How Prop Firm Payout Ratios Are Actually Calculated

The payout ratio is the share of a prop firm’s revenue that goes back out to traders as profit share. Exactly one firm in the industry has published audited figures that let it be calculated: FTMO’s FY2024 filings show $322.8 million in global revenue against $176.3 million paid to traders — a payout ratio of 54.6%. Almost every public estimate of a competitor’s revenue assumes 25–40%. If the audited figure is representative, those estimates are too high by roughly a factor of two.

The assumed ratio is the hidden variable underneath almost every number written about this industry. An analyst who sees “$283 million paid out” on a firm’s homepage and wants a revenue figure does payouts ÷ payout ratio. Assume 30% and the answer is $940 million. Use the one audited ratio available and it is $518 million. Those are two different industries.

Terms used here that carry firm-specific definitions — payout, reward, profit split — are defined in the glossary.

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The one audited data point

FTMO s.r.o. is domiciled in Prague. Its parent holding files accounts under Czech law, so unlike essentially every other operator in the category, a portion of its financials is a matter of public record rather than a marketing claim.

The FY2024 figures, as reported from those filings by TradeInformer and Finance Magnates:

Sources: TradeInformer, “How does FTMO make money”; Finance Magnates on the OMHC holding accounts. The holding-level figures reported in the same coverage are revenue of CZK 6.84 billion (≈$329 million, +53% year on year) and net profit of CZK 1.3 billion (≈$62.5 million).

More than half of revenue leaves the business as trader profit share. The payout line is a real cost, not a residual. The firm is profitable — the accounts show it clearly — but the profit comes from operating leverage, with OpEx under 15% of revenue, rather than from retaining most of what traders earn.

Nothing comparable exists anywhere else in the category. No other firm publishes audited accounts. Topstep discloses some funnel statistics voluntarily; that is the closest second, and it carries no revenue-and-payout pair.

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Why the industry’s working assumption is 25–40%

The 25–40% range is not sourced to any filing. It appears in vendor reports and third-party analyses as an assumption about how a fee-driven business ought to work, and it has been reused often enough that it now reads like a finding.

The reasoning behind it is intuitive and wrong in a specific way. It goes: only about 7% of challenge buyers ever receive a payout; the average payout is a few thousand dollars; therefore payouts must be a modest fraction of fee revenue.

The first two premises hold. The independent dataset here is from FPFX Technologies, a software provider to prop firms, covering 300,000+ accounts, 100,000 traders and 10 firms, published by Finance Magnates in September 2024:

Source: Finance Magnates / FPFX.

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The bottom-up check

Take the funnel figures and calculate payouts as a share of revenue from below.

Seven percent of buyers receive a payout. FTMO publishes average payout as a percentage of account nominal per product: 6.80% on a $10k account, 5.72% on $25k, 5.61% on $50k, 5.96% on $100k, 6.12% on $200k. On a $50k account that is roughly $2,800–3,100. Using an average lifetime spend of $800 per buyer:

0.07 × ~$3,050 ≈ $213 per buyer → against $800 of lifetime spend, that is about 27% of revenue.

That lands squarely inside the conventional 25–40% assumption, and it is roughly half the audited 54.6%.

The gap of about 27 percentage points is repeat payouts. The bottom-up figure counts one payout per successful trader. The audited figure counts every payout the firm made in a year — the second, the fifth and the twentieth, to the small group of traders who stay profitable. The FPFX dataset sizes that group: 1–3% of buyers become sustainably paid over more than six months.

What this means in practice

The payout line of a prop firm is not driven by how many people pass. It is driven by a small tail of traders who keep passing money out, month after month. A pass rate, published or estimated, says almost nothing about what a firm pays.

A former risk director at The5ers put the same point in a public formulation: ”Less Than 1% of Traders Can Bankrupt a Prop Firm.”

