The profit split gets all the marketing attention. "Keep 90%!" is on every prop firm's homepage. But the number that quietly decides how much you actually withdraw is buried further down the rulebook: the payout cap. It is the most overlooked term in a funded-account contract, and it is where a 90% split can turn into something much smaller in practice.
What a payout cap actually is
A payout cap is a ceiling on how much you can withdraw in a single payout cycle, regardless of how much profit you made. Hit a $6,000 month on an account with a $2,000 per-cycle cap and you do not withdraw $6,000 minus the split — you withdraw the cap, and the rest either rolls over, expires, or forces you to request multiple cycles. The advertised split is applied to a number the cap has already shrunk.
The three structures we see across the set
When our team verifies payout terms from each firm's own rules, almost every policy falls into one of three shapes:
- No cap. You withdraw your full profit share every cycle. Most established European forex firms publish no monthly cap. This is the trader-friendly end of the ladder.
- Per-cycle hard cap. A fixed dollar ceiling per payout window, common among US futures firms. The cap may or may not scale with account size, and cycle-stacking usually does not raise the ceiling — the lower reading governs.
- Tiered or conditional caps. The trickiest to read: caps that apply only for the first few payouts, then lift; or caps tied to a scaling program. The headline may say "uncapped" while the first four payouts are quietly capped. We score the effective policy a standard-account trader meets, not the headline.
A worked example
Suppose — hypothetically — a $150,000 account advertises a 90% split but applies a $2,000 per-cycle payout cap. You trade well and finish the month up $7,000. The split implies $6,300 to you. The cap says $2,000. Your effective take-home that cycle is $2,000 — under 29% of your profit, not 90%. The split was never the binding constraint; the cap was. Over a strong quarter, the gap compounds into real money you earned but could not withdraw on schedule.
This is why our scoring weights payout integrity heavily and reads the cap straight from the firm's own payout policy — not the marketing page.
How to check it on any firm
Every firm page on TraderVerdict shows the verbatim payout-cap policy in its Specifications, sourced from the firm's own rules. For the current ranked list of firms our team has verified as genuinely uncapped, see the live dataset: prop firms with no payout cap. It updates as we re-verify, so the figures are never stale.
For contrast, here are two firms at opposite ends of the cap spectrum — scores are live: