Day Trading Prop Firms 2026: Intraday Rules Compared

This page covers online funded-account firms: companies that sell an evaluation, then give you a simulated account to trade under a fixed rule set. It does not cover physical proprietary trading desks that hire salaried traders onto a payroll. The search term pulls in both, and they have almost nothing in common. If you are looking for a job at a trading firm, this is the wrong page.

One more definition before anything else. “Daily” on this page always means the daily loss limit. It never means the payout cycle. Payout frequency is a separate subject and lives in the payout speed comparison.

Three intraday rules separate day trading prop firms: whether the daily loss limit is measured from your opening balance or your peak equity, what time and timezone it resets, and whether a breach registers the moment equity touches the floor or only at the close.

Those three settings decide more accounts than profit targets do. A trader can be well inside the overall drawdown and still lose the account before lunch.

How the Daily Loss Limit Is Calculated

Every firm publishes a percentage. The percentage is the least interesting part. What matters is the number it is subtracted from, and there are two models.

Model 1: from the opening balance. The floor is set once, at reset, from your account balance at that moment. It then stays fixed for the whole session no matter how high equity climbs.

FTMO documents this precisely. Its own trading objectives page defines the limit as the account balance recorded at 00:00 CE(S)T minus a fixed percentage of the initial simulated capital, and states that intraday changes from open positions do not move the limit. On a 2-Step account that percentage is 5%; on the 1-Step it is 3%.

The practical effect: if you open the day at $100,000 and run equity up to $104,000 by midday, your floor is still $95,000. You have $9,000 of room from the peak. Profit made during the session gives you extra buffer.

Model 2: from the higher of balance or equity at reset. Some firms take whichever is greater at the reset moment. If you carried a floating profit through the reset, that unrealised gain becomes part of your baseline and your floor rises with it.

This one bites in a specific way. A floating profit that exists at reset raises your floor, and then giving that same profit back later in the session counts as a daily loss even though your closed P&L never moved.

A third pattern worth naming: peak equity trailing. This is not strictly a daily limit, but it interacts with one. E8 Markets is reported to run intraday trailing on one product line and end-of-day trailing on another, meaning the overall floor rises as equity climbs rather than staying anchored to the start. Blueberry Funded uses trailing drawdown on its Rapid and Instant accounts and a static model on Prime and 1-Step. Under trailing, a good morning permanently raises the floor you must stay above.

What counts toward the loss. At essentially every firm in this category the calculation is equity-based, not closed-balance-based. FundedNext’s documentation is explicit that realized losses, floating losses, swaps and commissions all count. FundingPips states that both floating P&L and closed positions count toward the daily loss.

That single detail causes most surprise breaches. A trader down $4,800 on closed trades who holds one open position floating at minus $300 is at $5,100 of daily loss against a $5,000 limit. Nothing has been closed. The account is already gone.

Reset Time and Timezone

This is the least documented field in the whole category, and the one most likely to cost you an account you thought you had saved.

The reset time is not your midnight. Three of the firms with published mechanics use three different clocks:

• FTMO resets at 00:00 CE(S)T, Prague time. FTMO’s own guidance points traders to a timezone converter in the client area rather than assuming.
• FundedNext resets at midnight server time, which is GMT+3 during daylight saving and GMT+2 outside it. The firm publishes both and shows a countdown in the dashboard.
• FundingPips resets at 00:00 Platform Time (UTC+3), also with a dashboard countdown.

For a New York trader, 00:00 CE(S)T lands at 6:00 PM or 7:00 PM Eastern depending on the season. That is inside the trading day for anyone holding into the evening. For a trader in Sydney or Manila it lands mid-morning.

Why this matters more than it sounds. The reset is not a neutral clock tick. It rebases the floor. FTMO’s own documentation warns that a position which was inside the limit before midnight can breach it after the reset if the floating loss is large enough, because the baseline has changed underneath the position.

Daylight saving moves the reset. Both FTMO’s CE(S)T and FundedNext’s GMT+2 to GMT+3 shift twice a year. The reset moves by an hour in your local time and nobody sends you a reminder.

