Research & Methodology

1. How this is run

PropSurvival maintains the simulation engine, published rule data and correction history. Each source reading records the account, relevant dates and fields it establishes. Automated checks verify that the product still uses the recorded version; they do not replace a source reading or an expert review.

2. What "verified" means here

Every modeled rule — a profit target, a daily loss limit, a drawdown mechanic, a consistency clause — is transcribed from that firm's own published documentation, not from a forum post, a review site, or a competitor's summary. Each rule set carries a structured provenance record alongside its values: for the fields it covers, a source URL, the exact quote that supports it, the date it was retrieved, and a confidence label (sourced, derived, reconciled, or ambiguous) describing how directly the firm's own words support the stored value. That coverage is not uniform field-by-field — a dollar figure that is exact arithmetic on an already-cited percentage carries its source through that percentage rather than as a second copy of the same quote, and a handful of structural or not-yet-independently-cited fields are still catching up — but it is real and checkable, not decorative: open any rule file and the record is there to compare against the firm's own page. A rule that changes on the firm's site is a rule that goes stale here until it is re-read — see the changelog for the dated history of every re-read.

3. When a firm's own documentation does not settle it

Firms sometimes describe the same rule two different ways, or publish a value that admits more than one reading. When that happens, it is recorded rather than guessed past: each ambiguous field lists the candidate readings and states which one the model uses, with the reasoning attached. The default stance is conservative — the reading that makes passing harder, so the model never quietly flatters an outcome. One real example from the rule data: Topstep publishes its daily-loss-limit reset only as a local time ("5 PM CT"), which maps to two different UTC values depending on the time of year the reset falls in; both candidates are on record, and the later one is what the model uses. A second field in that same rule set is disclosed the other way around — a stricter reading is on record as the more accurate one but deliberately left un-applied, because switching to it would silently disable an unrelated check elsewhere in the simulation engine. That trade-off is written into the rule data itself, not smoothed over.

4. How a number gets checked twice

Beyond the initial read, rule sets are periodically re-verified with a two-pass blind method: the rule is re-derived independently, without looking at the stored value first, and only then compared against what is live. Where the two passes agree, the field is confirmed. Where they disagree — including cases where a firm's own page contradicts itself between two explanations of the same rule — that disagreement is recorded, not silently resolved in whichever direction is more convenient. Every recheck is dated. Dated per-firm records of those passes live at verification records — each one shows exactly what every pass found. The prop firm rules census 2026 is the single citation address for the whole corpus — one row per firm rule set, CSV/JSON download, CC BY 4.0.

5. Corrections

Corrections happen. The changelog is the dated record of every one — rule re-reads, pricing-language fixes, engine corrections that changed a number. The practice is a dated changelog entry describing what was wrong and what changed, not a silent edit to the original text: a log that gets rewritten after the fact stops being a log. To report a changed rule, include the firm, account terms and primary source through the contact link in the footer. Confirmed corrections are recorded in the changelog.

6. What this product is, and is not

PropSurvival is independent analytical software. It is not financial, investment, or trading advice; not trading signals; not a broker; not a prop firm; and not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any prop firm. It publishes no pass rates, rankings, or comparative claims about any named firm — firm rules are facts about published documents, and how a given trader fares under them is computed locally, from that trader's own statistics, never asserted by us about a firm's business.

There is no advertising on this site and no affiliate placement, and no firm pays for a listing or a favorable reading of its own rules — the network requests this product actually makes are named in full on the privacy page, and a rule corpus paid for by the firms it describes would not be independent analysis.

7. Data and reproducibility

Simulations use a seeded, deterministic pseudo-random generator, so a published figure — given its seed and path count — is exactly reproducible, not just directionally similar. Where original research is published, such as the static-vs-trailing drawdown study or the rule-volatility census (how often the same corpus's own published values change), the dataset behind it ships as machine-readable JSON under a CC BY 4.0 licence: reuse it, quote it, check it, with attribution. The same reproducibility extends past this site's own pages: two of the calculators run as free, iframe-embeddable widgets, generated from the identical engine source — a number shown in one never drifts from the number this site's own tool would show for the same inputs.

Citing this corpus

The rule corpus behind every simulation on this site is citable directly. At the time of writing it covers 60 firm rule sets across 247 account-size configurations, each read from the firm's own published documentation as described in §2 above.

@misc{propsurvival2026corpus,
  author       = {PropSurvival},
  title        = {Prop-firm challenge rule corpus},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://propsurvival.com/research-methodology}},
  note         = {60 firm rule sets, 247 account-size configurations, each field sourced from the firm's own published documentation}
}

8. Machine access

A machine-readable summary of what is published here lives in llms.txt. The rule data is written to be checked, not just read.

9. Contact

For a rule correction, include the account terms and a link to the firm's documentation.