FTMO vs FundedNext vs FundingPips (2026): The Rules Compared

Search for a comparison of these three and you get the same table every time: profit target, daily loss, max drawdown, minimum days, price. The table is accurate and it decides nothing, because on the two-step evaluations the three firms have converged. Same 5% daily loss limit. Same 10% maximum loss. Same static floor that does not trail. Same absence of a calendar deadline. Two of the three have identical profit targets.

If the rules are nearly the same, the choice has to be made on something else. This post works through what actually differs, in the order it will affect you.

The rules, side by side

Figures are for the flagship two-phase CFD evaluation at each firm, verified 16 September 2026. Percentages are of the initial account balance.

Static drawdown is the common thread and it is worth being precise about, because it is the rule most often described wrongly. A static floor sits a fixed distance below your starting balance and does not move: on a $100,000 account the floor is $90,000 on day one and $90,000 after you are up $8,000, which means profit becomes room. A trailing floor follows your equity high and never comes back down. Neither of these three uses a trailing threshold on the accounts above, which quietly makes all three more forgiving than the futures firms people compare them against. The mechanics, and why two accounts advertising the same percentage are different products, are worked day by day in trailing vs static drawdown.

The one headline difference that is real

Convert the targets into the unit that survives a change of account size. At 1% risk per trade, one R is $1,000 on a $100,000 account, so the whole evaluation reads in R terms:

The interesting number is the ratio of what you must produce to what you are allowed to lose, and it lives entirely in Phase 1. FTMO asks you to make as much as you may lose: 10R required against a 10R floor, a ratio of 1.00. The other two ask 8R against the same 10R floor, a ratio of 0.80. Phase 2 is identical everywhere at 5R against 10R, a ratio of 0.50, which is why Phase 2 is the phase nobody writes about.

Now price that difference in work. At an expectancy of 0.25R per trade, 15R takes about 60 trades and 13R takes about 52. At 0.15R per trade it is 100 trades against 87. The gap is eight to thirteen trades across an entire evaluation, or roughly two extra winners.

Why that gap is smaller than it looks

Two winning trades is real, but it is well inside the variance of your own results. If your per-trade outcomes have a standard deviation of about 1R, which is typical for a fixed-stop strategy taking 1R to 3R winners, then the spread on a 55-trade sample is wide enough that the same strategy can finish an evaluation 5R apart from itself for no reason at all. The sample-size arithmetic behind that, and the formula that tells you how many trades any given edge needs before its result means anything, is in how many backtest trades before you go live.

The consequence: choosing FundedNext or FundingPips over FTMO to save 2R is optimising a number that noise moves further than the rule does. It is a tiebreaker, not a reason.

So look at the rules that are not the same.

The daily clock is where the firms genuinely differ

Every one of these evaluations allows a 5% daily loss. The number is identical. What is not identical is when the day starts and what it is measured from, and that decides whether two bad sessions land inside one budget or two.

FTMO measures the Maximum Daily Loss from the account balance at midnight CE(S)T, and it counts floating profit and loss on open positions, not only closed trades. So an open loser at 23:55 Prague time is already spending today's allowance, and at 00:05 it is spending tomorrow's.

FundedNext resets the Stellar daily limit at 00:00 server time, which is GMT+2 or GMT+3 depending on daylight saving, and calculates it off the day's starting balance rather than intraday equity highs.

Those clocks are one to two hours apart, and that matters more than it sounds if you trade the New York afternoon or the Asia open. A trader who takes a loss in the late New York session and another at the Tokyo open may be inside one day's budget at one firm and across two at another, with exactly the same trades. Nobody fails an evaluation because of this on its own, but it changes which trade is the one that breaches, which is the same thing as changing how much you can risk on the second trade of an overlapping session.

The practical move is not to pick a firm on its reset time. It is to know yours, and to stop measuring your day against the calendar on your wall.

There is also a second-order interaction on the daily rule worth knowing before you size anything, which is that the daily floor and the max loss floor cross each other once you are in drawdown. The full arithmetic, including the case where you can obey the daily rule perfectly and still fail, is in how to pass a prop firm challenge.

Consistency is phase-scoped, not firm-scoped

"No consistency rule" is the claim that sells these three evaluations, and in the evaluation phases it is true for all of them. It stops being true later, and the later is the part that holds your money.

FTMO. The 2-Step has no consistency requirement. The 1-Step product carries the Best Day Rule: your single best trading day cannot exceed 50% of your positive days' profit, and it applies in evaluation and on the funded account. So the answer to "does FTMO have a consistency rule" depends entirely on which product you bought.

FundedNext. Stellar 2-Step, 1-Step, Lite and Instant carry no consistency requirement in either phase. The 40% consistency rule that turns up in FundedNext discussions belongs to its futures products, not to the Stellar CFD accounts.

FundingPips. No consistency score in the 2-Step Standard evaluation. On the funded Master account it reappears as a condition on how you withdraw: the on-demand payout option, the one that pays 90%, requires a 35% consistency score, meaning no single day may account for more than 35% of the profit you are withdrawing, and the score resets after each processed reward.

Read that last one again, because it is the trap. A trader picks the firm partly because the evaluation has no consistency rule, passes, has one enormous day inside an otherwise quiet month, and then discovers the constraint at the counter rather than in the challenge. The rule was always there. It was scoped to a stage nobody reads about before paying.

