To pass a Topstep Trading Combine in 2026, you need to hit the profit target for your account size without breaching the trailing Maximum Loss Limit (MLL) or the Daily Loss Limit. The trailing drawdown is the single biggest reason traders fail — it follows your peak end-of-day balance upward and never moves back down. Pass it by trading small relative to the buffer, journaling every session, and treating each Combine day like a live funded account. New traders who join after January 12, 2026 are also subject to a 90/10 profit split on payouts.
A funded Topstep trader walking through the Combine rules and how to pass them.
The Topstep Trading Combine is one of the most-attempted prop firm evaluations in the world. Topstep has been operating since 2012 — longer than every other major futures prop firm — and the Combine has funded thousands of traders. But it has also failed many more, not because the rules are impossibly hard, but because the rules punish the exact behaviors that feel safest to a trader trying to pass.
This guide is the complete 2026 walkthrough. It covers what changed in 2025 and 2026 (a lot), how the trailing Maximum Loss Limit really works, why traders who think they are being conservative still get knocked out, and the specific habits funded traders use to defend their evaluation balance day after day. If you have failed a Combine before — or are trying to avoid failing your first one — this is the playbook.
01 — WHAT IS THE TRADING COMBINEThe Trading Combine is Topstep's funded trader evaluation. You pay a monthly fee for access to a simulated trading account that mirrors live market conditions, and you trade futures contracts (ES, NQ, CL, GC, 6E, MES, MNQ, and others) against a profit target and a set of risk rules. If you hit the profit target without violating any rules, you graduate to an Express Funded Account. From there, the path goes Express Funded Account → Live Funded Account → real capital.
The Combine itself is structured around a single rule and a few objectives. The single rule is the trailing Maximum Loss Limit. The objectives include the profit target, the Daily Loss Limit (which is technically a guardrail rather than a hard rule), and a few softer consistency considerations that Topstep reviews on payout requests further down the funnel.
Account sizes available in 2026 are the $50K, $100K, and $150K Combines. Each has its own profit target, Maximum Loss Limit, Daily Loss Limit, and starting contract limits. The $50K is the most popular entry point for new traders because the monthly fee is the lowest and the math is the most forgiving.
| Account Size | Profit Target | Max Loss Limit | Daily Loss Limit | Max Contracts (start) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $50K Combine | $3,000 | $2,000 trailing | $1,000 | 5 |
| $100K Combine | $6,000 | $3,000 trailing | $2,000 | 10 |
| $150K Combine | $9,000 | $4,500 trailing | $3,000 | 15 |
Notice the ratio: profit target to Maximum Loss Limit is 1.5 to 1 across every account size. You need to make $1.50 of profit for every $1.00 of risk you can absorb. With a 1:2 risk-reward ratio and a 50 percent win rate, that is achievable in expectation — but the trailing nature of the MLL means that any sustained losing streak after a peak dramatically shrinks your room to operate.
02 — WHAT CHANGED IN 2026If you read a Topstep guide written in 2024 or earlier, almost every detail about payouts, profit splits, and Express Funded Accounts is now wrong. Topstep made significant changes through 2025 and 2026, and the Combine has to be approached with the new rules in mind, not the old ones.
The biggest change. Traders who joined Topstep on or after January 12, 2026 are subject to a 90/10 profit split on all payouts. You keep 90 percent of approved payouts and Topstep keeps 10 percent. The split applies per trader, not per account, so opening a new account does not reset it.
Traders who joined before January 12, 2026 are grandfathered: they continue to receive 100 percent of the first $10,000 in lifetime profits, after which the 90/10 split kicks in. If you are a returning Topstep trader, check your join date carefully — it determines which payout structure you fall under.
Starting February 5, 2026, Topstep split the Express Funded Account into two distinct variants:
You choose which variant you want when you graduate from the Combine. The Combine itself is the same regardless of which EFA variant you plan to take — the choice is made post-Combine.
Topstep added the Trailing PDLL feature in 2025 and refined it through 2026. It is a dynamic loss limit that you can configure yourself: it moves up as your balance grows during the day, and you choose whether it trails based on realized profits (closes only) or unrealized profits (open trade equity included). It is not the same as the trailing Maximum Loss Limit — the MLL trails across days, the PDLL trails within a single day. The PDLL is optional but most disciplined traders use it because it forces them to lock in intraday gains automatically.
On TopstepX (Topstep's proprietary trading platform), the default Daily Loss Limit was removed for Trading Combines and Express Funded Accounts in August 2024 and remains removed in 2026. You can still set a Personal DLL or Trailing PDLL, but the platform no longer enforces a default. This does not apply to NinjaTrader, Tradovate, Quantower, or TradingView — those platforms still enforce the Daily Loss Limit objective on Combine accounts. If you trade on NinjaTrader, your Combine still has a hard DLL.
