.

Where the money actually is: scaling

The single-account arithmetic above understates the ceiling badly, because it ignores the mechanism that makes this model worth doing at all.

A typical scaling plan raises your account size and often your split after a sustained gain without a breach — commonly 8–10% over three to six months. Compare two traders over three years:

Trader A buys a $200,000 evaluation immediately, breaches in month two, buys another, breaches again, and gives up. Net: several thousand down.

Trader B passes a $50,000 evaluation, trades it conservatively at 3% a month, scales at month six to $100,000, again at month fourteen to $200,000, and reaches an 90% split along the way. By year three the monthly income on the same 3% return is roughly six times what it was in month one — and the risk per trade, as a percentage of buffer, never changed.

Scaling compounds; single accounts do not. This is why every honest answer to "how much can you earn" is a multi-year answer, and why the scaling terms matter far more in year two than the profit split does in month one.

Two details to check before relying on a plan: whether the drawdown scales proportionally with the account (if it does not, the bigger account is harder to trade), and whether taking payouts reduces the balance used to measure your gain. Some plans measure net of withdrawals, which means withdrawing slows your scaling.

What the distribution looks like

Grouping traders honestly, from the evidence available:

Most people never pass an evaluation, or pass one and breach within a few months. Net result: negative by the amount of the fees. This is the largest group by a wide margin and there is no useful way to soften it.

A minority hold a funded account and take payouts irregularly. A few thousand over a year, interrupted by a breach and a fresh evaluation, with the fees eating a meaningful share. Roughly break-even to modestly profitable.

A small group trade consistently enough to scale. For them the numbers become genuinely interesting, because the compounding described above starts working. This is where the visible success stories come from, and it is a small fraction of buyers.

Nobody — including us — can tell you in advance which group you are in. What can be said is that the third group shares one characteristic: they were profitable on their own capital before buying their first evaluation. The prop firm supplied size, not skill.

Multiple accounts do not multiply income

A common plan is to run several funded accounts to multiply the return. It works less well than it looks.

Trading the same strategy across accounts means the same losing run hits all of them simultaneously — that is correlation, not diversification. Two accounts breaching in the same week is the normal outcome, not the unlucky one.

Worse, trading identical setups across accounts can look like prohibited copy trading, even between accounts you own. That is a payout-review problem waiting to happen. See managing several funded accounts.

Diversifying across firms to reduce the risk that one firm's failure ends your income is sound. Multiplying accounts to multiply returns is mostly multiplying fees.

Tax comes off the top

Payouts arrive gross. Nothing is withheld, there is no year-end statement in most cases, and declaring the income is entirely your responsibility.

In most markets a performance fee from a prop firm is ordinary self-employment or business income rather than a capital gain, which usually means income tax and often social contributions. Depending on where you live, that can take a substantial share of the headline number.

The practical rule: set aside a percentage of every payout from the first one, before the money feels like yours. On the other side, evaluation fees — including failed attempts — data costs and platform charges are often deductible against the income, which materially improves the after-tax picture. See taxes on funded trading income, and take the specifics to a local accountant.

What we can and cannot verify

We publish what firms document — payout cycles, splits, minimums — because those are checkable. We do not publish a median payout time for a firm until five traders have submitted verified proof, and we do not rank firms on payout speed at all, because nobody has that data yet, including the sites that claim to.

The same discipline applies here. We have no verified dataset on what funded traders actually earn, so everything above is arithmetic from documented rules plus stated assumptions, not measurement. Where the assumptions are ours, we have named them so you can substitute your own.

If you have been paid, submitting the proof is the single most useful thing you can do to make this question answerable rather than arguable. Amounts publish as brackets and the document is deleted after verification.

Building a projection you can plan around

Five steps, using your own numbers rather than anyone's marketing:

1. Take your real monthly return from your own trading record, at the risk level the firm's drawdown actually permits — not the risk level you use on a personal account.
2. Apply the split, after commissions, not before.
3. Multiply by expected months survived, not by twelve. Use your own breach probability if you have one; 10% a month is a reasonable starting estimate for a first funded account.
4. Subtract the full cost of getting funded — fee times your honest attempt assumption, plus activation and recurring charges.
5. Multiply by your probability of passing at all. This is the step that turns a projection into an expected value.

If the result still justifies the effort, it will justify it in reality. If it only works when every term goes your way, it does not work.

The frame that survives contact with reality

Treat the first evaluation fee as tuition. Assume you will need more than one attempt. Assume your first funded account may not survive its first quarter. Judge the model on year two rather than month two, because year two is where scaling either happens or does not.