There is direct evidence of the mechanism operating. On 12 July 2026, Alpha Futures closed its flagship Premium plan and stated that the plan had produced more than $25 million in payouts over two months, describing the result as “significant operating losses.” Separately, ATFX suspended its ATFunded prop operation on 6 June 2026, stating that it had chosen to “pause, stabilise, and evaluate alternative models that better align trader success with company sustainability” (Finance Magnates).

Both events are consistent with a business whose cost line concentrates in a handful of accounts rather than spreading evenly across a customer base.

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How sensitive the model is

Using the audited FTMO structure — payout ratio 54.6%, OpEx 14.9% — the arithmetic to break-even is straightforward. With operating expenses at roughly 15% of revenue, the business reaches zero when payouts reach approximately 85% of revenue.

That is a 30-percentage-point buffer, and it exists because operating expenses are unusually low relative to revenue. A firm with a heavier cost structure has less room. One published analysis notes that a rise in payout rate of the magnitude implied “could have easily happened over the last few months, given higher levels of market volatility” (fx-edge.com).

So the payout ratio is not a parameter a firm sets. It is an output that moves with market conditions and with the performance of a small number of accounts.

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Why the reported totals do not settle it

A natural response is to look at the payout totals firms publish and work backwards. That does not work, because for several firms the self-reported total and the independently tracked total differ by a wide margin.

We are not in a position to say which number in any row is correct, and we do not assert that any figure is wrong. What can be said factually is that the figures differ, that in several cases the firm’s own public ledger differs from its own homepage, and that none of these totals is audited. Where a modelling exercise needs a number, the verified column is the conservative choice.

The one place a firm’s own ledger is directly checkable is Funding Pips, which publishes a live rewards page: fundingpips.com/rewards showed 67,914 rewards delivered and $66.78 million paid in 2026 at the time of writing. Alpha Capital’s public register is verifiable against the Rise blockchain rails it uses for payment.

Neither FTMO nor The5ers appears in the independent Finance Magnates crypto-payout tracking at all. The largest firm in the industry by revenue is absent from the main third-party dataset.

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The aggregate picture

For scale, the same Finance Magnates tracking of crypto payouts across the top ten firms gives the following, excluding FTMO and The5ers:

• Q1 2025: $55.3 million → Q1 2026: $115.1 million (+109% year on year)
• But Q4 2025 was $115.2 million — quarter-on-quarter growth of 0.1%
• Q1 2026: 61,682 payout events, average payout $1,865, down from $2,020 in Q4 2025
• Transactions +8.1% quarter on quarter and +129% year on year
• FundedNext CFDs ($42.7M) and MyFunded Futures ($38.5M) together accounted for 70.5% of tracked volume

Source: Finance Magnates.

Total payout volume has flattened while the count of individual payouts rises and the average falls. More payments, each of them smaller.

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What the record supports

1. One audited payout ratio exists in this industry. It is 54.6%, it belongs to FTMO, and it is roughly double what every public estimate of a competitor assumes — which puts those estimates at about twice the size of the businesses they describe. Everything else in circulation is an estimate or an assumption.
2. The payout line concentrates in the 1–3% of buyers who stay paid past six months. How many people pass an evaluation tells you very little about what a firm pays out.
3. Self-reported and independently tracked payout totals diverge substantially at several firms. Where both exist, quote both.
4. A payout ratio is not a policy setting. It is an output, and it moves.

Related: what “up to 100% profit split” actually means covers the other side of the same arithmetic — how much of a trader’s profit actually converts into a payment. When a payout can be denied covers the conditions attached.

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Written by the upme.com research desk. We publish sourced research on the retail prop-trading and brokerage industry. Figures are as of 31 July 2026 and link to primary sources where those exist. Corrections to the address on our sourcing page. Nothing here is investment advice.

Sources

Every factual claim above is drawn from one of the documents below. Where a document has been superseded since the date given, tell us and the piece is corrected with a dated line.

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