Topstep review.

Overview

Topstep is a Chicago futures proprietary trading firm that sells a simulated evaluation, the Trading Combine, and pays real money on the results. It has been operating under the Topstep Trader name since at least June 2010, which makes it one of the oldest firms in this business. The question a reader needs answered first is what the word “funded” buys, and Topstep answers it in two very different places. The page you land on says “Trade Our Money”. The Terms of Use say something narrower.

There are two funded stages, and only the second one touches a live market. The Express Funded Account, which is what almost everyone who passes actually gets, is simulated. Topstep’s own Terms of Use, last updated 11 May 2026, define it: “‘Express Funded Account’ means an account using real-time simulated Data provided after successful performance in the Trading Combine including those described in Section 26. Trades in a simulated account are not made in live markets and do not incur actual profits or losses.” Above that sits the Live Funded Account, which is genuinely live, routed through an unnamed futures commission merchant partner, trading TopstepFunded LLC’s capital. Topstep’s own 2025 statistics, printed in the footer of every page, say that 0.71% of individual participants trading in an Express Funded Account were called up to a Live Funded Account.

So the honest description is a simulated funding programme with a narrow live door at the top of it. That is not the same thing as a demo dressed up as funding, because the door is real, the live capital is real and the payouts on the simulated stage are real money too. It is also not what “Trade Our Money” implies to somebody reading the front page. Topstep says the plain version one click deeper, on its own prop landing page: “In the Trading Combine and Express Funded Account, trading takes place in a simulated environment using real market data… Live Funded Accounts trade with real capital.”

Overview Table

Facts List

• Terms of Use counterparty is Topstep LLC, “a Delaware limited liability company”. The funded account counterparty is TopstepFunded LLC, “an Illinois limited liability company”.
• Disputes go to individual JAMS arbitration in Wilmington, Delaware. Class actions and jury trial are waived.
• Liability is capped at the greater of last month’s fees or $100.
• Profit split is 90/10 in the trader’s favour at both funded stages. Minimum payout is $125.
• Express Funded Account payouts are capped per request at $2,000 to $6,000 depending on size and path.
• Live Funded Account payouts have no dollar cap, but total payouts are monitored so they do not exceed 90% of Starting Balance plus net Trading Profits.
• The Maximum Loss Limit is monitored intraday on unrealised profit and loss, and trails up on end of day balance but never down.
• After a first payout the Maximum Loss Limit is set to $0 permanently, so the remaining balance becomes the whole buffer.
• A call up to Live is compulsory once offered, and any Express balance above the account size cap is forfeited.
• Topstep publishes CFTC style performance statistics: in 2025, 16.8% of Combines were completed and 33.3% of funded level participants received a payout.

Key Takeaways

The funded stage almost everybody reaches is simulated, and the firm says so in its own definitions. The Express Funded Account is “an account using real-time simulated Data”, and “Trades in a simulated account are not made in live markets and do not incur actual profits or losses”. Payouts from it are real money, paid on simulated results.

There is a real live stage, and 0.71% of Express traders reached it in 2025. The Live Funded Account trades TopstepFunded LLC’s capital through a futures commission merchant partner. Topstep never names that partner in any document we could reach. Its retail brokerage arm does name its own FCM, Plus500US Financial Services LLC, but that is a different product.

You do not hold the account. Topstep’s help centre describes the structure for Canadian traders as “a sub-account of Topstep’s master account, considered a US-based account”, and answers the direct question plainly: “Is the live trading capital my money? No. It’s Topstep’s prop firm capital made available as you demonstrate consistent performance. Once you withdraw funds via a Payout, those funds are yours.”

The rule most likely to cost a compliant trader money is the call up itself. Topstep’s own worked example: “Four $50K XFAs holding $25K each. Account Size = $50K. Cumulative balance was $100K, so $50K is forfeited.” You cannot refuse. “Once the Risk Team determines you’re ready, your options are to move to Live or close your Express Funded Account.”

The consistency rule ratchets one way. In the Trading Combine your best day sets the target and never resets downward: “Losses do not reset your best day.” Every strong day raises the bar you have to clear.

Recourse is thin by design. Delaware law, individual JAMS arbitration in Wilmington, no class actions, and a liability cap of the greater of last month’s fees or $100. TopstepFunded LLC is not a member of the NFA, so NFA arbitration is not open to a prop trader.

The record is unusually clean and unusually long. We queried NFA BASIC on 12 August 2026 and found no regulatory action and no arbitration award against any Topstep entity. The Topstep Trader website has been continuously archived since 26 June 2010.

Challenges are on sale and payouts are being processed. Nothing we found suggests the firm has stopped selling evaluations or stopped paying. Its payout volume figures, though, are its own and are not audited.

Company & Accountability

No prop firm anywhere holds a licence for this activity, and Topstep’s lack of one is not a finding. What matters is who you are contracting with, under what law, and what you could actually do if a payout were refused. Topstep answers the first question better than most, and the second and third answers are firmly in the firm’s favour.

