Which prop firms refund the challenge fee after first payout

Of five prop-firm refund pages this desk read on 11 September 2026, two tie the challenge-fee refund to the first withdrawal: FTMO’s 2-Step Challenge (which “may be refunded”) and FundedNext’s Stellar 2-Step. The5ers refunds futures evaluation fees at the third payout, Topstep says fees are used in full once funded, and MyFundedFutures’ how-it-works page mentions no refund.

That is the whole answer to the question “which prop firms refund the challenge fee after first payout”, and it is shorter than the marketing suggests. The longer version is below, one firm at a time, quoting each firm’s own FAQ or policy page rather than a blog written by a firm that also sells a challenge. Two firms this desk meant to include, Apex Trader Funding and FundingTraders, could not be read from here and are carried as unread rows rather than guessed at.

The reason this piece exists is a small word. The pages that currently hold this search tend to describe the refund as something you get “when you pass”. None of the five firm pages we read says that. The two firms that do refund tie the money to a withdrawal, which is a later event, with its own conditions, and in FTMO’s case its own hedge. A trader who budgets on “pass, get the fee back” is budgeting on a sentence no firm wrote.

Which prop firms refund the challenge fee after first payout: the table

Each row is what the named page said when this desk read it on 11 September 2026. “Trigger” is the event the firm’s text attaches the refund to. “Route” is where the money goes. Rows marked unread were not verified against any primary page and should not be treated as findings.

Firm and product	Refundable at all?	Trigger, per the firm’s page	Route	Page date as shown
FTMO Challenge: 1-Step	No. “The entry fee is not refunded.”	None	None	Undated FAQ
FTMO Challenge: 2-Step	“May be refunded”	First Reward withdrawal	Initial payment method	Undated FAQ
FundedNext Stellar 2-Step	Yes, as a “Refundable Fee”	First Performance Reward, requested with the first withdrawal, after internal approval	Added to the Performance Reward	July 17, 2026
The5ers futures (Day Trade and Swing)	Yes, 100% of the initial evaluation fee	Third payout on the funded futures account	Added to total equity automatically	“last update: July 20, 2026”
Topstep Trading Combine	“Generally not available once a purchase is made”	None after funding; a 14-day guarantee applies before passing	Original payment method, 7 to 10 business days, where a refund is issued	Stamped “Updated today” when read
MyFundedFutures	Not stated on the how-it-works page	Not stated	Not stated	Undated
Apex Trader Funding	Unread (help centre returned a geo-block, status 403)	Unread	Unread	Unread
FundingTraders	Unread (not fetched this run)	Unread	Unread	Unread

Five read, two unread, and only two of the five say “first”. That is the state of the market as its own documents describe it, and the rest of this post is the fine print behind each cell.

FTMO: 1-Step is not refunded, 2-Step “may be”, and only with the first withdrawal

FTMO’s FAQ entry Is the entry fee refunded? is the shortest document in this comparison and the one that most contradicts the “refund when you pass” shorthand. It gives two answers, one per product.

For the FTMO Challenge: 1-Step, the page says the entry fee is not refunded. Six words, no conditions, no exceptions listed. If you bought the one-phase evaluation, the fee is the price of the evaluation and stays that way.

For the FTMO Challenge: 2-Step, the page says the entry fee “may be refunded with the first Reward withdrawal”, and that the fee is refunded using the initial payment method. Three things in that sentence deserve a pencil mark. “May be” is not “is”: the firm has kept a conditional in its own FAQ, and a conditional in a FAQ is usually there because the full terms carry conditions the FAQ does not repeat. “First Reward withdrawal” is an event that happens after funding, after a profit, and after a withdrawal request is approved, not at the moment the second phase closes. And “initial payment method” means the refund travels back the way the fee came, rather than being folded into the payout.

The FAQ page is undated, so this desk cannot say when the wording was last changed, only that it read this way on 11 September 2026. Our FTMO review treated the refundable fee as one feature of the 2-Step evaluation; this is the clause behind that feature, and the clause is narrower than the feature sounds.

What the page does not say is as important as what it does. It does not say what happens to the 2-Step refund if a funded account breaches a rule before its first Reward withdrawal. On a plain reading, the trigger never occurs, so the refund never occurs, but that is this desk’s reading, not FTMO’s sentence, and we flag it as such.

FundedNext Stellar 2-Step: the Refundable Fee rides on the first Performance Reward

FundedNext’s help-centre article When Do I Get the Refundable Fee in the Stellar 2-Step Model?, dated July 17, 2026 on the page, is the most explicit of the five about mechanics, and it is explicit in a way that confirms the withdrawal trigger rather than the pass trigger.

