How we rate prop firms

Every verdict, every subscore, and every rule audit on this site is the work of Ayub Rana, a Chartered Accountant and full-time forex trader since 2018. The accountancy training is the reason the pricing sections on this site read the way they do: a challenge fee is a contract with a refund clause, and it deserves to be read like one.

His name is printed on the score panel of every profile we have scored, next to a link back to this page. That is deliberate. If you think a score is wrong, there is a specific person to say so to, rather than a brand.

No review on this site is anonymous, syndicated, or assembled from a firm's own press material.

Two different numbers appear on a firm profile, both on a 0 to 5 scale. They are never merged, because they answer different questions.

The five subscores

Each is set on the same 0 to 5 scale, against this evidence:

Pricing & value

Published challenge prices at every account size, what the fee actually buys, refund terms, and any staged or conditional fee (recorded as a numbered footnote under the price table).

Rules fairness

Drawdown type, consistency rule, news-trading and EA policy, minimum trading days, and time limits, read from the firm’s own rulebook and help centre rather than its landing page.

Payout reliability

Stated profit split, payout frequency and methods, plus what traders report about how long a payout actually took and whether requests were refused.

Support

Which channels exist, what the firm publicly commits to on response time, and what reviewers say happened when something went wrong.

Platforms

Which trading platforms and broker or liquidity arrangements the firm genuinely runs on, and what that means for spreads, execution, and tooling.

How they combine

The overall editorial score is the plain arithmetic mean of the subscores set for that firm, rounded to one decimal place. There are no weights.

That is the entire formula. It is worth saying plainly, because the convention in this niche is to imply a proprietary model and then decline to publish it. There is nothing here to withhold: a firm on 4.5, 4.0, 4.0, 3.5 and 4.5 scores 4.1, and you can check that on the page.

Two honest caveats. First, a subscore that has not been set yet is left out of the average rather than counted as zero, so a firm with three subscores is averaged over three. The profile prints exactly which subscores exist, so you can always see what the average was taken over. Second, the arithmetic is transparent but the inputs are judgements. A person reads the rulebook and decides that a trailing intraday drawdown with a 40 percent consistency rule is a 2.5 rather than a 3. We publish the reasoning in the verdict so you can disagree with it specifically.

The order of firms on the homepage, in the directory, and on the best-of lists is a fixed four-step sort, applied identically to every firm:

1. 1Squad score, highest first. The average of the five subscores published on the firm profile.
2. 2Firms we have not scored yet sort last, always. A new or thinly researched firm never floats to the top of a list on the strength of missing data. It sits at the bottom until it has been scored, however good its pricing looks.
3. 3Ties broken by Trustpilot score. Where Trustpilot has restricted a firm’s public rating, we use the score it is hiding rather than treating it as zero, so a warning is published as evidence but never applied as an automatic demotion.
4. 4Still tied, broken by review volume. The last resort, so the order is deterministic rather than arbitrary.

That is the whole sort. There is no promotion slot, no manual pinning, no boost for a firm that pays us more, and no field in the sort that has anything to do with money.

One exclusion worth naming: firms recorded on the risk register never enter a ranking. The listing query is an allow-list rather than a block-list, so a firm has to be explicitly marked as listed to appear at all. A closed or rebranded firm cannot leak back into a top-ten by accident.

Data is taken in this order of preference:

1. The firm's own site, help centre, and terms. Not the landing page: the rules article, the withdrawal article, the FAQ entry that contradicts the landing page.
2. Primary documents. Regulator filings, court records, and the firm's own announcements, for anything about a firm's status or history.
3. Third-party reporting, with corroboration. Used only when the firm has published nothing, and flagged as unconfirmed until it is matched at source.

The source URLs used for each firm are recorded alongside its data, and a field that came only from a third party is tagged as needing verification at source before it is treated as settled.

A field we cannot confirm stays empty. Empty fields render as "Being verified" on the profile, never as a guess and never as a dash you might read as a zero.

You will see "Being verified" on live pages. It is not an oversight, it is the rule working. A comparison table with no gaps in it, covering an industry where firms routinely leave their own rules undocumented, is a table with invented numbers in it.

The risk register is stricter still

The register of firms that closed, changed hands, or drew regulatory action carries a harder rule, because naming a company in that context is a serious thing to do. Every entry needs at least one event with both a date and a public source URL. The code drops any firm and any individual event that lacks either before the page renders, and the script that seeds the register throws an error rather than writing an unsourced entry. The wording states what happened and when, without characterising it, and where a case was later dismissed that goes in the same timeline.

Every firm record carries a last-verified date, and it is printed on the firm's own page rather than buried here. Prop firm rules change quietly and often, so a comparison without a date on it is not much use.

Being precise about what that date means: it is stamped automatically every time we save the record. So it tells you when we last worked on that firm, not that every individual field on the page was independently re-confirmed at that moment. We would rather explain that than let you assume something stronger.

A record gets re-checked when any of these happen:

• A firm announces a pricing or rule change.
• A reader or a firm reports a discrepancy.
• We work through the directory on our own sweep.
• A firm appears in reporting that suggests its situation has changed.

Rule changes are not silently overwritten. Each one is logged with its own date on the firm's profile, so the previous position stays visible and you can see what moved.

Some outbound links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy a challenge after following one, the firm may pay us a commission, at no extra cost to you. That is how the research is funded. There is no paywall and no subscription.

