Clearing an evaluation is the part everyone plans for. The first payout is the part that decides whether any of it counted, and it has a few requirements that are easier to meet if you knew about them a month earlier.
What a payout depends on
Three things, broadly. That the profit is real — that it came from trading the account within its rules rather than from a platform artefact or an error. That the minimum requirements are met, which usually means a minimum number of profitable days rather than merely a positive balance. And that you are who you say you are.
The third is identity verification, and it is not optional anywhere in this industry. A firm sending money to a name it has not verified has a problem that has nothing to do with trading.
What delays a payout
- Identity documents submitted at the moment of request rather than in advance. Verification takes as long as it takes; starting it a month earlier costs nothing.
- A minimum profitable-days requirement that was not tracked. Days on which the account finished flat or down do not count toward it, and traders routinely discover the shortfall at the request rather than before it.
- Trading outside the published rules — an unusually concentrated result, or activity that looks like the platform behaved rather than the market. A normal trading record stays well inside them.
- Payment details entered against a name that does not match the verified account. Payouts go to the trader, not to a third party, and mismatches are rejected rather than reassigned.
When the fee comes back
On Prime 1 Step and Prime 2 Step the fee is refunded in full once the account is funded and in profit after 30 days, which is worth being explicit about because it changes the arithmetic of the whole exercise: there, the cost of a successful evaluation is the time, not the fee.
That does not apply to Edge, whose fee is the price of the attempt, or to instant accounts, which have no assessment to have passed and no fee to return. The Refund Policy sets it out in section 10.
On Prime the fee is a deposit against finishing: it comes back once the account is funded and in profit after 30 days.
Why the first one matters disproportionately
A funded account is a claim. A payout is evidence. Everything downstream — scaling milestones, better terms, your own confidence in sizing the next position — dates from the first time the arrangement actually paid, and until then you are trading a hypothesis.
Which is a practical argument for taking the first payout earlier and smaller than feels optimal. Waiting to withdraw a larger sum leaves the whole record hostage to a drawdown that has not happened yet, and a modest confirmed payout is worth considerably more than a larger theoretical one.
After it
The cycle and the split are printed on your plan and the process is the same each time, with the identity step already done. What changes is that you now have a record — and every term available to you from that point is a function of it.