The article’s own summary: once you complete both Challenge Phases and receive your FundedNext Account, you can request your subscription fee refund, which the firm calls a Refundable Fee, with your first payout, which the firm calls a Performance Reward. The amount equals the original purchase or reset fee and is added to your Performance Reward after approval.

So the sequence, per the firm, is: pass both phases, receive the account, trade to a withdrawal, request the refund as part of that first withdrawal, and receive it after “internal approval”. The refund is not a separate transaction back to your card. It is a line added to the first reward. If the first reward is delayed, reviewed or refused, the refund sits with it. We covered the firm’s decision to rename payouts as rewards in our FundedNext review; here the vocabulary matters, because the “Refundable Fee” is defined as an add-on to a “Performance Reward” and inherits whatever approval process the reward goes through.

The article also carries the one worked example in this comparison that shows the refund shrinking. If you bought the challenge for 59 dollars and passed, you can request a 59-dollar Refundable Fee. If the account was reset, the Refundable Fee reflects the reset fee instead of the original price; the firm’s example is a 53-dollar reset fee returning 53 dollars. The original 59 is gone in that case. A trader who resets and later passes has, by the firm’s own arithmetic, paid 112 dollars in fees and gets 53 back.

Two scope notes. This article covers the Stellar 2-Step model only. The related-article list on the same page names separate entries for the Stellar 1-Step, Stellar Lite and Stellar Instant products, and this desk did not read those, so nothing here should be generalised to them. And the article, like FTMO’s, does not address a breach before the first withdrawal.

The5ers futures: 100% of the fee, but at the third payout, added to equity

The5ers’ futures FAQ, “How Does the Evaluation Fee Refund Work?”, at the5ers.com under Futures FAQs, shows “last update: July 20, 2026” and is the clearest counter-example to the word “first” in the search query.

The page says that once you successfully receive your third payout on any funded futures trading account, the firm will refund the full evaluation fee you originally paid, and that the refund is automatically added to your total equity at the time of the third payout. Eligibility applies across the Day Trade and Swing futures programs regardless of account size. On amount, the page says you receive a 100% refund of exactly what you paid out of pocket for the initial evaluation fee, “no more and no less”, with the worked example of a 50K Day Trade account bought for 100 dollars returning that 100 dollars to the balance once the third payout is processed and confirmed.

Three features distinguish this clause. The trigger is the third payout, not the first, so a trader has to clear the funded account’s payout conditions three times before the fee comes back. The route is equity, not the original payment method, so the refund is trading balance rather than cash until it is itself withdrawn under the payout rules. And the page frames it openly as a reward for “consistent, long-term performance”, which is a fair description: it is a loyalty rebate paid in the account, not a return of the entry price.

The scope note here is the largest in the piece. This is the futures program’s FAQ. The5ers also sells CFD programs, and this desk did not read their refund rules; nothing above applies to them. Our The5ers review covers the CFD side of the house.

Topstep: “generally not available”, and “used in full” once you are funded

Topstep’s help-centre page Topstep Refund Policies was stamped “Updated today” when this desk read it on 11 September 2026, which means the stamp was read on that date and nothing more; the page does not show a fixed revision date.

The headline sentence is that because the Trading Combine gives instant access to live data and a trading account, “refunds are generally not available once a purchase is made”. Where a refund is issued, it goes to the original payment method only and processing takes 7 to 10 business days.

There is one carve-out, and it is the opposite of a refund after payout. The 14-Day Satisfaction Guarantee refunds up to one monthly renewal payment for a first-ever Trading Combine purchase if, within the first 14 calendar days, the trader decides it is not for them, “as long as you haven’t passed the evaluation”. Passing forfeits the guarantee. The page then addresses the trader who passes shortly after a monthly charge directly: the firm cannot refund or prorate that payment, because the subscription payment was required to keep the account active through to funding, and “once you earn funding, the subscription and all fees are considered used in full”.

So Topstep’s answer to this post’s question is a flat no, stated in the firm’s own words: the refund window closes at the pass, not opens. The rest of the page lists further no-refund items, each of which is a fee a Combine trader may meet: Reset purchases, including resetting the wrong account; the Activation Fee, including accidental activations; Back2Funded purchases; and Level 2 Depth of Market data, which the page says rebills monthly on the 28th for 38 dollars and is nonrefundable. Promotional codes applied incorrectly or missed are not refunded either.

