How we rate prop firms

The rules we hold ourselves to

• Firms cannot pay for placement, scores, or coverage. There are no sponsored rankings and no "promoted partner" slots on PropKings, and there never will be.
• No score without evidence. A firm gets a PropKings score only after our scored rubric is applied to verified data and a documented first-person test.
• Every number is verified. Specs in our dataset start as reported (sourced from aggregators or the firm's marketing) and only become verified — the status shown in our directory — when we confirm them against the firm's live pages or our own account.
• Negative coverage stays up. If a firm changes rules retroactively, delays payouts, or bans profitable traders, we publish it — including for firms whose evaluations we earn commissions on.

First-person testing protocol

We buy evaluations with our own money, trade them, and document the entire lifecycle: purchase receipt, dated account screenshots, rule interactions (drawdown behavior, consistency enforcement), pass or fail, and — where we get funded — the payout request and the receipt. Test logs are published as-is, including failed attempts. A failed test is data, not something to hide.

The scoring rubric (v1)

Scores are being introduced alongside our first published test logs. The rubric weighs: rule transparency and stability, payout reliability and speed, true cost to funding (fees including realistic resets), platform quality, support responsiveness, and trader-outcome signals. The full weighted rubric will be published on this page before the first score goes live — a score you can't reproduce from the rubric is a score you shouldn't trust.

Corrections

Found an error? Any reader can challenge any data point. Verified corrections are applied with a visible change note on the affected page.