Most firms do not publish this at all. Of the firms in the table below, three publish reset mechanics in their own documentation. The rest do not, and the third-party figures circulating for them disagree with each other. That is a reason to check the dashboard countdown on a small account before committing to a large one.

Intraday Breach vs End-of-Day Breach

Two firms can publish the same percentage and enforce it completely differently.

Intraday breach (hard, real-time). The rule is violated the moment equity touches the floor, whether or not a position is closed. FTMO’s wording is that the limit is a level below which equity cannot drop at any time. There is no grace, no chance to recover, and platforms typically auto-close positions and disable trading immediately.

This is the standard across most CFD firms in this category.

End-of-day breach. The check runs at the session close against the closing figure. Intraday excursions below the floor do not register as long as you are back above it by the close. E8 Markets is reported to run this model on one product line, where the floor only updates at day close.

Why the distinction decides which firm suits you. Under intraday enforcement, a wide-stop strategy that regularly floats deep before resolving will breach on a spike it would have recovered from. Under end-of-day enforcement, the same strategy survives. A scalper closing everything within minutes will never notice the difference.

One more variant. FundedNext’s documentation distinguishes hard breaches on funded accounts from soft breaches during the challenge on some products. A soft breach may pause trading rather than terminate the account. The terminology is not standardised across the industry, so read the specific wording rather than the label.

Flat-by-Close and Overnight Restrictions

Very few firms in this category force a flat close. That is a futures prop desk convention that has not carried over to CFD evaluation firms, and it is worth stating plainly because the assumption travels with traders coming from futures.

What CFD firms restrict instead:

• News windows. FTMO blocks trades within two minutes either side of high-impact releases on Classic accounts. FundedNext and BrightFunded use a five-minute window on funded accounts. Blueberry Funded uses two minutes around red-folder events.
• Weekend holds. Permitted at most firms, restricted at some. FTMO sells a Swing account specifically for overnight and weekend holding, which implies the standard account is more constrained.
• Swap costs. Holding overnight incurs swaps, and swaps count toward the daily loss calculation at firms with equity-based rules. An overnight hold can therefore consume daily loss allowance while you sleep.
• Inactivity requirements. thePropTrade requires one trade every 30 days to keep the account active. That is an inactivity rule, not a flat-by-close rule.

If your strategy depends on multi-day holds, this page is the wrong lens. That belongs in the swing trading firm comparison.

Intraday Rules by Firm

Affiliate disclosure: PropFirmProof earns commission on some links in the table below. Commission does not affect placement or any figure in any cell. Every cell is sourced as marked and rechecked on the verification date.

Full profiles for every firm above sit in the prop firm comparison.

Minimum trading days and evaluation time limits are a separate axis and are compared in the minimum trading days guide. Lot and contract size caps are defined in the prop firm glossary under Lot Size Limit.

What to Verify Before Paying

Five checks, all doable from the firm’s own documentation before you spend anything.

1. Find the reset time in the firm’s own help centre, not a review site. If the firm does not publish it, that is information too. Convert it to your local time and write it down, then check again after each daylight saving change.

2. Establish the baseline. Ask whether the floor is set from balance at reset or from the higher of balance and equity. If a floating position is open at reset, the answer changes what your floor is the next morning.

3. Confirm whether floating losses count. Almost everywhere they do. Where a firm says otherwise, get it in writing from support, because that single difference changes how wide your stops can be.

4. Check whether the breach is real-time or end-of-day. A strategy that floats deep before resolving needs end-of-day enforcement to survive. Intraday enforcement will close it on a spike.

5. Read the news window and weekend rules together with the swap treatment. At an equity-based firm, swaps accrued overnight eat into the next day’s allowance.

A sixth, practical one: open the dashboard on a small account and watch the countdown timer for one full cycle before scaling up. Firms with a visible countdown, including FundedNext and FundingPips, make this easy.

Last updated: 4 August 2026. Intraday rules change without notice and vary by product within the same firm. Every figure above should be checked against the firm’s live rules page before purchase.

PropFirmProof publishes comparison and education content only and does not provide financial advice. Some links on this page are affiliate links, and commission does not influence any figure in the table. Trading carries substantial risk.

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