The entities

We verified those two NFA records directly against NFA BASIC’s own data endpoint on 12 August 2026, using the request shape published in BASIC’s own scripts, with a positive control confirming the search returns known firms. Topstep Brokerage LLC is registered as an Introducing Broker with the CFTC, NFA member approved since 8 September 2025, at 130 S. Jefferson St., Suite 400, Chicago, IL 60661. It also carries a Notice Broker Dealer registration effective 20 March 2026 and Swap Firm approval effective 5 May 2026. Its record carries no regulatory actions and no arbitration awards. Neither does Topstep Advisory LLC’s, which holds Commodity Trading Advisor registration and the same Swap Firm approval.

Those two records do more work than a licence table suggests, because they name the people and the parents. Both list Topstep LLC and Topstep Holdings LLC among their principals, both list Michael Joseph Patak as “CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER” and “INDIRECT OWNER”, and both share the Chicago address. Tammy Sue Botsford is listed as Chief Compliance Officer of both, Sarah Suzan Zeleny as Chief Operating Officer, and Andrew James Maratea as vested with management authority. That means the entity behind the Trading Combine appears on a federal self regulatory register as the parent of two members, with named officers who have been through NFA principal screening. It is not the same as being regulated, and it should not be read as such, but it is a good deal more accountability than a prop firm has to offer and more than most choose to.

TopstepFunded LLC, the entity you actually contract with for a funded account, is not among those principals and does not appear on BASIC at all. Its capital is what backs the live accounts, and it sits outside every register we can search.

Two state corporate registers would settle the rest, and we did not manage to search either. The Delaware ICIS name search returned an empty result for a control query on a company that is unquestionably a Delaware LLC, and its search button is served disabled behind a CAPTCHA that never renders, so nothing can be concluded from it. Every Illinois Secretary of State hostname we tried refused us at the network edge, twelve HTTP 403s and one 404 across thirteen enumerated attempts and four different clients, so we never reached a search box. Both of those are facts about us, not about the registers or the firm.

What did corroborate independently is the USPTO federal trademark register. TopstepTechnologies LLC appears on 44 records, each sworn as “LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY; DELAWARE, USA”, at 141 West Jackson Boulevard, Suite 4240, Chicago. The oldest is serial 85801252 for TOPSTEPTRADER, filed 12 December 2012 and registered 16 July 2013, which independently dates the brand to the year Topstep’s own timeline claims. A separate registrant, TOPSTEPTRADER, LLC, is recorded as an Illinois limited liability company at Suite 200, 130 South Jefferson, the same building as the NFA address above.

What a searcher will trip over

Searching BASIC for “Topstep” returns eight rows. Two of them are TOP STEP TRADING and TOP STEP TRADING INC under NFA ID 0289742, a Chicago introducing broker whose registration was pending from 27 August 1998 and effective from 14 October 1998, and which was permanently barred from NFA membership on 30 July 2001 under case 01BCC00006. Its BASIC record gives the legal name as TOP STEP TRADING INC and lists FITZGERALD RICHARD HALL and TOP STEP TRADING as former names. That is a different firm with a different name and it predates Topstep entirely. It is worth knowing before somebody sees a bar notice and draws the wrong conclusion.

The recourse position

The Terms of Use, last updated 11 May 2026, put every dispute into arbitration: “Any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to these Terms or the breach, termination, enforcement, interpretation, or validity thereof… shall be determined by arbitration in Wilmington, Delaware before one arbitrator.” Class actions are out: “THE PARTIES AGREE TO ARBITRATE A CONSUMER DISPUTE OR BUSINESS DISPUTE ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS AND EACH WAIVES THE RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE IN A CLASS ACTION.” Jury trial is waived separately in Section 25.

Then there is the ceiling. Section 12: “IN NO EVENT WILL OUR LIABILITY FOR ANY CLAIM OF ANY KIND… EXCEED THE GREATER OF (a) THE AMOUNT PAID BY YOU TO TOPSTEP IN THE IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING MONTH FOR TOPSTEP’S PRODUCTS OR SERVICES OR (b) $100.” Topstep qualifies that immediately: “BECAUSE SOME STATES/JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF LIABILITY FOR CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, THE ABOVE LIMITATION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU. IN SUCH JURISDICTIONS, OUR LIABILITY WILL BE LIMITED TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW.” Whether the cap survives is therefore a question about the trader’s own jurisdiction, and we are not going to answer it for them. What is certain is what the contract asks for. A trader chasing a $9,000 payout is arbitrating individually, in Delaware, against a clause that asks for a ceiling that may be $100. The arbitration costs are shared initially and the prevailing party recovers them, which cuts both ways.

Because TopstepFunded LLC is not an NFA member, the NFA’s own arbitration forum is not available for a prop payout dispute. That route exists for customers of Topstep Brokerage LLC, which is a different relationship with a different product.

