FTMO Rules Explained: Every Challenge, Verification and Funded Account Rule

FTMO has been selling evaluations since 2015 and its rules are the ones most other firms copied, so understanding them is close to understanding the whole industry. Everything below was checked against FTMO's own rules pages on 7 November 2026. The firm changes details from time to time, most recently adding a consistency rule to one-step accounts in October 2026, so treat its Trading Objectives page as the final word.

The three FTMO products

FTMO Challenge (two-step). The original. Pass the Challenge, pass the Verification, receive an FTMO Account. Available at $10k, $25k, $50k, $100k and $200k, with a Swing variant that relaxes the news and weekend rules.

One-step FTMO Challenge. A single phase with the same 10% target but a tighter daily limit, a trailing maximum loss and a consistency rule. 90% split from the start. The fee is not refunded.

FTMO Instant Account. No evaluation. You pay a much higher fee, receive an account from $5k to $100k, and trade under tight trailing drawdown and consistency rules at a 90% split. Covered in instant funding prop firms.

The rest of this article is about the two-step Challenge, with the one-step differences noted where they matter.

FTMO Challenge rules, with the dollars

Take a $100,000 Challenge.

Profit target

10% in the Challenge, 5% in the Verification, measured on closed balance at the moment you have met the minimum trading days. There is no time limit, which FTMO removed in 2022. The absence of a clock is the most under-used feature of the product: traders who fail usually fail by forcing trades to hit the target quickly, when nothing in the rules asks them to.

Maximum daily loss

5% of the initial balance, so $5,000 on $100k, and it does not grow as you make profit. It is measured from the balance at the start of the day, with the day running midnight to midnight Central European time (11pm to 11pm UK in winter, 11pm to 11pm in summer too, since both shift together). Open trades count. If you are up $3,000 on the day and give back $8,000, you have breached, even though your closed balance only fell $5,000.

The practical version: decide how much of the $5,000 you will ever risk in one day, and make it a fraction. At 1% per trade ($1,000) with a 20 pip stop on EUR/USD, that is 5 lots, and three losers in a row use 60% of the daily allowance. At 0.5% per trade you can be wrong five times. The position size calculator gives you the lots; the leverage guide explains why FTMO's 1:100 leverage has nothing to do with it.

Maximum loss

10% of the initial balance, static. Equity may never fall below $90,000 on a $100k account, whether you are in week one or have made $8,000 already. This is the generous version of the rule. On the one-step Challenge the maximum loss trails: it is measured from the highest end-of-day balance, so once you are up $4,000 the floor rises to $94,000 and never comes back down.

Minimum trading days

Four, in each phase. A trading day is any day you open at least one position. This stops a pass on a single lucky trade and is rarely the rule that catches anyone.

FTMO Account rules

Passing both phases gets you an FTMO Account. The 5% daily and 10% total loss limits still apply and a breach closes the account. Three new rules appear that did not apply during the evaluation.

The news trading rule

On a standard FTMO Account you may not execute any order, including stop losses, take profits and pending orders, within 2 minutes before and 2 minutes after selected high-impact events, on instruments containing the affected currency or asset. During US non-farm payrolls you cannot touch USD/JPY but you can trade EUR/GBP. A position opened more than 2 minutes before the release may be held through it. Violation can terminate the account.

The Swing FTMO Account is exempt. If your strategy holds through data, choose Swing when you buy the Challenge; you cannot switch afterwards. Either way, the economic calendar should be the first thing you open each day on a funded account.

The weekend rule

Standard FTMO Accounts must be flat before any market break longer than two hours, which means Friday close. Swing accounts may hold over the weekend. Again, not a rule during the evaluation, which is how it catches people in their first funded week.

Payouts and the refund

You can request your first payout on the 14th day after your first trade on the FTMO Account, with all positions closed. FTMO reviews it within one to two business days and pays one to two business days after the invoice is approved. The Challenge fee comes back with that first payout on the two-step product.

The consistency rule (one-step and Instant only)

Since 12 October 2026, one-step Challenge accounts carry a 50% best-day rule: no single day may account for more than half of your total profit. Instant Accounts have a 30% version. Breaking it is not a failure, but it blocks the pass or payout until the rest of your trading dilutes the big day. If you make $6,000 on day one of a one-step Challenge, you need another $6,000 from other days before the target counts. The two-step Challenge has no consistency rule.

Scaling Plan

Once funded through the one-step or two-step Challenge, FTMO increases your account by 25% every four months if, over those four months, you made at least 10% net profit, received at least two payouts and finished positive. The split rises to 90% on two-step accounts. The cap is $2,000,000 across all your FTMO Accounts. Instant Accounts are not eligible.

Note what the Scaling Plan does not do: it does not compound. Payouts leave the account and the balance is reset. A trader netting 3% a month on $100k earns about $2,400 a month at 80% and that figure only grows when the account is scaled. The compounding calculator shows the difference against the same return on your own capital.

Forbidden trading practices

FTMO's forbidden practices page is long. The clauses that matter to a discretionary forex trader:

• Exploiting platform errors or delayed feeds. Obvious.
• Coordinated trading across accounts. Hedging an FTMO account against another firm's account, or group trading, is prohibited. Opposite positions within one account are allowed.
• Gap trading. Opening trades around major scheduled news or within two hours of a market close of two hours or more, to catch a gap. This is separate from the 2-minute news rule and applies more broadly.
• Unrealistic trading. Over-leveraging, one-sided bets, "account rolling" (buying several Challenges and betting opposite ways) and risk management that is materially different from your other trades.
• Artificial profit distribution. Splitting one idea across days or hedging to dodge the consistency rule.
• Hyperactive EAs. More than 2,000 server requests a day.

EAs and algorithmic trading are allowed provided the strategy could be replicated on a live account. Third-party EAs carry the risk that many traders run the same system and breach FTMO's maximum capital allocation rule together.

The free trial

FTMO offers a free 14-day trial on MT4, MT5 or cTrader. It is unlimited in number but one at a time, ends if you have not traded within seven days, and does not count towards a paid Challenge. The exact conditions differ between FTMO's regional pages, so read the one you sign up through. It is the cheapest way to find out whether your sizing survives a 5% daily limit before you pay.

How traders actually fail FTMO

Having watched a lot of challenge attempts, the failures cluster.

1. Sizing for the target instead of the limit. Risking 2% to 3% a trade to reach 10% quickly. Two normal losers and half the daily allowance is gone.
2. Correlated positions. Long EUR/USD, long GBP/USD and short USD/CHF is one dollar trade at triple size. The platform's correlation matrix exists for this.
3. Floating loss at the daily reset. Being down $4,500 on open trades at 11pm UK and holding, hoping. The rule counts equity, not closed trades.
4. Forgetting the funded-account rules. A stop loss that fires 90 seconds after a CPI print on a standard FTMO Account is a violation, even though the same trade was fine a week earlier in Verification.
5. Holding into Friday's close on a standard account.

Every one of these is a process failure rather than an analysis failure, which is why what is a prop firm argues for six months of journalled trading before the first fee. The best prop firms comparison sets FTMO's rules beside the other firms, and the prop firm tools page shows how to put a correlation check, a calendar and ATR-based sizing in front of every funded trade.