If you are reading this guide because you trade on NinjaTrader, the Daily Loss Limit is still enforced on your Topstep Combine. The "no DLL" change applies only to TopstepX. Plan your sizing around the DLL value for your account.
The trailing MLL is the rule that catches more traders out than any other. It is also the most misunderstood. Let us walk through exactly how it moves so you can see where the trap lies.
Imagine you start a $50K Combine. Your account balance is $50,000. Your trailing MLL is $48,000 — $2,000 below the starting balance. This means if your end-of-day balance falls to $48,000, you fail.
Day 1, you make $800 profit. Your end-of-day balance is $50,800. Your MLL trails up by $800 to $48,800.
Day 2, you make $1,200 profit. Your end-of-day balance is $52,000. Your MLL trails up by $1,200 to $50,000.
Day 3, you make $1,400 profit. Your end-of-day balance is $53,400. Your MLL trails up by $1,400 to $51,400.
You are now $3,400 in profit. You have hit the profit target. But notice what has happened to your defensive position: your MLL has climbed from $48,000 to $51,400, which is above your original starting balance. You can no longer afford to give back any of those profits without dropping below the floor and failing.
The MLL stops trailing once it reaches your starting balance. On a $50K account, that means the MLL freezes at $50,000. Once you have built enough cushion that the MLL has trailed all the way up to $50,000, the rule essentially flips into a flat $0 floor — you cannot dip below the original starting balance. Until you reach that point, every dollar of profit raises the bar for the next day.
This is why experienced Combine traders reduce position size as their profit grows, not increase it. Protecting the floor becomes more important than maximizing the next day's gain. This is also why so many traders fail after they have already hit the profit target — they take one normal-sized trade the next day, it goes against them, and they are below the trailed floor.
04 — THE DAILY LOSS LIMITThe Daily Loss Limit (DLL) is the second rule that traders run into. Unlike the trailing MLL — which carries across the life of the account — the DLL resets at the start of every new trading day. Topstep defines a trading day as 5:00 PM CT to 3:10 PM CT the next day, which means the DLL resets in the early evening, not at midnight.
If you reach the DLL during a session, your account is auto-liquidated for the rest of that day. Open positions are flattened, pending orders are canceled, and you are blocked from placing new trades until the next trading day starts. This is not a rule violation — it does not fail your Combine. It is a forced timeout. The next session starts fresh and the DLL resets.
However, hitting the DLL is still bad news for two reasons. First, the loss has counted against your trailing MLL, so you have less buffer for the days that follow. Second, hitting the DLL is a behavioral signal — it usually means you traded outside your plan, or you revenge-traded after an early loss, or you sized up trying to recover. Topstep does review trader behavior at the funded stage, and a Combine with multiple DLL hits is a profile they will flag later.
The DLL on a $50K Combine is $1,000. On a $100K it is $2,000. On a $150K it is $3,000. Both realized and unrealized P&L count toward it, which means a floating loss on an open position can trigger liquidation just as fast as a closed-out loss.
05 — THE STEP-BY-STEP PASS PLANKnowing the rules is the easy part. The hard part is executing under pressure for 10 to 30 trading days without giving back what you build. Here is the playbook that consistently funded traders follow.
The $50K Combine has the lowest monthly fee and the smallest profit target. It is the right starting point for most traders. The $100K and $150K accounts are tempting because the funded amounts are bigger, but the trailing MLL is also harder to defend with proportionally smaller buffer-to-target ratios. Start small. Prove the process. Scale up only after you have funded one account.
On a $50K Combine with a $3,000 profit target, do not target $3,000 in three days. Target $150 to $300 per day for 10 to 20 days. This sounds slow, but the math is forgiving: at $200 per day, you hit the target in 15 days while never having a single day big enough to make the trailing MLL feel scary. The traders who fail are the ones who target $1,000 days and end up with one $1,000 day followed by three -$700 days.
On a $50K Combine you can technically trade up to 5 contracts. Trade 2 or 3 instead. The DLL is $1,000 — at 5 contracts on ES (each tick is $12.50), a 16-tick adverse move on a 5-lot is exactly $1,000. That happens in about 90 seconds on a normal day. At 2 contracts, the same adverse move is $400. You give yourself room to be wrong, room to wait for re-entries, and room to absorb the inevitable bad sequence without hitting the daily limit.
This is the single most important rule disciplined traders enforce on themselves. Two losses in a row is not a coincidence — it is a signal that your read of the market is off, that conditions have changed, or that you are in a state where your decision-making is compromised. Walk away. Come back tomorrow. The $1,000 DLL on a $50K does not have to be hit to ruin a session — even a -$500 day eats meaningfully into your buffer.
