Prop Firm Profit Calculator

Before you buy another challenge, run the numbers. Most traders compare the challenge fee to the funded account size and stop there — which ignores the profit split, the real probability of passing, and the cost of the retries that follow a failure. This calculator models the whole picture.

How to read the results

The most important number on the page is not the payout — it is the expected value per attempt. Everything else is an input. Expected value answers the only question that matters before you spend money: if I keep buying this challenge until I pass, what does one attempt average out to? A challenge with a big headline payout and a low pass rate can have a lower expected value than a modest challenge you nearly always clear, and that is the trap most traders fall into without ever noticing.

The second most useful number is expected attempts, which is simply the inverse of your pass rate. A 40% pass rate means three attempts on average, not one. That number is where the fee stack quietly builds, because each of those attempts is another challenge fee out of your pocket. Most of the pain in self-trading prop challenges lives in this figure, and most traders never calculate it.

The expected value formula, step by step

There is nothing mysterious in the maths, and understanding it makes you far harder to mislead by marketing. Expected value per attempt is:

EV = (net payout × pass rate) − (challenge fee × failure rate)

In words: take what you would actually receive if you passed, weight it by how often you pass, then subtract what you spend on attempts that fail, weighted by how often they fail. Apply it to a single attempt and you get the average outcome of buying that challenge once. Here is the same setup run three ways, so you can see how sensitive the result is to the pass rate.

Notice the third row. This is the quiet argument for a passing service: because the pass probability jumps toward certainty, the expected trial cost collapses, and the flat fee is paid once rather than repeatedly. Our challenge fees vs passing service article works through the comparison in detail, but the calculator above will show you the same thing in about a minute if you run it with a 40% pass rate and then with 95%.

Worked example: the serial retrier

Take a trader with a $100,000 account on an 8% target and a $550 challenge fee, who honestly assesses a 35% pass rate. Expected attempts come to roughly 2.9. Expected cost before any payout is therefore about $1,600 in challenge fees alone — nearly three times the advertised fee, because the advertised fee is per attempt and they will probably buy three. When a pass finally lands, the gross target is $8,000 and, at an 80% split, the payout is $6,400. Net of the attempts already spent, the first successful challenge has returned a little over $4,800.

That is still positive, which is why the trader keeps going. But watch what happens if the pass rate is actually 20% rather than the 35% they believe. Expected attempts jump to five, expected fees to $2,750, and the margins thin to the point where a single extra breach wipes out the result. The difference between a good challenge and a bad one for this trader is almost entirely the accuracy of that one input, which is why the next section exists.

Why most traders mis-estimate their pass rate

Self-reported pass rates are notoriously optimistic, and the reason is memory rather than dishonesty. Traders benchmark against the challenge they remember passing, not the four they quietly failed and moved on from. Industry data consistently suggests that fewer than one in ten attempts on strict firms succeed, and even among thoughtful, experienced traders a realistic rate is often 30–50% rather than the 80% people assume when they fill in a form.

There is a second bias on top of the first: traders who buy several challenges at once tend to remember the best of them. If you passed one of four, you experienced a pass and the feeling of success is what you recall, not the three you paid for. If you are unsure of your true rate, run the calculator with a conservative number. If the challenge still makes sense at 30%, you have a genuinely good opportunity, and the upside surprise will be pleasant. If it only works at 80%, you are relying on an assumption you have not tested.

What the calculator does not capture

• Time cost. Weeks of screen time and stress have an opportunity cost the calculator ignores, and it is often the largest hidden expense of a slow, repeated evaluation.
• The consistency rule. It affects when you can withdraw, not the total — but a blocked payout is worth less than an available one, and a pass that cannot be withdrawn is close to worthless.
• Scaling. Many firms increase your account over time; the calc models a single account at a single size. See the scaling plan guide for what a funded account can become.
• Taxes and transfer fees. Always net these off before celebrating a payout. They are small individually and not always small together.
• The firm's own fee changes. Fees and targets move, so re-run the numbers when your firm updates its terms rather than trusting a figure you entered months ago.