How to Trade

Everything runs on futures listed on CME, COMEX, NYMEX and CBOT. The site states it flatly: “Topstep traders are prohibited from trading Stocks, Options, Forex, Spot Cryptocurrency, and CFDs; these products are not available in Topstep’s program or platforms.” There is no leverage figure to quote because the constraint is a contract count, not a margin ratio.

The three stages

Stage one is the Trading Combine, a simulated account with, in the firm’s words, “one rule and two objectives”. The rule is not to hit the Maximum Loss Limit. The objectives are a profit target of $3,000, $6,000 or $9,000 for the $50K, $100K and $150K sizes, and a consistency target where your best single day stays at or below 50% of the profit target. Position limits are 5, 10 and 15 contracts, or ten times that in micros.

Stage two is the Express Funded Account, still simulated, where the balance starts at $0 and grows from trading profits. The account size label is buying power, not money. Up to five can run at once.

Stage three is the Live Funded Account, which is live. The trader does not open an account at a broker. The help centre explains the shape while answering a question about Canadian eligibility: “You trade on a sub-account of Topstep’s master account, considered a US-based account.” Positions therefore sit inside Topstep’s own account at its futures commission merchant, and the capital at risk is Topstep’s: “Is the live trading capital my money? No. It’s Topstep’s prop firm capital made available as you demonstrate consistent performance. Once you withdraw funds via a Payout, those funds are yours.”

That the live stage is genuinely cleared, rather than a better grade of simulation, shows up somewhere the marketing pages do not reach. The Topstep dashboard application’s own JavaScript bundle, 1.9 megabytes fetched on 12 August 2026, carries a cost disclaimer that reads: “The costs, including fees and commissions, and any financial information incorporating those costs are estimated and for informational purposes only. Your statement from the FCM is the definitive governing document with respect to cost’s applicable to your account.” A statement from a futures commission merchant is what a real cleared account produces. That bundle mentions an FCM exactly once, and it does not name one. Neither does anything else we could reach for the prop programme. Topstep’s separate retail brokerage does name its own: Plus500US Financial Services LLC, which we confirmed on NFA BASIC as a registered futures commission merchant, NFA ID 0001398, in Itasca, Illinois, formerly Cunningham Commodities LLC. Whether the prop programme clears through the same firm is not stated anywhere we found, and we are not going to assume it.

Session mechanics

The trading day runs 5:00 PM CT to 3:10 PM CT. All positions must be closed before 3:10 PM CT or the product’s close, whichever is sooner, and Topstep flattens automatically “about ten seconds prior to the closing bell”. Hitting the Daily Loss Limit triggers a soft breach: positions flattened, orders cancelled, no new trades until the next session. Topstep is explicit that this “is not a rule violation”.

Who decides what happened

One sentence in the Express Funded Account rules is worth more attention than its placement suggests: “Rule adherence is determined solely by Topstep based on your account activity, not by the Trading Reports or platform metrics.” The Live Funded Account rules repeat it: “Topstep determines whether you are following the rules based on your actual trading activity. This is not based on what appears in your trading reports or on your trading platform”. If your own dashboard and Topstep’s risk engine disagree, the risk engine wins.

Liquidation on unrealised profit and loss

Risk limits are checked against unrealised as well as realised numbers, and Topstep publishes a worked example of the consequence. A $50K Combine with a $48,000 Maximum Loss Limit, an open trade whose unrealised value drops the balance to $47,750, liquidation fires, and the exit fills better so the “final realized balance: $48,050”. The firm’s ruling: “Final balance above the limit doesn’t matter. The breach happened first.” A wick you never realised can end the account.

Challenges & Funding

Topstep sells three account sizes and two pricing paths, and the path choice is locked at purchase. The evaluation is a monthly subscription rather than a one off fee, which is the single most important thing to understand about the cost.

Trading Combine pricing

On the Standard Path a $149 Activation Fee is charged once per Express Funded Account earned. On the No Activation Fee Path there is nothing to pay on passing, and Topstep’s own framing is honest about the trade: the second path is “Best for Traders confident they’ll pass in 1–2 attempts”. Resets cost the same as one month. The subscription “Rebills approximately every 30 days until you pass or cancel”, and Topstep says managing it is the trader’s responsibility.

Express Funded Account

The Express Funded Account is the simulated funded stage. Balance starts at $0. At activation you pick Standard or Consistency as your payout path and, in the firm’s words, “Once you select XFA Consistency or Standard, that choice cannot be changed either.” Nor can the size. Up to five can be active at once, and an account with no trading activity for more than 30 days may be closed.

Back2Funded

Lose an Express account before your first payout and you can buy it back, at $599 for a $50K, $699 for a $100K and $829 for a $150K, up to twice per account. That is between four and twelve times the monthly Combine fee for the same size, and the reactivations are “final and non-refundable”.