Not every firm on this site has a commercial relationship with us, and the ones that do not are sorted by exactly the same four steps as the ones that do. There is no field in that sort for commission, so the separation is structural rather than a promise about our own restraint.

If a firm offered to pay for a higher position, a softer verdict, or the removal of a fact, the answer would be no, and the request itself would go on that firm's profile as something worth knowing about it.

A firm page does not go to search engines until it is worth reading. Concretely: a profile is forced to noindex unless it carries a written verdict and at least one live challenge with pricing, and we require a rules summary on top of that before opting a page in.

This runs as a check in the publishing pipeline rather than as a good intention. It can only ever turn indexing off, never on, so no automated process can promote a thin page into search. Turning it on is a deliberate act by a person once the page clears the bar. If the check itself errors, it fails closed and the page stays noindex.

The practical effect is that we cover fewer firms than the directories that list several hundred. Most of those listings are a logo, a price, and an affiliate button. We would rather have a smaller directory that is worth the click.

If something here is wrong, we want to know, whether you are a trader who just checked a price at the firm's own checkout or the firm itself. Tell us what is wrong and where we should look to confirm it. For now the route is the contact details on the about page; a dedicated contact form is in progress and this line will change when it lands.

What happens next:

• If the source shows we are wrong, we correct it and the record's verified date moves with the edit.
• If a firm has changed a rule, the change is logged with its date on the profile rather than quietly swapped in, so the old position stays on the record.
• If a firm disputes a risk-register entry, send us the dated public document and we will add it to the same timeline. We do not delete a sourced entry because a firm objects to it. We publish what happened next, including a dismissal, a settlement, or a resumption of payouts.
• If a situation has moved on, the entry is updated rather than left to rot. A firm that closed and reopened, or was acquired, gets that recorded too.

A short list, so you can hold us to it. These are not aspirations, they are the things we have decided in advance that we do not do.

• Sell placement in a ranking, a "best of" list, or a comparison table, in any form, at any price.
• Buy, incentivise, or write trader reviews. Reviews submitted here sit at pending until a human approves them, and only approved ones are readable through the public API.
• Fabricate a number. An unconfirmed field stays empty and renders "Being verified" rather than being filled with a plausible guess.
• Manufacture urgency on a coupon page. No invented countdowns, no "only three left" counters. Where a firm states a real end date, we print that date and nothing more.
• Hide a promo code behind an email signup. Codes are in the page HTML on first paint, selectable by hand, with the copy button as a convenience rather than the only way through.
• Publish a status claim about a named company without a dated source a reader can open.
• Delete a sourced fact or an unflattering review because the firm asked us to.

A methodology you cannot check is marketing. Everything above is written so that you can test it against the pages themselves. Six specific things to try:

1. Redo our arithmetic. Open any firm profile. The subscores are printed beside the overall editorial score. Average them. You should get the number we printed.
2. Check the dates. Every profile shows its own last-verified date. If a page looks stale, the date will say so rather than hide it.
3. Click the risk-register sources. Every entry on the register links the primary document, with the source host shown next to it. If a link does not support the claim, that is a correction and we want it.
4. Read the fine print under a price table. Where a fee is staged or conditional, there is a numbered footnote under the table explaining the catch. Compare it against the firm's checkout.
5. Look for the gaps. Find a "Being verified" cell on a profile. A comparison table with no gaps in this industry is a table with guesses in it.
6. Test a coupon page. Go to deals and check for a countdown timer or an email gate on a code. There should not be one.

Claims that can be checked are worth more than claims that are asserted. If one of these checks fails, that is a real error on our side, and section 08 is how you tell us.

Do you use secret weights in your prop firm scoring?

No. The overall editorial score is the plain arithmetic mean of the subscores set for that firm, rounded to one decimal place. There are no weights, no multipliers and no hidden adjustments. Every subscore is printed next to the total on the firm profile, so you can average them yourself and check that our number matches.

Can a prop firm pay to rank higher on PropFirmSquad?

No. List order is decided by the squad score first, with unscored firms always placed last, and ties broken by Trustpilot score and then review volume. The squad score is the plain average of five subscores we publish on every profile, so the sort key is a number you can recompute yourself. There is no commercial field anywhere in that sort. Affiliate commissions pay for the research time and change nothing about scores, order, or what we publish about a firm.

What is the difference between the squad score and the Trustpilot score?

The squad score is ours: the average of five subscores covering pricing and value, rules fairness, payout reliability, support, and platforms, all printed on the firm profile. The Trustpilot score is a third party’s, shown next to it as a cross-check and never blended in. A firm can score well on one and badly on the other, and that gap is usually the most useful thing on the page. Where Trustpilot has restricted a firm’s rating for a guidelines breach, we say so with the date we checked and a link to the profile.

What happens when you cannot verify a piece of prop firm data?

The field is left empty and the page prints "Being verified" instead of a number. We do not estimate, and we do not copy an unconfirmed figure from another comparison site. For the risk register the rule is stricter: an entry with no dated, publicly linkable source is dropped before it can render, and the script that seeds those entries throws an error rather than writing one.

Who actually writes and scores the reviews?

Ayub Rana, a Chartered Accountant and full-time forex trader since 2018. He sets every subscore and writes every verdict, and his name is printed on the score panel of each scored firm profile alongside a link to this page.