Funded Minute · September 2026

The Rebuy Report

What 25,891 prop-firm challenge purchases reveal about why traders fail, and pay again.

Source: anonymised purchase records from 13,478 traders, January 2025 to September 2026. No names, no accounts, only patterns.

The one number

30%

of traders who buy a challenge buy another one. Not a different plan. The same challenge, at the same account size, on average 20 days later.

Those repeat buyers account for 64% of every challenge sold. The industry does not run on new traders. It runs on the same traders paying again.

1. How many times people pay

Challenges bought	Traders	Share
1	9,419	70%
2	1,917	14%
3	792	6%
4 to 7	937	7%
8 or more	413	3%

The average buyer purchases 1.92 challenges. One in ten buys four or more. Four hundred and thirteen people bought eight or more, which at the entry tier is more money than a funded account would ever have paid them.

2. How fast the next purchase comes

Time between one purchase and the next	Share of rebuys
Within 7 days	32%
Within 30 days	64%
Within 90 days	88%

Median: 20 days. A challenge takes most of that to fail, so the pattern is: fail, wait a few days, buy again. There is no pause for review.

3. What changes between attempts

82%

of repeat buyers bought the exact same challenge type every time. Same style, same rules, same result. The 18% who switched (from Regular to Knockout or Swing, or the reverse) are the only group whose behaviour changed at all.

4. What the entry tier costs over time

The most common purchase is the entry-tier account at roughly $70 to $94 after discount. Ninety-five percent of orders used a discount code, which is why the entry tier feels cheap. It stops feeling cheap here:

Traders with $500 or more in challenge fees	1,274
Top 10% of buyers have spent at least	$478
Median cash paid per order, when cash was paid	$125

A trader who fails the entry tier three times has spent more than one attempt at a $50,000 account, whose payout on a pass is five times larger under the same rules. The checker shows this as "fee per $1,000 of first payout" for every firm and size.

5. The three rules behind most of this

Prop firms publish their pass rates in the 8 to 12% range for a two-phase evaluation. The purchase data cannot show which rule ended each challenge, but the rules themselves are public, and three of them explain most failures:

1. The daily loss reset. Most firms measure daily loss on equity, including open trades, and reset it at a fixed server time (FTMO: 00:00 Central European time; FundedNext: 00:00 server time). Traders size from their starting balance and the wrong clock.

2. The trailing floor. On plans where the maximum loss trails your high-water mark (FTMO 1-Step, FundedNext Stellar Instant), a good week shrinks your room for error. Most traders treat it as fixed.

3. The consistency and profitable-day rules. FTMO 1-Step counts your best day against total profit (50% rule). The5ers only counts a day as "profitable" above 0.5% of balance, and needs three of them per step. Traders discover these after the fact.

None of these are secrets. All of them are scattered across the firms' pages in different formats, and none come with the arithmetic done for your account size.

What to do with this

Know the exact dollar figures for your rules, not the percentages. Daily loss in dollars, max loss in dollars, the reset time in your time zone, the consistency threshold.
Size from the rules, not from the setup. Your maximum lot size is a function of your remaining daily allowance and your stop, and it changes after every loss.
Decide the account size on payout, not on fee. The entry tier is the most expensive account per dollar of payout. Run the numbers once.

Open the Rule Trap Checker → It does all three in about two minutes.