Note a live contradiction between two of Topstep’s own documents. The Express Funded Account rules page on the main site, which states that it takes precedence over the account agreement, still says “You have seven calendar days from the time your XFA is closed to decide”. The help centre article, updated 18 June 2026, says 30 days and explains the change: “On May 29th, 2026, the Reactivation window increased from 7 days to 30 days!” The rules page carries a “Last updated: June 26, 2025” stamp, so the document with precedence is more than a year behind on a term that decides whether a trader still has an account.

Live Funded Account

Live account size is the average funded tier of your eligible Express accounts, rounded up to $50K, $100K or $150K. Only 20% of the transferred balance is tradable immediately, with a $10,000 floor, and the other 80% sits in Reserve, released in four 25% increments as you hit the same profit targets as the Combine. Capital expansion is reviewed weekly and “Can be delayed or denied for excessive or reckless risk behavior”.

Drawdown & Breach Rules

Topstep runs one hard rule and calls it that. The Maximum Loss Limit is “the lowest point your account balance is allowed to reach”, it is monitored in real time on both realised and unrealised profit and loss, and it “cannot be adjusted or changed. Topstep makes no exceptions.”

How the trail works

It is a trailing limit that moves in one direction. It rises with your end of day balance and never falls, and it locks once it reaches your starting balance. In the Combine a $50K account starts with the limit $2,000 below at $48,000. Make $500 and it trails to $48,500. Lose that $500 the next day and it stays at $48,500. In the Express account, where the balance starts at $0, the limit starts at minus $2,000 for a $50K and locks at $0 once the balance reaches $2,000.

The trapdoor is the first payout

Two rules published in different articles only bite when you put them together. The first is the trail: for a $50K Express account the limit “starts at -$2,000 and trails upward”, and “Once your balance reaches $2,000, the MLL locks at $0 permanently.” The second is the payout rule: “After your first Payout: Your MLL is set to $0 regardless of where it was before. The remaining balance becomes your effective loss floor.”

Read carefully, the second rule changes nothing for a trader whose balance has already passed the lock threshold, because their limit is at $0 anyway. It bites on the trader who takes a payout early, below that threshold, and there it is expensive. Work it through on a $50K account on the Consistency path, which needs only three trading days and a consistency figure at or below 40%.

Your balance is $1,000. Topstep’s own worked example puts the limit at minus $1,000 at that balance, so you can lose $2,000 before the account closes. You qualify, and request the maximum, which is 50% of balance, or $500. After the 90/10 split you receive $450. Your balance is now $500 and your Maximum Loss Limit is $0, permanently. You can now lose $500. So a $450 payout cost you $1,500 of drawdown room, and the limit can never trail back down to give it back.

The same reset applies after a Back2Funded reactivation, which returns the balance to $0 and the limit to minus $2,000, minus $3,000 or minus $4,500 by size, so the trap can be walked into more than once. A Daily Loss Limit would cap the daily damage, but in the Express account it is optional and off unless you bought it at Combine checkout. None of this is hidden. It is simply spread across two articles, and the arithmetic is left to the trader.

Breaching

In the Combine, breaching liquidates the account for the day and makes it ineligible for funding until you buy a Reset. In the Express account it is permanent: “Your account is permanently closed.” In the Live account, a balance below $1,000 triggers closure, with Topstep’s own example being an account that “drops to $800 = auto liquidation and account closure at the end of that day. The remaining $800 is sent as a final Payout. Unlocked reserve is forfeited.” That last sentence is ambiguous as published, since Reserve is elsewhere described as unlocking in increments, and we could not resolve which sense is meant from the published text.

The rules that need no numeric breach

Beyond the loss limits sit two discretionary layers. The Terms define Prohibited Conduct to include “Engaging in other conduct which in the sole discretion of Topstep, represents uncommercial activity, is intended to game the market, is not a viable trading strategy, or is not responsible trading, in each case as determined in the sole discretion of Topstep”, and separately “performing trades… in a way that establishes justified concerns that Topstep might suffer financial or other harm as a result of User’s activities”. Neither has a threshold.

Then there is the Shoulder Tap, a discretionary demotion from Live back to a simulated account. Its triggers are described as “recurring patterns over time” including “Patterns of YOLO behavior or lack of discipline”, “Activity that resembles gambling rather than disciplined trading” and “Improper per-trade or per-session risk sizing as a % of account”. Topstep is careful to say “It is not a penalty”. A trader who breached no stated limit can still be moved out of the live market on the Risk Team’s reading of their tape.

Trading Instruments

Futures and nothing else. The instrument policy appears in the footer of every page on the site: “Topstep traders are allowed to trade Futures products only, listed on the following exchanges: CME, COMEX, NYMEX & CBOT. Topstep traders are prohibited from trading Stocks, Options, Forex, Spot Cryptocurrency, and CFDs; these products are not available in Topstep’s program or platforms.”

Topstep publishes the exchange coverage as part of its Live Funded Account data fee table, which doubles as the clearest product list on the site.

