Prop Firm Profit Split Explained: What You Keep After Everything

✓ Last verified 2026-08-02

Prop firm pricing pages lead with the profit split, “keep up to 90% of your profits”, because it’s the most attractive number they have. It’s also the number that tells you the least about what you’ll actually take home. Here’s what sits between the headline percentage and the amount that arrives in your bank account.

What the split actually applies to

The split is a percentage of profit generated on the funded account, not a percentage of the account balance and not a percentage of your own money, because in most models, there isn’t any of your own money in the funded account. You paid an evaluation fee to get access to it. The split determines your share of what the account earns from that point forward.

This is worth stating plainly because it’s easy to mentally round “90% profit split” up to “I keep 90% of the account.” You keep 90% of whatever profit you generate, provided you generate any at all, which most challenge attempts don’t.

What typically comes off before you see the split percentage

The evaluation fee itself. This is spent before you’ve made a dollar of profit, and at most firms it’s non-refundable regardless of outcome. It needs to be recovered from future profit share before you’re ahead overall, not treated as a sunk cost you can ignore once you’re funded.

Reset fees, if you fail and retry. Most traders don’t pass a challenge on the first attempt. Each additional attempt is typically another paid reset. If it took you three attempts to get funded, your real cost basis is three evaluation fees, not one, and that full amount needs to come back out of profit share before the split is actually paying you anything.

Platform or data fees, at firms that charge them separately from the evaluation price. Check whether these are one-time or recurring, since a recurring monthly fee quietly reduces every payout cycle’s net.

The scaling plan’s fine print. Many firms advertise scaling, your funded capital increases as you hit profit targets. What’s less advertised is that scaling plans usually reset if you have a losing month or breach a soft drawdown limit, and the terms for exactly when that happens are in the rules document, not the marketing page.

Minimum payout thresholds and processing minimums. Some firms only process payouts above a set amount or on a fixed schedule, which affects how long profit sits before it’s actually payable, not whether it’s owed.

A realistic worked example

Take an 80/20 split, a $250 evaluation fee, and a trader who passes on their second attempt (two fees paid, $500 total cost basis). In the first payout cycle, the account generates $1,000 in profit. At an 80% split, the trader’s share is $800, but $500 of that is recovering the sunk evaluation cost, leaving $300 of actual new income from that cycle. The 80% number on the pricing page was accurate. It just wasn’t the number that mattered for working out when the trader actually turned a profit overall.

This is also where tax fits in, profit share paid out is generally treated as income, separate from whether you’ve fully recovered your evaluation costs yet. See our guide on tax basics for Filipino forex traders for the general framework, which applies to prop firm profit share the same way it applies to direct trading income.

What to check before you compare firms on split percentage alone

Two firms both advertising “90% split” are not offering the same deal if one has no reset fee and a low evaluation cost, and the other charges more per attempt and resets the scaling plan aggressively. Before comparing headline percentages, check the actual reset fee amount, whether it changes on repeat attempts, the recurring platform fee if any, the minimum payout amount and schedule, and the exact conditions that reset a scaling plan.

The honest way to evaluate a profit split isn’t “what percentage do I keep”, it’s “how much total cost do I need to clear before that percentage starts meaning anything”, which is a question the pricing page alone can’t answer.

Educational content only, not investment or tax advice. Fee structures and profit split terms vary by firm and change over time; always confirm the current terms directly in a firm’s official rules document before purchasing an evaluation.