TradeDay payout rules: one trailing floor to survive, and a 50% entry split that decides what you keep

The payout terms

Two honest qualifications belong next to that table. First, the 50% split is the funded-stage entry tier, not a fixed lifetime rate: TradeDay's own funded-payout policy describes it climbing to 80/20 and then 90/10 as your account profit accumulates, and we return to what that actually costs below. Second, TradeDay publishes a $250 minimum payout but no fixed first-payout day count and no fixed withdrawal cadence for Quick Pay, so we record those two fields as not published rather than inventing a schedule. What is unambiguous is the shape of the risk: there is only one line to breach, and it is the drawdown.

The numbers, by account size

Every Quick Pay size shares the same shape — a 6% profit target to get funded, no daily loss limit, one trailing intraday maximum drawdown, a 50% entry split and a $250 minimum payout. Only the target and the drawdown scale with the account, and the drawdown tightens in percentage terms as the account grows.

TradeDay publishes the dollar figures; the percentages are this corpus's derived ratios ($3,000 / $50,000 = 6% target; $2,000 / $50,000 = 4% drawdown). There is no daily loss limit at any size, and TradeDay does not publish a maximum evaluation length. Split shown is the funded entry tier.

What actually ends a TradeDay account: one trailing floor, calculated intraday

Most evaluations give you two ways to lose the account — a daily limit that paces each session and an overall floor underneath it. TradeDay removes the first entirely. Its own rules page states it plainly: "TradeDay has just one rule — Don't break the Maximum Drawdown Limit." There is no daily loss limit at any size, which means no single-session budget to blow and no lockout that ends your day early. It also means the entire survival question collapses onto a single line, so understanding exactly how that line moves is the whole game.

It trails, and it trails on intraday equity. The maximum drawdown "is a limit that trails your account growth," pegged to "the highest balance you have had in your account." Crucially, TradeDay evaluates it intraday, on equity that includes open positions — not at the close. So an unrealised gain you never bank still counts: an intraday spike lifts the floor, and it does not come back down when the spike does. And because it is measured intraday, an unrealised loss can breach it without you closing a trade — "you must never let your equity fall below the active drawdown level at any point during the day, doing so will still trigger auto-liquidation."

It freezes at your starting balance. Unlike a floor that trails forever, TradeDay's stops once it catches up to where you began: the drawdown "continues to trail your account growth until [it] reaches the starting account balance, at which time the trailing drawdown will freeze and no longer trail." On a 50k account the floor starts at $48,000 ($2,000 below), climbs with your highs, and freezes the moment it reaches $50,000. After that, your entire cushion is whatever sits above your original starting balance — a fixed line for the rest of the account's life.

Question: if you give back an intraday gain before the close, does your drawdown floor give it back too?

What the 50% entry split really costs

The split never ends your account — it decides what you take home once you are funded. But TradeDay's is worth reading closely, because it is the lowest starting rate among the firms in this corpus and its drag is front-loaded onto exactly the profit you make first. TradeDay's funded-payout policy describes a tiered ladder: 50/50 while cumulative account profit is below $4,000, 80/20 once above $4,000, and 90/10 in Funded Live. So the 50% rate is not a permanent tax — it is the toll on your earliest and most fragile payouts, before the account has had time to build a cushion above the floor.

Put in survival terms: at the entry tier, to net $1,000 you must generate $2,000 gross, and your first $4,000 of funded profit returns roughly $2,000 to you (illustrative, at the 50/50 entry tier). That matters most precisely when the account is youngest — when the trailing floor still sits closest beneath you and a single intraday touch can end the account before you ever climb to the 80/20 tier. A 100%-split firm hands you the whole of that first, hardest-won profit; TradeDay keeps half of it. Neither is "better" in the abstract, but for a survival-first trader the question the split changes is concrete: how much gross profit must I extract, and how long must I hold an account against one trailing line, to make the attempt pay?

One honesty note carried through from our recheck: this tiered ladder is one of two readings of TradeDay's payout policy — a second, independent read saw only a flat "up to 80/20" in the marketing copy, with no tiers. Our schema stores a single split figure, so PropSurvival records the conservative 50% entry tier, because storing the entry rate rather than the eventual ceiling means a projected payout never overstates what a newly funded trader keeps. The $250 minimum payout is the one hard withdrawal gate the documentation states outright.

What the documentation does not settle

TradeDay's Quick Pay evaluation is verified in our corpus, and two independent blind reads agreed on the hard mechanics — the $3,000/$6,000/$9,000 targets, the $2,000/$3,000/$4,500 trailing drawdowns, the intraday calculation, the freeze at the starting balance, and the absence of any daily loss limit. Four points, though, the firm's own pages leave genuinely open, and we render them rather than smooth them over.

How the consistency rule is measured — and why it doesn't fail you. TradeDay's consistency objective is unusual twice over. First, its effect: exceeding "no day greater than 30% of your total profits" does not fail the evaluation — TradeDay states that "your profit target does increase" instead, so a single outsized day makes passing harder rather than ending the attempt. Second, its metric is self-contradictory in TradeDay's own article, which states both a running ratio ("your day's PnL as a percentage of the total PnL you have earned to date," worked as 1200/1800 = 67%) and a fixed dollar cap ("profit target × 30% … $3,000 × 30% = $900"). These are mathematically different tests — the fixed cap never moves, while the running ratio recalculates each day and can trip on a small early day that is a large share of tiny cumulative profit. We model the running-ratio reading, because it never understates how often the target escalates.

The split ladder, or a flat 80/20. As above: one read found the detailed 50/50 → 80/20 → 90/10 ladder in TradeDay's funded-payout policy; another read only a flat "up to 80/20" marketing figure. We store the conservative 50% entry tier and treat the flat-80 figure as a simplification of the same underlying tiered policy, not a competing first-party mechanic — but a reader comparing quotes should confirm which they are being sold.

First payout timing and cycle. TradeDay publishes the $250 minimum payout but no fixed number of days before a first withdrawal and no fixed withdrawal cadence for Quick Pay. We carry both as not published. If your plan depends on a specific payout rhythm, treat it as unconfirmed until TradeDay states it for your account.

Minimum days, and no maximum. Both blind readers report a 5-day minimum for Quick Pay, but neither found a verbatim first-party passage stating the figure, so we carry it as derived rather than quoting it as a source. Separately, TradeDay publishes no maximum evaluation length in the pages we verified, so — unlike a time-boxed challenge — there is no clock forcing the pace; the only pressure is the floor.

Rules change without notice; the firm's own documentation is always the final authority. This page is independent research, not investment or trading advice, and PropSurvival is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by TradeDay.