Under those assumptions the honest answer to "how much can you realistically earn" is: probably nothing in year one, possibly a useful second income by year two if you are genuinely profitable, and something substantial by year three if you scale — with a large probability attached to each of those and no way to know in advance which applies to you.

That is less exciting than the screenshots. It is also the version you can build a plan on.

Return on the account is not your return

Every income figure in this industry is quoted as a percentage of an account you do not own, and that is the single most misleading convention in it.

A trader who makes 3% on a $100,000 funded account has produced $3,000 of gross profit and, at an 80% split, $2,400 of income. Their return on capital is undefined, because they supplied no capital. What they actually supplied was a fee, so the meaningful figure is return on cost: $2,400 against, say, $1,400 spent reaching and holding the account — a 71% return on money at risk in that month, and a negative one in every month before it.

Framing it this way fixes two errors at once. It stops you comparing a funded account to an investment return, where 3% a month looks absurd, and it stops you ignoring the fees, where 3% a month looks free. What you are running is a small business with a known cost base and a highly variable revenue line, and the correct question is whether it clears its costs across a year rather than whether it had a good March.

The three income profiles

Nearly everyone who makes money here falls into one of three patterns, and they need very different things to be true.

Most public discussion is written by and about the third group while being read by the first. The supplementary profile is the realistic target for a competent trader with a job, and it is a perfectly good outcome — it is simply not the one the marketing describes.

The compounding you do not get

The most valuable feature of ordinary trading capital is that profit stays in the account and works next month. Funded accounts mostly do not do this.

When you withdraw, the balance usually drops by the amount taken, and on many accounts the drawdown level is recalculated from the reduced balance. So the account you trade in month two is the same size as the one you traded in month one, no matter how well month one went. Income from prop trading is therefore linear rather than compounding: two good months in a row make twice the money, not more than twice.

The exception is a scaling plan, which is the only mechanism in the model that grows the base. That is why scaling terms deserve more attention than the split — the split changes your slice of a fixed pie, scaling changes the pie — and why a plan whose drawdown does not grow with the account is worth much less than it looks.

A twelve-month simulation

One realistic year for a competent trader on a single $100,000 account, at 80% split, with $150 a month in platform and data costs. Nothing here is a projection of what you will make; it is an illustration of the shape.

That is a successful year: the trader is up around $2,300 before tax, has been paid four times, and has learned enough to do better next year. It is also a year in which five of twelve months produced no income at all, one destroyed the account, and the largest single month provided more than the rest combined. Anyone planning around a monthly average is planning around a number that never actually occurred.

What would have to be true for this to be your income

A short, uncomfortable checklist. If you cannot answer yes to all six, the honest label for your prop trading is "a paid experiment", and there is nothing wrong with that as long as it is budgeted as one.

1. You have a written method with a positive expectancy measured over at least two hundred trades.
2. Your worst historical losing streak fits inside the drawdown at the size you actually trade.
3. You can lose an entire account without changing how you trade the next one.
4. You have enough non-trading income to cover three consecutive months of nothing.
5. You have been paid at least twice by the firm you are relying on.
6. You are recording the results yourself, not reading them off a dashboard you do not control.

Item four is the one that eliminates most people, and it eliminates them for a reason that has nothing to do with skill: a trader who needs this month's payout will size for the payout rather than the edge, and the rules are specifically good at punishing that.

The alternative uses of the same money

The honest comparison is not against a salary, it is against what else $1,500 and six months of evenings could do.

Trading the same strategy on a personal account with $1,500 gives you full freedom and roughly a fiftieth of the size, so a good year returns a few hundred dollars — less money, no rules, no counterparty. Buying evaluations gives you leverage on the same skill, with rules that will end the account occasionally and a firm that must stay solvent for you to be paid. The prop route wins clearly when the edge is real and the capital is small, which is precisely the case it was designed for, and loses badly when the edge is unproven — because the leverage applies to the discovery process too.

What it should not be compared to is passive investing. They are different activities with different risk, and a year of evenings is a real cost that neither arithmetic includes. If the honest answer is that you want to trade, the leverage is worth buying. If the honest answer is that you want the income, this is one of the least reliable ways to obtain it.

Where to go next

To improve the inputs rather than the projection: position sizing against a drawdown determines how much return your allowance permits, and how to choose a prop firm determines how long an account is likely to survive.

To reduce the cost side: the true cost of a challenge and are discount codes worth waiting for.

To understand the mechanism that actually produces meaningful income: scaling plans compared.