FTMO rules explained: daily loss, maximum loss and the Prague reset
FTMO is the account most forex and CFD traders meet first, and its rule set is unusually simple: two percentages and a clock. Almost every failed FTMO account dies to one of the two, and usually because of how they are measured rather than how large they are.
Prop firms change their terms, and rules differ by plan size, phase and promotion. FTMO’s own rules page is authoritative — always check it against the plan you hold before you trade.
FTMO at a glance
Where a row says “set per plan size”, the firm states that limit in dollars per account rather than as a single percentage — read it off your own account and enter it when you set the account up.
FTMO states both of its risk limits as a percentage of the account you bought rather than as flat dollars, which is what makes them easy to reason about: on any plan size, the daily loss limit is 5% and the maximum loss is 10%. A larger account does not give you more room in relative terms — it gives you the same rules with bigger numbers, which is why traders who scale up tend to blow the larger account faster. The percentage did not change; the dollar value of a normal-sized mistake did.
The part that catches people is not the size of either limit. It is that the two limits measure different things over different windows, and that only one of them resets.
The daily loss limit
The daily loss limit is the most you may be down across a single trading day: 5%. Cross it once — not on average, not for a week, once — and the account is failed regardless of how the rest of the challenge went. It resets at the start of the next trading day, which means it is the limit you interact with most and the one worth building a personal buffer under.
It is measured on equity, including open positions, and the room is counted from your balance when the day opened. That changes what a "small" open loser means: a position sitting deep underwater can use up most of your daily room before you have closed anything and decided to take the loss. The number the firm reads is not the number your realized P&L shows.
If FTMO fails you at 5%, stop yourself well before it — many funded traders use half. The last portion of a daily loss limit is not trading capital. It is the margin that keeps the account alive on the day your read is wrong twice in a row.
The maximum loss, and where the floor sits
The maximum loss is the floor under the whole account: 10%. Unlike the daily limit it does not reset — it is the total, cumulative distance you are allowed to fall. How far you are from it is the single most useful number a funded trader can keep in front of them, and it is not shown on a broker platform, because a platform knows your balance but not the level the firm is measuring it against.
On the 2-Step plan this is a fixed floor that never moves. The floor is set once and never moves, so every dollar of profit is a dollar of extra room. The catch is the other direction: profit you have not made yet gives you no extra room, so a bad first week eats straight into the same fixed distance. FTMO's 1-Step plan works differently — a tighter daily limit and a maximum loss that trails — so if that is the plan you hold, edit the account and the app will judge you by it.
When the trading day actually resets
The day rolls over at 12:00 a.m. Europe/Prague, not at midnight where you live. For a trader in the Americas that is the middle of the afternoon or earlier, which means a late-session trade can belong to the next trading day — with a fresh daily loss limit — while a trade taken an hour before it still belongs to the day you have already spent room on.
This is not a technicality. Traders regularly take a revenge trade after a losing session believing they are already flat for the day, and get failed because the clock had not turned yet. Know your reset time in your own timezone and treat the hour before it as a different risk environment than the hour after.
Trading days, payouts and the split
Each evaluation phase needs at least 4 trading days; the funded account itself carries no minimum. Any day with a trade on it counts, whatever the result. The profit split is 80/20.
A minimum-days rule exists to stop a single lucky session from passing an evaluation, and it has a useful side effect: it makes the fastest possible pass slower than most traders expect, which removes the incentive to size up early. If you cannot pass without oversizing, you cannot hold the account after you pass either.
What most often ends an FTMO account
- Recovering a losing morning in one afternoon. The daily loss limit does not care that the trade was going to work. Two oversized recovery attempts is the most common failure sequence at every firm on this list.
- News risk on a position held through the release. An equity-measured daily limit and a five-second spread widening are a bad combination. Being flat is a position.
- Ignoring the cumulative floor while passing the daily test. You can lose an account without ever breaching a daily limit, by losing a little more than you make for three weeks. The maximum loss is a slow rule, which is exactly why it is invisible until it is not.
Tracking a FTMO account
The reason these rules are worth reading closely is that none of them are checked by your platform. Your broker shows you a balance; the firm is watching a floor, a daily limit and a share of profit that your balance alone does not tell you about. Edgekeeper loads this rule set onto an account and does the arithmetic on every trade you log: how much daily loss room is left right now, where the drawdown floor currently sits, how many qualifying days you have, and whether one big day has put the consistency rule between you and a payout.
It also warns you before you write the trade, not after. The point is not to be a scoreboard — it is to be the thing that says "this trade takes you inside the last third of your daily loss" while you can still decide something about it.
Prop firms revise their rules regularly, and they differ by plan size, by phase and sometimes by promotion. Everything above is the rule set Edgekeeper loads for FTMO, checked against the firm's own published rules on the date at the top of this page — but FTMO's own page is the authority, and every field is editable on your account, so if your plan differs you can change it and the app will judge you by your numbers rather than these.
FTMO rules: common questions
What is FTMO's daily loss limit?
On the rule set Edgekeeper loads for FTMO, the daily loss limit is 5% of the starting balance, and it resets at 12:00 a.m. Europe/Prague. It is measured on equity including open positions, so a floating loss counts against it before you close.
What is FTMO's maximum loss?
10% of the account size, measured cumulatively rather than per day. On the 2-Step plan it is a fixed floor that never moves, and unlike the daily limit it never resets, so it is the floor under the entire account.
Does FTMO have a consistency rule?
No consistency cap is modeled on this rule set, so a single large winning day does not by itself block a payout. Firms do add consistency requirements to particular plans and promotions, so check FTMO's own rules page for the plan you hold.
How many trading days does FTMO require?
4 on this rule set. Any day with a trade on it counts, whatever the result.
When does the FTMO trading day reset?
At 12:00 a.m. Europe/Prague. Convert that into your own timezone before you trade a late session — a trade taken after the reset belongs to the next trading day and gets a fresh daily loss limit, and a trade taken just before it does not.
Track a FTMO account in Edgekeeper — free
These are the exact rules Edgekeeper loads. Create the account and every trade you log updates your daily loss room, your live drawdown floor, your qualifying days and your payout eligibility — and warns you before a trade takes you past a limit. One prop account is free, forever, no card.
Track a FTMO account freeOther prop firms
New to these limits? Start with daily loss vs. trailing max drawdown.