What a passing service does to the maths

Run the same challenge twice in the calculator above — once with your honest self-traded pass rate and once with a much higher one reflecting a managed pass — and the expected value changes by more than any other input can move it. That is the entire financial case for outsourcing a challenge, and it is the reason we built this tool the way we did rather than as a marketing pitch.

The mechanics are straightforward. A passing service replaces an uncertain outcome with a near-certain one, which collapses expected attempts toward one and therefore collapses the fee stack. It replaces a variable cost that scales with your failures with a single flat fee that does not. And it removes the retries from your budget entirely when the retries are covered on the provider's side, as ours are. None of that changes the profit target, the split or the market — it only changes how often you pay to try, which for a retrying trader is the whole game.

The honest counterpoint belongs here too. If your pass rate is genuinely high, a service is simply an unnecessary cost, and trading the challenge yourself is cheaper and teaches you more. The calculator is designed to tell you which of those two traders you are, and to do it with your own numbers rather than ours. Use a conservative pass rate, and believe the result.

Using the calculator to choose a firm

The tool is not only for deciding whether to trade a challenge; it is also the fastest way to compare two firms. Enter the same account size and the same honest pass rate, then change only the challenge fee and split. The firm with the lower total expected cost is the one to buy, and the gap is often larger than the difference in advertised fees suggests, because the split compounds against you across every future withdrawal.

A small example makes the point. A firm advertising a 60% fee but a higher advertised split looks worse than a competitor with a higher fee and a better split — until you extend the horizon across a year of payouts, at which point the split regularly dominates. Run both, then look at the highest row of the table rather than the first. Choosing a firm on the headline number is how traders end up paying the most for the least.

The three inputs people get wrong

The calculator is only as honest as what you put into it, and in practice three inputs are entered wrong almost every time. Get these right and the output becomes genuinely useful; leave them optimistic and the tool will flatter a bad decision.

1. The profit split is not what you keep

The field asks for the split you receive, not the split the firm advertises. A firm advertising an “80% split” means you keep 80% of the profit generated on a funded account, and the figure applies to net profit, not the profit target. Traders routinely enter 80 and then read the payout number as if it were the target. It is not, and the gap between the target and your actual take is where most of the disappointment in this category lives.

2. The challenge fee is per attempt, not one-time

This is the single biggest source of error. The fee you enter is the cost of one evaluation. If your pass rate is 40%, you will, on average, buy 2.5 evaluations before one lands, and the true cost of reaching a funded account is the fee multiplied by expected attempts. Entering the advertised fee and reading the “estimated cost to pass” output as something less than the fee is a common misreading. The calculator handles the multiplication for you; the mistake is done by hand, in your head, before you open the tool.

3. The pass rate is a guess you have never tested

Most traders have no measured pass rate and default to something aspirational. The honest default for a self-traded challenge on a strict firm is far lower than intuition suggests, and the difference between a 60% assumption and a 35% reality is the difference between a clearly worthwhile challenge and a marginal one. If you genuinely do not know your rate, enter 30% and see whether the result still appeals. If it does, you are looking at a good opportunity; if it only works at 80%, you are betting on an assumption.

Your advertised challenge fee is not your cost

Every firm markets its challenge fee as though it were the price of the challenge. It is the price of one attempt at the challenge, and the two are only the same for a trader who passes first time. For everyone else, the real cost is the fee multiplied by the number of attempts, plus the time those attempts consume, and it is almost always a multiple of the advertised figure.

Run it with realistic numbers. A $550 fee and a 40% pass rate gives an expected 2.5 attempts and an expected fee outlay of about $1,375 before any payout. At a 25% pass rate the expected attempts rise to four and the fee outlay to $2,200. At the optimistic 70% that traders like to assume, it falls to about $785. Notice that the highest of these, the 25% case, is four times the number the firm advertises, and that the trader in that case will still describe their challenge as “a $550 challenge.” The marketing worked. The correct frame is that the challenge costs $550 per attempt, and the expected total is what you should compare against the payout — or against a service fee.

