Fee Refunds: Who Refunds, When, and on What Condition

A “refundable” evaluation fee is not a cash refund available on request. In the terms we read it is a credit added to a payout once the trader reaches one. FTMO returns 100% with the first reward withdrawal; FundedNext with the first payout on 2-Step but the third on 1-Step and Lite, and never on Instant; Funding Pips with the fourth reward, on two of five products.

A refund conditioned on a payout is reachable only by the minority of buyers who pass an evaluation and then withdraw. For most purchases, a refundable fee is a description of a path rather than of an entitlement. The mechanics of that path are set out in where prop firm revenue comes from.

Reward, reset and evaluation fee are firm-specific terms; they are defined in the glossary.

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Who refunds, on what condition

Parameters as of 31 July 2026, taken from each firm’s own published pages. Where a cell is not linked, the parameter is published in the firm’s plan or checkout material and we did not identify a stable URL for it; we have not filled those cells from aggregators. The5ers’ two statements — 70% from the external portion, and available from the third payout — both come from the firm’s own material and are not reconciled there. We report both rather than picking one, and the difference is a question to put to the firm before purchase rather than one to infer.

The refund is a function of the product, not of the firm. A trader buying two products from the same operator can be on entirely different refund terms: FundedNext and Funding Pips both apply different refund rules across their own product lines, and both exclude their instant-funding products.

On the subscription-priced futures products the concept largely does not arise. Topstep and MyFundedFutures bill monthly, so there is no single fee sitting in escrow waiting to be given back; Apex’s 4.0 structure charges an evaluation fee plus an activation fee on passing, with no refund parameter published and no resets.

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Three different things get called a refund

The word covers three mechanisms with almost nothing in common. One is a term of the contract. One is money returned that no term obliged anyone to return. One is not the firm’s decision at all.

The fee rebate paid with a profit share

This is the mechanism in the table above. It is a credit added to a payout, drawn from the firm’s own funds, governed entirely by the firm’s published terms, and conditional on the trader reaching whichever payout the terms name — the first, the third, or the fourth. It cannot be triggered by asking, and by construction it never triggers on an account that breaches before a payout.

A fee returned with the first reward and a fee returned with the fourth are the same sentence on a landing page. They are not the same offer. Each additional required payout is one more gate in front of the money you are being told is refundable, and the profit share itself carries conditions of its own, covered in what “up to 100% profit split” actually means.

A refund granted outside any published entitlement

The clearest documented instances are wind-downs, where firms have returned money that no term obliged them to return. When Seacrest Funded closed its prop operation, refunds covered active, unbreached challenges — breached, gifted and inactive accounts were excluded, with processing up to 30 days on a first-come-first-served basis (Finance Magnates). ATFunded promised full refunds of purchases and all pending payouts on suspending in June 2026. FundingTicks refunded active evaluation and master accounts on winding down in January 2026.

These are discretionary in the precise sense that the entitlement did not exist in the terms before the firm created it. They are useful as a record of behaviour and useless as a planning assumption.

A payment reversal through the card scheme

A chargeback is not a refund policy and not something a firm grants. It is a decision of the card network and the issuing bank, made under the network’s rules, and it operates whether or not the merchant agrees. We describe the mechanism because it shapes how this industry prices and processes payments; we do not set out how to use it.

The relevant scheme rules are public. Visa’s Acquirer Monitoring Program, effective from 1 April 2025, sets an excessive-merchant threshold of 1.50% from 1 April 2026 for merchants with at least 1,500 dispute events a month, and an acquirer-portfolio threshold of 0.50% enforced from 1 January 2026, with a fee of $8 per dispute at the excessive level (Visa VAMP fact sheet). Mastercard’s programme places a merchant in ECM at 100–299 chargebacks a month with a ratio of 150–299 basis points, and in HECM at 300 or more and 300 basis points or more, with penalties escalating from $1,000 in the early months to $100,000 and above after 19 (Mastercard excessive chargeback programme guide, via JPMorgan). The denominator in that calculation is the previous month’s volume.

One further fact is consumer-visible: there is no official merchant category code for a prop-trading challenge. The code most often used in practice is 8299, Schools and Educational Services, while Visa’s merchant data standards require a high-integrity-risk line of business to carry a category code that matches it (Visa Merchant Data Standards Manual). A payment made over a crypto rail has no chargeback mechanism at all, which is a property of the rail rather than a policy choice.

Beyond the card schemes, the statutory routes available to a challenge buyer are jurisdiction-specific and narrow; they are set out in what protection a challenge buyer actually has.

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What the terms say when the account is closed for a rule breach

The published post-breach remedy, where one exists at all, is a discounted repurchase rather than a refund.

Funding Pips prices a reset of an evaluation at a 15% discount on the purchase price, and a master-account reset at 7%, available only within seven calendar days of the breach; closures for inactivity do not qualify. On the 2 Step Standard product, resetting phase two restarts the account from phase one. Apex removed resets entirely in its 4.0 product. E8 Markets publishes neither resets nor free retries — a failed evaluation is repurchased at full price, and its Signature Futures product bills monthly and auto-renews after a failure unless cancelled.

The interaction with the refund terms is mechanical: because every fee refund in the table is conditioned on reaching a payout, a breach before the first payout ends the refund path. No firm we reviewed publishes a partial return of the fee at the point of breach. Separately, several firms’ terms provide for cancelling accrued profits on termination — The5ers’ terms state that on termination “any accrued balance of profits or rewards shall be canceled and forfeited”. Those clauses concern profit, not the fee, and they are catalogued in when a prop firm payout can be denied.

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What happens to the fee if the firm stops operating

Reported behaviour in the closures of 2024–2026 has varied, and the terms rarely address the case in advance.

Seacrest Funded announced on 4 February 2026 and closed accounts on 6 February — about two days — with a refund and final-payout window running to 28 February. ATFunded suspended on 6 June 2026 with full refunds promised. FundingTicks refunded active accounts on a 32-day timeline from rule change to wind-down. SurgeTrader’s chief executive stated at its May 2024 closure that roughly 10% of payout obligations were not met. We report these as reported; the sequence, the notice periods and what happened to balances in each case are covered in firm closures 2024–2026.

One fact sits under all of them. A challenge fee is the firm’s operating revenue from the moment it is paid: there is no client-money segregation requirement attaching to it in any jurisdiction reviewed, and no compensation scheme behind it. The fee is not held for the buyer at any point, which is why a refund at wind-down depends on the firm’s remaining cash rather than on a ring-fenced balance.

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What the word describes

Refundable, in the terms we read, means a credit attached to a payout the contract names in advance — the first, the third, or the fourth. Which one it names is published, and checking it takes a minute. That single word is the whole of the difference between two offers that read identically on a sales page.

What no refund term addresses is the part that decides whether the credit is ever paid: reaching the payout it is attached to.

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Written by the upme.com research desk. Every refund parameter above was read on the firm’s own published pages on 31 July 2026; where we could not link a stable page, we say so rather than sourcing the cell from an aggregator. This table is re-verified quarterly. Corrections to the address on our sourcing page. Nothing here is investment, legal or tax 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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