Are Prop Firms Profitable? What the Numbers Show

Almost no prop firm publishes accounts, so most claims about prop firm profits are guesses. The exception is FTMO, whose Czech filings are reported by the trade press. One firm is not an industry, but its numbers show both the upside and the swings.

What do published figures say?

The figures below are as reported by the outlets named, from company filings. Currency conversions are theirs.

Why do profits swing so much?

Profit swings because payouts depend on how traders perform, and markets change how traders perform. FTMO's co-founder attributed the 2025 decline to "market volatility", and TradeInformer reported that the firm's marketing costs rose 85%. Revenue can grow while profit shrinks.

That is the core risk of the model. A firm's payout ratio, total payouts divided by fee revenue, moves with market conditions, rule design and the mix of account sizes sold. Firms that price for an average month get caught by a good month for traders.

What do payout and pass-rate figures say about profitability?

Profit is what is left after payouts, so the published payout and pass-rate figures matter as much as revenue. Topstep says that from January to December 2025, 16.8% of its Trading Combines were completed, 51.8% of participants reached the Funded Level at least once, and 33.3% of Funded Level participants received a payout, as stated by the firm. Those rates are why fee revenue can cover payouts when pricing and rules match each other.

Payouts are still large in absolute terms. Prop Firm Match tracked $324,963,316 of payouts in 2025 from firms with tracking in place, as reported by Finance Magnates on January 6, 2026, and Finance Magnates Intelligence counted $115.1 million of on-chain payouts across ten large firms in Q1 2026, up from $55.3 million a year earlier. When payouts double while sales do not, margins fall: FTMO's 2025 payouts came in 82% above its own forecast, TradeInformer reported, in the year its net profit fell 59%.

Court filings give one more data point, with a caveat. In 2023 the CFTC alleged that My Forex Funds had taken at least $310 million in fees from more than 135,000 customers since November 2021. The court dismissed the case with prejudice in May 2025 and awarded the defendants fees, so the figure is an allegation about scale, not a finding. Model your own firm's economics with labelled assumptions in our prop firm business plan template, and see budgets by launch route.

Why do so many firms still fail?

Big-firm profits hide a long tail of closures. Finance Magnates estimated 80 to 100 firms shut down in 2024, many after MetaQuotes withdrew platform access. Common causes are no audience, a reserve sized for an average month, single-platform dependency and losing the payment processor. Our page on why prop firms fail covers each.

For a new founder, profitability depends less on the model than on four numbers you control: price per account size, the rules that set the pass rate, the size of your reserve, and the cost of acquiring each trader.

Questions

Sources

1. Finance Magnates: FTMO's parent netted over $62 million on $329M revenue in 2024 (Nov 14, 2025)
2. TradeInformer: FTMO sees 59% decline in profit (Sep 8, 2026)
3. Finance Magnates: 80–100 prop firms wiped out in 2024's industry collapse
4. Finance Magnates: Prop firm shuts down after one week, "we only made four sales"
5. Topstep: 2025 trader performance statistics
6. Finance Magnates: Prop Firm Match tracked about $325 million in payouts in 2025
7. Finance Magnates Data Lab: Tracked prop firm crypto payouts doubled to $115M in Q1 2026
8. CFTC release 8771-23, reprinted by Mondo Visione: CFTC charges My Forex Funds (Sep 1, 2023)
9. Willkie Compliance Concourse: New Jersey federal judge dismisses forex case with prejudice