Break-even pass rate: when a challenge stops being worth buying

There is a pass rate below which a challenge has negative expected value: the fee stack is expected to exceed what you take out. Finding that rate is more useful than any single EV number, because it tells you how much margin of error your trading needs to have.

Set the payout and the fee so that the two sides of the EV equation balance, and solve for the pass rate. If your net payout after split is $6,400 and the challenge fee is $550, the break-even pass rate is the point where the expected payout equals the expected fee. Below that rate, buying the challenge repeatedly is a losing game on average, however good any single attempt feels. Above it, the challenge has positive expected value and is rational to buy. The point of running this is not pessimism; it is calibration. A trader who knows their break-even can tell whether a rough month is normal variance or a sign that their process is not good enough for the firm they have chosen.

Comparing two firms over a full year

The calculator models a single challenge, which is the right unit for deciding whether to buy one. For choosing between two firms, extend the horizon, because splits compound across payouts in a way that a single-challenge view hides. Suppose two firms offer the same account size and target, but one takes a larger share of your payouts in exchange for a lower challenge fee.

Firm A looks cheaper on day one and wins the comparison that most traders run. Firm B wins the comparison that actually matters, because the split difference applies to every payout, not just the first, and the fee difference is paid once. Choose on the highest row of the table, not the first, and the decision usually gets easier rather than harder. This is exactly why our own service is priced flat rather than split-based: a one-time fee keeps the compounding on your side of the ledger.

What happens when you pass twice

A single funded account is a starting point, not the finish line, and the calculator deliberately models one. Once you are funded, the arithmetic changes in a way worth understanding before you scale. Passing a second account roughly doubles your capacity and your potential payout, while adding only one more flat fee if you use a service or one more challenge fee if you trade it yourself. The per-account cost falls. Firms with scaling plans complicate this further by growing your account automatically as you hit profit milestones, which means the same account can compound without an entirely new evaluation.

Two cautions. First, running several funded accounts multiplies your exposure to rule breaches, so the operational burden grows faster than the payout does; this is one reason traders diversify across firms rather than stacking one. Second, a second account is not free money — it is another drawdown to respect and another consistency check to satisfy. The calculator is a decision tool for one challenge at a time, and it works best if you run it again for each new evaluation rather than assuming the second is easy because the first was.

Three decisions the calculator settles in a minute

Tools are only worth building if they change a decision, so here are the three questions this one is designed to answer, in the order most traders should ask them.

Should I buy this challenge at all? Run it with your honest pass rate and look at the expected value line. If it is comfortably positive, the challenge is worth buying and the next two questions are about optimising. If it is negative or marginal, no amount of firm-shopping fixes it, because the problem is the ratio of fee to payout at your real skill level, not the branding. That is an uncomfortable answer and a useful one.

Is my pass rate realistic? This is the question the calculator is best at exposing, because the output is extremely sensitive to that one input. Try your assumption, then try a figure ten points lower, and see whether the challenge survives. If a ten-point error flips the decision from good to bad, you are relying on an assumption you have not measured, and the honest move is to treat the challenge as marginal until you have data.

Should I use a passing service or trade it myself? Run the challenge twice, once with your self-traded rate and once with a managed rate. The difference in expected cost is the value the service provides, and comparing it to the flat fee is the cleanest way to decide. If the gap is larger than the fee, the service is the rational choice; if your own rate is high enough that the gap is small, keep trading and keep the money.

Use this calculator in your own article

If you write about prop firms and would rather put a live calculator inside your piece than a screenshot of one, this tool is free to embed. One line of HTML, no signup, no API key, no analytics and no ads inside the frame — and nothing collected from your readers, because it runs entirely in their browser. We ask for one visible credit link in return. The embed snippet and instructions are on their own page.

Frequently asked questions

The FAQ block below explains the inputs, what pass rate to assume and why expected value matters more than the headline payout. To reduce your expected trial cost to near zero, see the flat-fee challenge passing service, or read the 2026 ranking of passing services if you are weighing providers against each other.