18+ only. Forex, CFDs and funded-account challenges are high-risk. Compare facts before visiting any provider.How we stay independent →

The5ers

Israel-founded (2016) CFD proprietary trading challenge firm — also styled 'The5%ers' — one of the longer-running firms in the category, with a 4.7/5 Trustpilot score across 36,634 reviews (90% five-star) and a 96% reply rate to negative reviews. Runs four CFD evaluation programs (Bootcamp, High Stakes, Hyper Growth, Pro Growth) all sharing a genuinely trader-friendly trait — static, not trailing, drawdown across every program — plus a separate futures arm. Real caveats: a February 2024 suspension of new US CFD traders with no confirmed lift found, a High Stakes evaluation-fee refund that is 70% (not the commonly assumed 100%), and a documented pattern of large-payout account-termination disputes citing vague 'account integrity' language.

◆ Recently checkedAffiliate partner (labelled)MT4MT5
Open challenge
Provider score
69
weighted mean of the dimensions below
Data confidence
Medium
how complete & sourced the fields are
Last fully verified
Sep 2, 2026
last checked Sep 2, 2026
Commercial relationship
Affiliate
never affects the score
Rules & terms

Evaluation & cost

Model2-step evaluation

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Account sizes5k, 20k, 60k, 100k (High Stakes, per corroborated Jan-2025 pricing); the5ers.com itself separately lists a 2.5k–100k lineup scaling toward 500k — treat both as current pending re-check

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Challenge fee from$39

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Fee refundableYes, on funding

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Refund conditionsOn High Stakes, only 70% — not 100% — of the evaluation fee is refunded with the first payout, and only if the account shows ≥$150 profit and has been active ≥14 days; the 70% is calculated on the real-funds portion only, excluding anything paid with Hub Credit (secondary-sourced, see Source #10 — the primary help-center page 404'd on direct fetch and this should be re-verified). A separate limited-time 'Summer Plan' promotion instead staged the refund as 10%/20% Hub Credit at each evaluation step plus 70% cash at the 3rd funded payout — refund mechanics are program- and promotion-specific, not one universal rule.

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Rules & terms

Drawdown & targets

Drawdown type decides whether a winning day raises the level you can be cut at.

Profit target10%

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Daily drawdown5%

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Max drawdown10%

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Drawdown typeStatic (balance-based)

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Minimum trading days3 days

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Time limitNo time limit stated

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Rules & terms

Payout terms

Profit split80–100%

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

First payout after14 days

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Payout rulesFigures above are for the flagship High Stakes model (10% Phase-1 / 5% Phase-2 target, 5% daily / 10% max static drawdown, 3 minimum profitable days — a profitable day needs ≥0.5% of initial balance in closed-position gains, not just activity). First payout is available 14 days after the account is funded, then every 14 days after that (the timer resets on a scaling event); minimum withdrawal $150; approved payouts processed within 72 hours (secondary-sourced, primary help page 404'd — see Sources #9–10). Other live programs differ materially: Hyper Growth (1-step, 10% target vs a 6% stop-out, split starts at 50%, combined account size capped at $40K, a daily-loss breach only pauses the account for the day rather than ending it); Pro Growth (1-step, split starts at 75%, a daily-loss breach terminates immediately); Bootcamp (3 sequential steps, 6%/5% per step, tighter 4% max loss and 5% target once funded, lower 1:30 leverage). Accounts with no trading activity for 30 consecutive days expire. Scaling: profitable funded accounts can grow toward $500K per the current High Stakes page (older marketing cited a $4M ceiling under a different scaling scheme) — treat the exact current ceiling as needing a re-check.

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Rules & terms

Strategy rules

A rule that is absent from this list is not automatically permitted — it means we have no sourced statement either way.

News tradingNot confirmed allowed

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Weekend holdingAllowed

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Expert advisorsAllowed

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Copy tradingNot confirmed allowed

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Consistency ruleNot on file

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Scaling planYes

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Prohibited strategiesA long, specific ban list confirmed directly from The5ers' own FAQ: arbitrage/system-error exploitation, HFT and tick scalping, bulk/simultaneous multi-position trading, 'bracketing' (placing pending orders around high-impact news releases), rollover-scalping EAs, closed-source or duplicated third-party EAs (a trader must own and understand the source code of any EA used), 'trade coordination or copy trading with other traders or accounts' — banned outright with no stated same-owner exception, unlike some competitors — one-sided directional betting, account sharing/reselling, paid challenge-passing services, cross-firm hedging, and gambling-like concentrated speculation. Violations are cancelled/banned and not refunded.