Micros count against the position limit at a ten to one ratio, so a $50K account can hold 5 minis or 50 micros. Topstep flags that this conversion “is available for the Trading Combine and Express Funded Account. It is not currently available for the Live Funded Account”, which quietly makes position sizing coarser at exactly the stage where the money is real.

Product restrictions that are easy to miss

Two rules bind position choice rather than instrument choice. Traders may not hold “a position within 2% of a product’s lock limit”, which the help centre gives its own article. And Prohibited Trading Strategies names “Trading Maximum Position Size into Major News Events”, specifically “Purposefully trading your full Maximum Position Size directly into a scheduled major news event”. Neither is a numeric limit you can compute in advance beyond the 2% band, and both are enforced after the fact.

Hedging is permitted and has its own explainer, but the Terms prohibit “simultaneously entering into opposite positions” where the purpose is to manipulate or gain an unfair advantage, and prohibit pooling or hedging risk across unconnected accounts with other people. Copy trading across your own accounts is explicitly supported through a trade copier, and Topstep notes the connection is disabled automatically while a payout processes.

Education & Analysis

Education is the part of Topstep that predates the prop firm framing, and it shows. The Terms describe the Trading Combine as “a Simulated Account used for experiential learning where a User is provided tools to develop trading skills”. The help centre carries 57 articles across four collections, which we fetched in full from the site’s own sitemap on 12 August 2026, and they are unusually specific: worked examples with real numbers for the consistency calculation, the loss limit trail, and the reserve unlock.

What is included

Level 1 top of book market data is included with membership at no extra cost in the Combine and Express stages. Level 2 depth of market is a $38 monthly upgrade that “activates immediately upon purchase” and is nonrefundable. TopstepX carries TradingView charts and its own indicator set, documented in a 20,000 character help article. There is a practice account, a glossary, a trading checklist download, and TopstepTV, a media operation whose site wide disclaimer is given in the name of TopstepTV LLC.

The statistics Topstep publishes about itself

This is the most useful thing on the site and it sits in the footer boilerplate. For January to December 2025: “(a) 16.8% of all Trading Combines initiated were successfully completed and afforded the opportunity to advance to the Funded Level, (b) 51.8% of individual participants who entered one or more Trading Combines advanced to the Funded Level in at least one of their Trading Combines, (c) 33.3% of all individual participants at the Funded Level received a payout, and (d) 0.71% of individual participants trading in an Express Funded Account were called up to a Live Funded Account.”

Read those together. Roughly one Combine in six is passed. Half of people who try eventually pass at least one. A third of funded level participants received a payout in that year. And seven in a thousand Express traders reach the live stage. A separate figure turns up inside the payout policy, offered as an argument for buying a Daily Loss Limit: “63% of Traders lost their Combine on day 1.”

The community, and its rules

Topstep runs a Discord and a subreddit and points at both from its own footer. The Professional Behavior policy, dated 10 June 2026, lists behaviours that “put your account at risk” in that community, including “Creating a toxic or negative atmosphere in the Discord community” and “Tagging Discord Ambassadors or Topstep employees excessively”. Traders should read that list before treating the community as a neutral venue for airing a dispute.

Payout Terms

The profit split is 90/10 in the trader’s favour at both funded stages, the minimum payout is $125, and payouts can be requested during CME market hours. Those are good terms. The conditions attached to them are where the detail lives.

The two Express paths

Topstep presents doubled versions of those caps, but as a “Limited Time Offering” rather than a standing term, and one that is only unlocked if a Daily Loss Limit was bought at Combine checkout: “Only if you already added the DLL when you purchased your Trading Combine. Adding it at the XFA stage doesn’t unlock the higher cap.” Topstep says only that it will announce the expiry on its social channels, so treat the standard caps in the table above as the terms you are actually buying. The Live Funded Account has no dollar cap, and after 30 winning days it unlocks daily payouts of up to 100% of the unlocked balance, with the caveat that “Requesting a full 100% Payout closes your LFA since the balance reaches the Maximum Loss Limit.”

The consistency rule, and which way it moves

Two different consistency rules run at two different stages, and both are computed with a numerator that only ever ratchets upward.

In the Trading Combine the target is 50%: your best single day must stay at or below half your profit target. Exceed it and the target rises to “Best Day ÷ 0.50”. The asymmetry is stated outright, under the heading “What happens if I have a losing day?”: “Losses don’t reset your best day. If your best day is $1,500 but a losing day brings your total profit down to $1,000, your best day is still $1,500.” Topstep works the arithmetic itself: a $1,500 best day makes the target $3,000, and “If your next day earns $2,000, your best day becomes $2,000 and your new Profit Target becomes $4,000.” Nor can you fix it inside the session: “every dollar you earn today increases your best day total, which keeps raising the target.”