Write down which setups you will take, what size, what stop, what target, and what your maximum trade count is for the day. Do this before the market opens. Once you are in front of charts with prices flickering, your prefrontal cortex narrows and you start improvising. The plan written 30 minutes before the open is the plan made by the version of you that was rational. Trust that version. Override it only if the market context has changed in a way you can articulate.
Your remaining buffer is your account balance minus your trailing MLL. This number is the only score that matters in the Combine. If your buffer drops below $500 on a $50K account, you should reduce position size to micros only or stop trading until the next session. Funded traders watch this number more than they watch P&L.
If you are using TopstepX, set a Trailing Personal Daily Loss Limit at the start of each session with realized trailing. As you close winning trades, the PDLL trails up automatically and locks in your gains. This converts the abstract idea of "discipline" into an automated guardrail. You cannot give back what the platform will not let you give back.
Day 1–15: Average $200 net profit per day, trading 2 contracts on ES, with a hard stop of 8 ticks ($100) per trade. Maximum 4 trades per day. Day 16: $3,000 profit hit. Drawdown buffer maintained throughout. Combine passed in 16 sessions with no single day exceeding $400 in net P&L. This is what the funded traders look like.
Topstep is not just looking for traders who can hit a profit target. They are looking for traders who can hit it, then keep hitting it, then keep doing so on real capital without blowing up. The Combine is a screen, but the bar that matters is consistency — and consistency comes from understanding your own patterns.
Most Combine failures are not strategic. They are behavioral. Traders take trades they did not plan to take. They size up after a loss to "make it back." They trade through news events because the move looks fast. They take a third trade after two losses because they cannot tolerate being wrong. None of those decisions are about strategy. All of them show up in a journal as patterns.
A trade journal that only logs entry, exit, P&L, and screenshot is not enough. The journal that helps you pass a Combine logs context and behavior: what setup was this, what was your emotional state before entry, did you follow your plan, was this a planned trade or an improvised one, what was the daily P&L when you took it, how many trades had you taken already that day. Those context fields are what reveal the patterns that fail evaluations.
The reason most traders do not journal at this depth is that it takes too long. A 3-account Combine setup with 12 trades per day is 36 individual trades to log every night. After three days, the journal becomes a backlog. After a week, it is abandoned. This is why most Combine traders journal for a week and then stop.
An AI journal solves this problem by capturing every trade automatically and tagging it for context based on the actual data — daily P&L at the time of entry, sequence position, time of day, recent loss streak, instrument, position size relative to recent average. You stop being the data entry clerk for your own trading. You become the reader of your own pattern report.
Tradecovex was built specifically for this use case: trade copier first, AI journal second, both connected to your NinjaTrader Combine account so every trade is logged the moment it is filled. If you are running multiple Combines in parallel, the journal aggregates across accounts so you can see your behavior holistically, not per-account.
07 — AFTER YOU PASSPassing the Combine moves you to an Express Funded Account. You are not yet on real money — the EFA is still simulated — but you can now request payouts based on profits you generate, and Topstep is watching your behavior to decide whether to advance you to a Live Funded Account.
The EFA has its own rules. The Scaling Plan replaces the Maximum Position Size rule from the Combine and requires you to grow your contract sizes gradually as your account balance grows. The trailing MLL still applies but is structured slightly differently. The Daily Loss Limit still applies on most platforms. And depending on whether you chose the Standard or Consistency variant, the 40 percent payout consistency target may or may not be in effect.
Beyond the EFA is the Live Funded Account. This is where Topstep places real capital behind your trading and you receive actual payouts from real trading profits. The rules tighten further: there is a Path to Reduction system where Topstep's risk team will "shoulder tap" you during drawdowns and may temporarily reduce your contract size or DLL until you recover. There is a Live Performance Bonus ladder that pays cash bonuses for hitting consistent monthly profit targets, with over $250,000 in lifetime cash bonuses available to consistently profitable Live traders.
The thread connecting the Combine, the EFA, and the Live account is the same: traders who keep their accounts are the ones who treat every day like a live account from day one. The Combine is not a sandbox. It is a job interview that lasts 30 days. You are being watched and your behavior is being scored. The traders who pass are the ones who never gave Topstep a reason to doubt them.
The Topstep Combine in 2026 is winnable, but it rewards a very specific kind of discipline. Trade small relative to the buffer. Stop after two losses. Track your remaining drawdown obsessively. Use the Trailing PDLL to lock in gains automatically. Journal your trades with enough context that you can spot the patterns that hurt you. And when you finally hit the profit target, do not celebrate by sizing up — celebrate by trading even more conservatively until the funded account is in your hands.
If you are running multiple Combines in parallel, the discipline gets harder because every mistake is multiplied. This is the exact use case Tradecovex was built for — copying trades across all your Combine accounts while the AI journal flags the behavioral patterns that fail evaluations before they cost you another month of fees.