What happens immediately
Positions close, the account is disabled, and access to the platform is usually revoked within a day. It is abrupt by design.
What you keep
Money already withdrawn is yours and is not clawed back. Profit sitting in the account and not yet paid out is generally forfeited — the terms almost always say so.
This is the practical argument for taking payouts on schedule rather than accumulating. An account holding six weeks of unwithdrawn profit is six weeks of work that a single bad session erases. See how payouts work.
What you lose that is easy to overlook
Scaling progress. If you were four months into a six-month scaling requirement, that progress almost always resets. In terms of future earnings this is usually the largest cost of the breach, larger than the forfeited profit.
Also any tenure-based benefits — reduced payout waits, higher splits earned through longevity.
Ask about a discounted restart
Many firms offer previously funded traders a reduced-price evaluation, sometimes substantially reduced, and they do not always advertise it. It costs one email to find out.
Weigh it against the same question as any reset: do you know what you would do differently.
Diagnose before rebuying
The same three categories as a failed evaluation apply, and the diagnosis matters more here because you have already proved you can pass:
Sizing. You traded the funded account like the evaluation, without noticing that the drawdown allowance is often different and that a breach now costs far more. The most common cause.
Behaviour. Real money changed how you traded — larger size after the first payout, or reluctance to take a stop. Very common and worth naming honestly.
Rules. Something applied on the funded account that did not apply during the evaluation. Check the terms for what differs between the two.
The full framework is in what to do after a failed challenge.
The asymmetry worth internalising
A funded account should be traded more conservatively than the evaluation that earned it, because the cost of a breach is an order of magnitude higher. Most traders do the opposite, sizing up once the account is real.
If that describes what just happened, the fix is a written sizing rule you follow rather than a promise to be careful. See trading plans that survive a challenge.