The one rebate route that is described in detail is for a forgotten subscription: the Combine rebills approximately every 30 days until you pass or cancel, a reminder email goes out 3 days before, and a rebill can be refunded if the account has no trading activity and the trader contacts the firm within 28 days of the charge, provided the Reset credit that rebill added has not been used. Processing that refund cancels the subscription and closes the Combine. The page also lists chargebacks among prohibited conduct. Our Topstep Trading Combine review covers the subscription model these clauses sit on top of.

MyFundedFutures: no activation fee, no renewal, and no refund clause on the page we read

MyFundedFutures’ how-it-works page (myfundedfutures.com/how-it-works) is included because it is the firm’s own account of what the fee is, and because of what it does not contain.

The page describes the evaluation as a simulated trading challenge on real-time market data for which you make a one-time payment, “as low as 63 dollars depending on current promotions”, with no activation fee and no renewal. Passing unlocks the sim-funded account instantly with, per the page, no waiting period and no extra fees.

What the page as read on 11 September 2026 does not contain is any statement that the evaluation fee is refunded at any payout. That is an absence scoped to one page. MyFundedFutures runs a help centre that this desk did not read, and a refund clause may exist there; it may equally not. What can be said is that the firm’s main explanation of its own fee structure sells the absence of activation and renewal fees, and is silent on getting the evaluation fee back. Readers weighing MFFU against the two “first withdrawal” firms above should treat the refund as unconfirmed until they find it in the firm’s own text.

Apex Trader Funding and FundingTraders: unread, not guessed

Two rows in the table say unread, and it is worth being plain about why, because a comparison that quietly fills a gap with a search snippet is the kind of document this post is trying not to be.

Apex Trader Funding’s help-centre billing page returned a status 403 with a geo-block message when this desk fetched it on 11 September 2026. A search-engine snippet for that page circulates a claim about what is and is not refundable at Apex. A snippet is not a source, and this desk did not read the page, so the claim does not run here. If you can open the page from your own network, that is the document to read.

FundingTraders was on the list of firms to check and was not fetched in this run, so there is nothing to report either way. The firm’s payout-screen design was the subject of an earlier piece here, but that piece did not look at the refund clause and this one has not either.

Refund on pass versus refund with the first withdrawal: why the difference is money

The distinction the table keeps making is not pedantry. Consider what has to happen between “pass” and “first withdrawal” at the two firms that refund on the latter.

At FTMO, a passed 2-Step Challenge leads to an FTMO Account, and the refund is attached to the first Reward withdrawal from it. Between those two points the trader must make a profit, satisfy whatever payout conditions apply to that account, and have the withdrawal approved. Each of those is a place the process can stop. At FundedNext, the Refundable Fee is requested as part of the first withdrawal and added after internal approval; the same dependencies apply, plus an explicit approval step.

A “refund on pass” would be a different product: money back at the end of the evaluation, whether or not the funded account ever pays. No page read here offers that. The nearest thing is Topstep’s 14-day guarantee, which works only if you have not passed, which is the reverse of the search query.

For the trader’s budget, then, the fee is best treated as sunk at purchase, with a possible rebate later. FTMO’s own “may be” is the honest way to write that, and it is a better guide than any blog’s “get your fee back”.

What happens to the refund if the funded account is breached before the payout?

This is the question the search engine’s “people also ask” box puts most directly, and it is the one this desk could not source.

None of the five pages read, FTMO’s FAQ entry, FundedNext’s Stellar 2-Step article, The5ers’ futures FAQ, Topstep’s refund policy page and MyFundedFutures’ how-it-works page, states what happens to a pending fee refund when the funded account breaches a rule before the payout that would trigger it. That is a scoped absence: five specific pages, read on one specific date, and no wider claim about the firms’ full terms, which may well address it elsewhere.

What can be said from the text is structural. At FTMO and FundedNext the refund is defined as an attachment to the first withdrawal; at The5ers it is defined as an attachment to the third payout. A breach that ends the account before that event means the event does not happen, and a refund defined by an event that does not happen has, on the words alone, no trigger. That is a reading, not a rule, and the right move is to find the clause in the firm’s full terms before relying on either outcome.

Topstep is the exception because its answer does not depend on the breach: once funded, the fees are used in full, so there is nothing pending to lose.

Resets, renewals and add-ons: where the refundable amount shrinks

Even at the firms that do refund, the amount that comes back is not always the amount that went out, and the firms’ own pages are where this shows.