In the Express Consistency path the figure is “Largest Winning Day ÷ Total Net Profit” and it must be at or below 40%. Note the two halves of that fraction. The numerator counts winning days only. The denominator is net, so it absorbs losses. A trader who makes $4,000 on their best day, $6,000 across other winning days and gives back $2,000 is at $4,000 over $8,000, which is 50% and not eligible, on a $8,000 net profit. The same trader without the losing days would be at $4,000 over $10,000, which is 40% and eligible. A losing day is therefore penalised twice, once in the balance and once in the eligibility test. Topstep adds that the 40% “is not rounded. Any result above 40% does not qualify.”

What the live stage costs before you earn anything

Payout terms at the live stage have to be read net of a monthly bill that does not exist at the simulated stage. Live traders are classified as professional by the exchanges, and Topstep passes the fee straight through at “$133 per exchange, per month”. Its own arithmetic: “To trade all permitted products in the LFA, you’d need all 4 exchanges = $540/month total. With 1 exchange covered by Topstep, you’re at $399/month out of pocket for all 4.” The trader also pays their own platform licence at this stage, where Topstep covers it in the Combine. Round turn costs run from $1.54 on crude oil to $4.24 on gold, with ES and NQ at $3.80, deducted from the account balance rather than billed. The single figure carried in our cost data, $3.80, is the ES and NQ round turn and is not representative of every product.

So a live trader trading the full permitted product set starts each month roughly $399 down before commissions. On a $10,000 opening tradable balance that is a real drag, and it is charged whether or not the month is profitable.

Clauses that can take money from a trader who broke no stated limit

• Forfeiture on the compulsory call up to Live. Topstep’s own example: “Four $50K XFAs holding $25K each. Account Size = $50K. Cumulative balance was $100K, so $50K is forfeited.” And you cannot decline: “Once the Risk Team determines you’re ready, your options are to move to Live or close your Express Funded Account.”
• Retroactive clawback across every account. “If you are found to have profited from taking advantage of the simulated environment to gain an edge in your Trading Combine at any time you have graduated past the Trading Combine, or otherwise deemed to have engaged in other Prohibited Conduct… you will not be entitled to receive any withdrawals from any other account maintained with Topstep, all of which will be forfeited and closed immediately.”
• Sole discretion catch alls with no threshold, quoted in the drawdown section above.
• Reputational risk. Section 24 permits Topstep to restrict access “WITHOUT ANY PRIOR NOTICE AND WITHOUT ANY COMPENSATION OR REFUNDS” where a user acts “IN A MANNER THAT (A) MAY CAUSE TOPSTEP RISK OF OR ACTUAL REPUTATIONAL DAMAGE”.
• Rewards can be cancelled for disparagement. Section 29 lets Topstep cancel a Reward “for no consideration and without any notice” where a user “disparages Topstep or its products or services, Topstep’s competitors or their products or services, Topstep Affiliates or any other person or party affiliated with Topstep”. Rewards are defined in that section as prizes and incentives rather than profit payouts, which narrows it, but the wording is broad.
• VPN use. “Using any VPN or VPS on Accounts is strictly prohibited and may result in account termination and forfeiture of profits.”
• A hard payout ceiling in the Live account: “Topstep will monitor your account to ensure total payouts do not exceed 90% of the Starting Balance plus net Trading Profits. If needed, deductions may be made to stay within that limit.”

The clause that suppresses the evidence base

The Professional Behavior policy of 10 June 2026 lists “Publicly posting private correspondence” among behaviours that put an account at risk, alongside “Threatening to write a bad review to get free or discounted Resets or Trading Combines” and “Initiating chargebacks against Topstep”. The middle item is aimed at extortion and reads defensibly. The first is not so narrow. A trader in a payout dispute who publishes Topstep’s emails to make their case is doing the one thing that would let anybody outside the firm assess it, and doing so is listed as risking their account.

Opening an Account

There is no deposit and no brokerage onboarding at the start. You buy a Trading Combine subscription with a card, and credentials follow. Topstep accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover, and states that “PayPal is not supported”. Sales tax is added at checkout where applicable.

Eligibility

The rules are citizenship and residency based, not deposit based. The minimum age is 18, no US citizenship is required, and identity verification runs through an IDV flow with its own help article. Tax forms are collected at the payout stage rather than at signup: W-9 for US persons, W-8BEN for everybody else.

Four disqualifiers are listed in the Express Funded Account rules and are worth reading before paying. You cannot receive an Express Funded Account if you have been “convicted of any felony or a misdemeanor involving dishonesty, fraud, or financial misconduct”, if you have “been disciplined by the NFA or CFTC”, if you have “unresolved debt with a clearing firm”, or if you have “used a fraudulent credit card or initiated a chargeback”. And if any of those surface later, “you will not get a refund for any fees paid.”

One profile, and no VPNs

Topstep enforces a single profile policy: “All Trading Combines, Express Funded Accounts, and Live Funded Accounts must be under 1 Topstep profile. Multiple profiles are a Terms of Use violation and can result in account closure or suspension.” Separately, VPN and VPS use is prohibited outright and can cost profits, which matters for anyone who routinely runs one for unrelated reasons.