The formula is the same everywhere it appears, best day divided by total profit, and so is the fix: you cannot shrink the day that already happened, you can only add profit underneath it. The prop firm consistency rule explained has the arithmetic for how much more, plus the daily cap that keeps you compliant going forward.

The payout design is the real divergence

Once funded, the three firms stop looking alike.

FTMO starts the 2-Step at an 80% split and scales to 90% through its Scaling Plan, and refunds the evaluation fee with the first payout.

FundedNext starts Stellar 2-Step at 80% and scales to 90% through Scale-Up, with rewards on a 14-day cycle. It also pays 15% of the profit you made during the challenge phases, claimable after passing all phases and meeting the Scale-Up criteria, and not available to US clients. That is an unusual structure and it is the one thing on this page that pays you for work done before funding.

FundingPips does something structurally different on standard Master accounts: it makes the split a function of how often you withdraw. 60% weekly, 80% bi-weekly, 90% on demand with the 35% consistency score attached, 100% monthly.

That last column is the most interesting design decision of the three, because it prices patience directly. Waiting a month instead of a week is worth 40 points of split on the same profit. It also means a comparison of "profit split" across these firms is not comparing like with like unless you say how often you intend to withdraw, and most comparisons do not.

What the two-phase structure does to your drawdown budget

One structural point that applies to all three and is worth understanding before you decide a phase is going well.

Each phase is a fresh account at the initial balance, with the floor placed 10% below it again. So across a full evaluation you may spend up to 20% of drawdown, but never more than 10% inside one phase, and the profit you built in Phase 1 does not carry forward.

The practical consequence runs the opposite way to how it feels. Because the floor is static, being up 7% in Phase 1 genuinely does give you 17% of room from where you stand, and traders correctly relax into that. Pass, and the room resets to 10% while your required target drops to 5%. Phase 2 is the easier target and the tighter cushion at the same time, which is exactly the combination that punishes a trader who finished Phase 1 by raising risk.

Size Phase 2 as if it were a new challenge, because it is one.

The pacing inversion nobody mentions

The minimum trading days look like a nuisance rule. Lined up against the targets they say something more useful:

FundingPips has the loosest pacing requirement, and that is precisely why using it is the most dangerous of the three. Passing at the 3-day minimum per phase means producing 2.17R on each of six trading days, against a daily loss limit of 5R. That is the profile of a trader taking two or three full-risk positions a day and needing most of them to work, which is the behaviour that breaches daily limits and, at FundingPips specifically, builds the concentrated single day that its own 35% payout consistency score will later object to.

FundedNext's 5-day minimum is the most forgiving pace on the page. It is also the one traders complain about, because it delays a fast pass. It is worth exactly nothing to pass fast.

If you want the number in R rather than percent, and the reasons an R column can quietly lie to you about what you risked, R-multiples covers the unit and its failure modes.

How to actually choose

Ordered by how much it will change your result.

1. Pick the model, not the firm. Every difference above is smaller than the difference between two models at the same firm. A 3% daily limit instead of 5% is a first-order change, because it decides how many trades you can be wrong about in one day. A 2R difference in target is not.
2. Check the payout rules before the evaluation rules. This is where the constraint you did not read about lives, and it applies to the money rather than to the simulated account.
3. Match the minimum days to how you trade. If you take two setups a week, a 5-day minimum per phase is irrelevant. If you scalp daily, the 3-day minimum is an invitation you should decline.
4. Know your reset clock. Write the hour down. Your daily budget belongs to that clock, not yours.
5. Only then look at the target. 13R versus 15R is the tiebreaker.

And the rule that outranks all five: none of these evaluations is failed by the rule. They are failed by sizing. At 1% risk per trade the 10% floor buys ten consecutive full losses; at 2% it buys five, and a five-loss run at a 45% win rate is the base case rather than bad luck. That arithmetic, with the losing-streak numbers behind it, is the core of how to pass a prop firm challenge.

Tracking the rules you chose

Whichever firm you pick, the rules are only useful if you can see your position against them before the next trade rather than after the breach. That is the job TradingSFX's prop firm tracking does: pick FTMO, FundedNext, FundingPips, The Funded Trader, E8 Markets, TopStep or Apex from the presets, or type your account's own numbers if your model differs from the published defaults, and each logged trade updates two figures that a drawdown chart cannot give you.

The first is how much you can still lose today without ending anything, taken as the smaller of your remaining daily allowance and your remaining room to the floor, which is the figure that changes what you may risk on the next trade. The second is your consistency position: your best day as a share of total profit, how much more green-day profit would clear a breach, and the largest total a further day can reach while staying compliant. There is a free consistency rule calculator if you only want that number and nothing else.

Presets track each firm's published terms, and firms revise models often enough that you should check yours against your own account before trusting a default. The Basic plan is free forever at 10 trades a month, which is enough to run one evaluation's worth of A-setups through it; Pro is $19.99/mo and tracks up to five accounts in parallel, which is what running two challenges at once actually needs.

Published September 16, 2026. Evaluation rules, consistency requirements and payout structures for FTMO, FundedNext and FundingPips verified 16 September 2026 against each firm's own trading objectives, help centre and product pages. All three vendors' domains are blocked by the session egress proxy, so figures come from indexed extracts of those official pages corroborated across at least two independent searches each. One source claimed a 10% Phase 1 target for FundedNext Stellar 2-Step against three claiming 8%; 8% is used here. Prop firms revise rules frequently and per-model, so confirm against your own account's terms before sizing anything.