FundedNext is the clearest case. The Refundable Fee reflects the reset fee, not the original purchase, if the account was reset. The firm’s numbers are 59 dollars paid, 53 dollars for the reset, 53 dollars back. The original purchase price is not refunded in that scenario, which means a reset is not a second attempt at the same refundable fee; it is a new, smaller refundable fee replacing a larger one that has been spent.

Topstep’s structure makes the same point from the other direction. The Combine is a monthly subscription that rebills roughly every 30 days until pass or cancel. A trader who takes three months to pass has paid three fees, and the policy page says the firm cannot refund or prorate the most recent one when you pass shortly after it charges. Resets and the Activation Fee are each listed as non-refundable, so the total spent to reach a funded account can be several multiples of the sticker price, and none of it returns.

The5ers refunds “exactly what you paid out-of-pocket for the initial account evaluation fee”, per its page. The word “initial” is doing work there; the page does not say resets or additional accounts are included, and this desk does not read it as saying so.

FTMO’s FAQ entry says only that the 2-Step fee may be refunded, without a figure or a reset scenario, so the reset question is unanswered on that page.

Questions searchers ask about prop firm fee refunds

Do all prop firms offer a refund on the challenge fee? No. Of the five firm pages this desk read on 11 September 2026, two tie a refund to the first withdrawal (FTMO 2-Step, FundedNext Stellar 2-Step), one pays it at the third payout (The5ers futures), one says refunds are generally not available and fees are used in full once you are funded (Topstep), and one does not mention a refund at all (MyFundedFutures, how-it-works page).

When do you typically get your prop firm refund? Where a refund exists, it arrives with a payout, not on passing. FTMO’s 2-Step fee may be refunded with the first Reward withdrawal to the original payment method. FundedNext’s Stellar 2-Step Refundable Fee is requested with the first Performance Reward and added to it after internal approval. The5ers adds the futures evaluation fee to equity at the third payout. None of the pages read refunds at the moment the evaluation is passed.

Can you lose your refund eligibility? Yes, in the ways each firm’s own text describes. FTMO says the 2-Step fee may be refunded, which is conditional language. FundedNext shrinks the Refundable Fee to the reset fee if the account was reset. Topstep’s 14-day guarantee covers only a first-ever Trading Combine that has not been passed, and once funded all fees are considered used in full. None of the five pages says what happens if a funded account is breached before the payout that triggers the refund.

Is the FTMO entry fee refunded? It depends which challenge you bought. FTMO’s own FAQ, read on 11 September 2026, gives two answers. For the FTMO Challenge 1-Step, the entry fee is not refunded. For the FTMO Challenge 2-Step, the entry fee may be refunded with the first Reward withdrawal, and the refund goes back through the initial payment method. Nothing on that page refunds a fee for passing the challenge on its own.

Is the prop firm refund considered taxable income? This desk cannot answer that from any page it read. None of the five firm pages, as read here, addresses tax, and the treatment of a fee rebate depends on where you are resident and how the payout it rides on is treated there. It is a question for a tax adviser in your own jurisdiction, and we would distrust any prop-firm blog that answers it in one sentence for every country at once.

How to read a refund clause yourself

The method this desk used is repeatable and needs no tools beyond the firm’s own site. First, find the per-question FAQ page, not the FAQ index: FTMO’s index page shows only the question headings, and the answer text lives on the individual question’s URL. Second, look for the trigger word. If the sentence says “withdrawal”, “payout” or “reward”, the refund depends on the funded account performing; if it says “pass”, it does not, and you have found something none of the five pages here offers. Third, look for the route, because “added to your reward” and “added to your equity” are not the same as money back on your card. Fourth, look for a reset or renewal sentence, since that is where the refundable amount quietly changes. Fifth, note the date on the page, or note that there is none, so that when the wording changes you know what you were relying on.

Do that for the firm you are considering and you will know more than the comparison blogs do, because you will have read the clause and they, on the evidence of the pages currently holding this search, largely have not.

The fee buys an evaluation

Everything above is the firms’ own text as read on one day, and every one of these pages can change without notice; the two that carry dates were both revised in July 2026, and the one that says “Updated today” says it every day. A challenge fee buys an evaluation, not a job, and most of the capital on the other side of it is simulated by the firm’s own description. Where a firm offers to hand the fee back, it does so at a point that depends on the funded account making money and the firm approving a payout, and the pages read here are clear that the refund is a possible later rebate, not a return of the purchase price. Trading involves substantial risk of loss, and a refund clause does not change the odds of the evaluation it is attached to.