Refunds

The default is no refunds, because “The Trading Combine gives you instant access to live data and a trading account.” Three exceptions exist and they are more generous than the sector norm. A 14 day satisfaction guarantee refunds up to one monthly renewal on a first ever Combine purchase, provided you have not passed. An accidental rebill can be refunded within 28 days if the account has no trading activity and the Reset credit is unused. And refunds go to the original payment method within 7 to 10 business days. There are no refunds on Resets, Activation Fees, Back2Funded reactivations, promo code errors or Level 2 data.

Getting to live takes weeks, not days

An Express Funded Account arrives “minutes after paying the Activation Fee”. A Live Funded Account does not: “7 to 10 business days” after the call up, and the trader must also arrange professional market data and a platform licence before trading. Pass on a Friday and the Express account is unavailable until markets reopen at 5 PM CT on Sunday.

Payout Record

There is no deposit side to this product, so the whole question is whether money comes out. Topstep publishes numbers that suggest it does, and none of them is independently verifiable.

What Topstep claims, and what backs it

Those figures also disagree with each other, on the same day, sometimes on the same page. Reading all three pages on 12 August 2026: the homepage says “$1.4B+ Paid out to prop firm traders”, the instant payouts page says “$1.4B+ Paid out to traders”, and the prop firm page says “$1.5B+ Paid out to traders” in its hero and repeats it as “The numbers don’t lie. $1.5B+ Paid to traders.” Further down that same prop page, its FAQ says “With more than $1 billion paid out”, and a later passage says “paying out more than $1.4 billion to traders”. Every one of those carries the same footnote, “1 Total paid all time.”

The community numbers behave the same way. The prop page shows “750,000+ Topstep traders” near the top and “300K+ Trading community” further down, while its own FAQ says “a community of over 200,000 traders”. These are not different metrics with different definitions given different labels; they are the same two claims rendered at three values each. A number that cannot hold still across one page on one day is not a number a reader should rely on, and it is the strongest available reason to treat the payout total as marketing rather than measurement.

We have no independent payout evidence for this review and did not gather any. Topstep does generate a “Proof of Payout” card inside the dashboard for completed payouts “going back to January 1, 2026”, but those are images the firm creates for traders to share, not third party confirmation, and they sit behind a login.

Methods, timings and fees

Those processing times sit on top of approval, not inside it: “Internal approval can take 1-3 business days.” Topstep’s own worked example is refreshingly blunt about what lands: “Example (ACH, $500 request): $500 minus $50 (10% split) minus $30 (processing fee) = $420 received”. On a $500 request that is 16% gone. Payouts can only go to an account in the trader’s own name, and a Wise payout must be claimed within 7 calendar days or “Unclaimed funds are canceled and returned to Topstep”.

What the firm reviews before paying

The payout policy lists the criteria: the payout policy requirements themselves, then “Prohibited Conduct, Terms of Use, and Professional Behavior” and “Prohibited Trading Strategies”. Three of those four are discretionary standards rather than numeric tests, which is the honest answer to how a payout could be refused without a limit being broken.

One detail that says what the Express stage is

The payout policy explains a code that appears on payout references: “RA stands for Research Analyst, the designation Topstep uses for Traders operating in the simulated environment.” That is what the paperwork calls a funded trader before the live stage.

Customer Support

Support is genuinely one of Topstep’s stronger points, with the usual caveat that everything published about its speed is the firm’s own measurement.

Channels

Topstep publishes three service figures on its support page: an 8 minute average first response, 90.6% of cases closed the same day, and a 1 hour 40 minute average resolution time. None carries a footnote, a period or a methodology, so read them as claims rather than measurements.

How it behaves around a dispute

This is where the picture becomes less comfortable, and it is the dimension that matters most in this sector. Refund handling for accidental rebills is routed to the chatbot first, which “will ask for your payment reference ID… and check eligibility against our policy automatically”, with human escalation only when the automated check declines you.

Platform faults carry a hard condition: “If you experience any issue while trading, stop immediately and contact the Trader Support Team. If you continue trading after an issue, exception requests may not be reviewed or approved in most cases.” A trader whose platform freezes mid position has to choose between managing the position and preserving a claim.

And the Professional Behavior policy puts three ordinary dispute behaviours on the risk list: “Opening an excessive number of support tickets or repeatedly calling support unnecessarily”, “Publicly posting private correspondence” and “Initiating chargebacks against Topstep”. Persistence, publicity and a card dispute are the three tools a customer normally has when a company will not pay, and all three are named.

Escalation beyond the firm

For the prop programme there is no ombudsman and no regulator to complain to, because there is no regulator. The route is JAMS arbitration in Wilmington, Delaware, individually. For the separate Topstep Brokerage product, NFA member 0567079, the NFA’s complaint and arbitration machinery is available, which is a real difference between the two relationships.

Restricted Countries

Topstep publishes its restrictions properly, in a help centre article dated 8 July 2026, and it runs two separate lists. This matters more here than at most firms because one of the lists does not stop you buying anything, it only stops you ever reaching the live stage.

