When does your next payout actually clear? Firm-specific rules, live gate checks, and a Gantt from funded day to money-in-bank.
Rules verified: April 2026 (Apex 4.0 ruleset, per proptradingvibes + support.apextraderfunding.com)
Clock starts on the date of your first trade in the funded account.
The lowest cap binds. For exact per-stage split math (consistency → cap → tiered split → refund), use the Payout Calculator.
Time-based gates stack; consistency gates don't. Calendar-day minimums, trading-day minimums, and qualifying-day minimums all run in parallel — the payout clears once the latest of them is satisfied. Apex 4.0 needs 5 qualifying trading days; if you have 10 trading days but only 3 qualified (hit the minimum profit tier for that size), you still wait. The calculator shows which gate is the actual blocker so you know where to focus. The consistency gate and safety-net gate are different: they block the payout entirely rather than pushing it forward, and they clear through changes in ratios or balance rather than through time passing.
Calendar days and trading days are not the same thing. FTMO and E8 use calendar days — 14 days is 14 days regardless of whether you trade. Apex and Topstep use trading days — only sessions where you place at least one trade count. The calculator approximates trading-day-to-calendar-day conversion at 7:5, which assumes weekdays only. If you skip days, the trading-day clock pauses but the calendar-day clock does not, which can make FTMO feel slower in practice than Apex despite Apex's "5 qualifying days" looking shorter on paper.
Consistency is a ratio, not a timer. Apex's 50%, Topstep Consistency's 40%, and FundedNext's 40% all measure the same thing: largest single day divided by total profit since the payout anchor. If your best day is $1,000 and your total profit is $1,800, the ratio is 55.6% — over Apex's 50% cap. You clear the gate by earning more on other days to dilute the ratio, which the calculator quantifies as a dollar deficit. Critically, you cannot clear it by having a new, even-bigger single day — that just raises the ratio's numerator. The only path forward is distributed profit across multiple days. MFFU Rapid and FTMO have no funded-phase consistency rule at all.
The Apex safety net is the least-understood rule on this page. Safety net = drawdown + $100, enforced on every payout request (not just the first 3 — that was the legacy rule). It's checked twice — when you submit the request and again when Apex processes it (2 business days later). If your balance drops below the safety net between the two checks, the payout auto-denies and the 5-qualifying-day clock restarts. This is the main reason Apex traders report "my payout got denied and I don't know why" — they usually traded down between request and approval. The calculator flags the current safety-net status, but remember it needs to hold for ~2 days after the request clicks, not just at the moment you click it.
Processing times are estimates, not guarantees. The funds-in-hand date uses a firm-by-firm typical value (3 business days for Topstep/FTMO/E8, 5 for Apex) that covers internal review plus wire transfer. Bank holidays, weekend queues, international wire delays, and KYC document submission (especially FTMO's first payout W-9 requirement) can extend this by several days. Plan tightly around a specific date only after your second or third payout when you have baseline data on how your bank handles the specific payment rail each firm uses.
What this tool does NOT model: rolling 30-day inactivity rules (Apex PAs close after 30 days without 2 qualifying days), KYC holds for first-payout W-9 submissions, manual compliance reviews triggered by unusually profitable days, account-review delays from risk-management flags, bank holidays, or the difference between trade-date and settlement-date accounting. Treat the output as the earliest-possible-in-a-normal-world date.
Payout timing answers "when can I withdraw?" — but once you know the date, three related questions usually follow: how much will actually land in your bank (Payout Calculator), whether consistency dilution is worth the wait or you should bank less sooner (Consistency Rule Calculator), and whether the trading style that produced your best day is sustainable for the next cycle (Position Size Calculator).