The Terms of Use set up the framework in Section 30, which is the clause that confirms live accounts run through third party brokers at all. A “Live Restricted Jurisdiction” is one where “Topstep does not maintain an active relationship with a futures commission merchant partner who accepts live traders resident in your country” or where live access “would be inconsistent with internal practices to comply with applicable laws and regulations”. For residents there, the outcome is stated without hedging: “any such Funded Account will operate exclusively in a simulated trading environment as an Express Funded Account (there will be no ‘call up’ from an Express Funded Account – your trading will not be in the live markets, and will remain in a simulated environment), and no trades will be executed in the live market.”

Evaluation only, no live account ever

The help centre names 25 places in this category, and the entry price is the same as everywhere else. Topstep’s framing: “These Traders can join Topstep, trade and pass the Trading Combine, earn Express Funded Accounts, and take up to $200,000 in total payouts. No Live Funded Account access.” Counted from that table: Albania, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, British Virgin Islands, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Germany, Ghana, Hong Kong, Iceland, Kuwait, Laos, Liberia, Macedonia, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Namibia, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Serbia, Trinidad and Tobago, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.

Germany and Hong Kong on that list deserve a second look, because a German resident buying a Combine is buying a product whose advertised destination is closed to them, at full price, with a lifetime payout ceiling. Topstep offers a Pro Account instead, which it describes as “a simulated account with parameters similar to an LFA”. Its reason is given plainly in the same article: “Brokerage restrictions prevent Live Funded Account access in certain countries.”

Not eligible at all

The second list carries 34 entries, two of which are not countries. Citizens of these “can’t trade or receive payouts”: Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Belarus, Burkina Faso, Burma/Myanmar, Burundi, Chinese Military Companies, Cote d’Ivoire, Crimea including Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, Cuba, Dem. Rep. Congo, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Kosovo, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Morocco, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Darfur, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Yemen.

Eligibility turns on both citizenship and residency, and residency governs: “Residing in an ineligible country makes you ineligible — regardless of citizenship.” Travel counts too. “Trading from an ineligible country — even briefly — may trigger a review by the Trust team.” Topstep warns the list is unstable: “This list can change at any time based on updates from brokerages and other circumstances.” A trader whose country moves onto the ineligible list loses the ability “to trade with, get Funded by, or receive payouts from Topstep”, which is a residency risk carried entirely by the trader.

Conclusion

Topstep is the rare prop firm where the interesting question is not whether it is real. It is real, it is old, it is in Chicago, and its affiliates are on the NFA register with clean records. The interesting question is what you are buying, and the answer changes depending on which page you read it from.

What you are buying, for almost everybody, is a simulated account that pays real money. The Express Funded Account is defined in Topstep’s own Terms as one “using real-time simulated Data” in which “Trades… are not made in live markets and do not incur actual profits or losses”. The live stage above it exists and is genuine, trading TopstepFunded LLC’s capital through a futures commission merchant partner, and 0.71% of Express traders reached it in 2025 on Topstep’s own count. A reader who signs up expecting to be trading live futures has misread the product, and the front page did not help them. The deeper pages did: the prop landing page says “In the Trading Combine and Express Funded Account, trading takes place in a simulated environment using real market data… Live Funded Accounts trade with real capital.” That is a good disclosure sitting one click behind a worse headline.

The payout terms are among the more generous in the sector on their face, at 90/10 with a $125 minimum and no cap at the live stage, and the ways they can go wrong are all disclosed. The one that would surprise a careful, rule abiding trader most is the call up: it is compulsory, and Topstep’s own example forfeits $50,000 of a $100,000 accumulated balance. Behind it sit the consistency ratchet, whose numerator counts only winning days and never falls, and a first payout taken early that permanently surrenders drawdown room the account can never trail back. None of those requires you to break a rule.

Recourse, if it comes to that, is thin. Delaware law, one arbitrator in Wilmington, no class actions, no jury, and a liability cap of the greater of last month’s fees or $100. TopstepFunded LLC belongs to no self regulatory body, so the NFA arbitration forum that covers Topstep’s brokerage customers does not cover its prop traders. And the Professional Behavior policy discourages the three things a dissatisfied customer normally does: escalate repeatedly, publish the correspondence, or charge back.

Challenges are on sale, payouts are being processed, and nothing we found points at distress. Our score of 6.4 reflects a firm with real corporate substance, a long verifiable history, unusually candid self reported statistics and clearly written rules, marked down for a contract that is one sided at every point where money changes hands, for a product whose headline framing outruns its own definitions, and for a payout record that rests entirely on the firm’s own unaudited numbers. It suits a disciplined futures trader who reads the rules first, treats the evaluation subscription as a recurring cost, and understands that the realistic ceiling is a simulated account paying real money rather than a seat at a live desk. It does not suit anybody buying it because the homepage says “Trade Our Money”.

FAQ