Source: The5ers — Challenge Programs Explained (Bootcamp / High Stakes / Hyper Growth / Pro Growth) · last checked Sep 2, 2026 · confidence Medium

Score breakdown

How this score was built

Each dimension is scored 0–100 with a written rationale and its own weight. No single unexplained star.

Commercial deals excluded
20%Rule clarity70

The5ers documents its programs in real detail across a dedicated blog explainer and specific help-center FAQs (prohibited-practices list, EA source-code-ownership rule), and — unusually for the sector — announces price changes as a direct, dated public statement (the Jan 2025 price notice) rather than silently editing a page. Marked down because an automated fetch of the live High Stakes pricing table returned an internally inconsistent flat '$19' figure across every account size, and the page's own account-size lineup (2.5k–100k, scaling to 500k) doesn't cleanly match the size/price lineup independently corroborated elsewhere (5k/20k/60k/100k, scaling toward 4M) — a trader relying on the live page alone could come away with a materially wrong picture of cost.

20%Drawdown fairness78

The genuine standout: every program — High Stakes, Hyper Growth, Pro Growth, Bootcamp — uses static (balance-based) drawdown, with no trailing/equity-ratchet variant hidden behind an 'instant funding' brand the way some competitors do. Hyper Growth even turns a daily-loss breach into a one-day pause rather than an account-ending event, which is unusually forgiving. High Stakes' 5%/10% daily/max thresholds are standard-for-the-industry, not generous, but the consistent no-trailing-anywhere policy is a real structural fairness advantage over firms that mix drawdown types across their own product line.

18%Payout-term transparency64

Concrete, checkable mechanics: 14-day first payout, 14-day cycles after that, a $150 minimum and a 72-hour processing window (secondary-sourced, since the primary help page 404'd — flagged for re-check). No review-manipulation finding turned up against The5ers the way one did for a peer firm, and the firm replies to 96% of negative Trustpilot reviews — genuinely better transparency behavior than most of the sector. Marked down for a real, if secondary-sourced, pattern of large-payout account-termination disputes (a $15,800 rejected payout citing vague 'account integrity and exclusive ownership issues' with no detailed evidence offered, and a separate report of a scaled account's accrued profit being zeroed after a support dispute) — both found only via search-snippet corroboration of Forex Peace Army content that returned HTTP 403 on direct fetch, and needing independent re-verification.

14%Fee / value relationship66

Entry pricing is competitive and well-corroborated at the smaller sizes ($39 for a $5K account) rising to $545 for a $100K account after the Jan 2025 price increase — broadly in line with the rest of the sector. Marked down specifically because the evaluation-fee refund on High Stakes is 70%, not the 100% a trader might reasonably assume from generic "fee refunded on first payout" marketing language repeated across third-party trackers — a real, quantifiable gap between marketing shorthand and the actual condition-laden mechanic, alongside profit split starting as low as 50% on the Hyper Growth entry tier before scaling up.

12%Platform & strategy compatibility74

Reasonably broad tolerance: EAs are allowed broadly on MT4/MT5, and overnight/weekend holding is permitted (the firm is explicitly described as stricter on daily-loss controls than on holding patterns). Two real constraints stand out versus peers: EAs must be ones the trader fully owns and understands the source code of (closed-source/black-box EAs are a violation even though 'EAs allowed' is the headline), and copy trading is banned outright between any accounts — with no same-account-owner exception the way a comparable firm allows. 'Bracketing' pending orders around high-impact news is specifically banned, a narrower and more precisely-defined restriction than a blanket news-trading ban.

10%Rule-change stability58

The5ers has changed pricing mid-cycle before (the Jan 2025 increase on 60K/100K High Stakes, announced directly rather than silently) and profit targets have shifted between a "Classic" (8%/5%) and current "New" (10%/5%) High Stakes structure per third-party trackers. No evidence found of a change being applied retroactively to accounts already funded under older terms — the changes found were forward-looking pricing/target updates on new purchases, not a clawback on existing funded accounts, which is the more serious version of this risk.

6%Dispute transparency58

A 96% reply rate to negative Trustpilot reviews and no review-manipulation finding (unlike a peer firm reviewed on this site) put The5ers ahead of the sector norm on this dimension. It isn't scored higher because of a real, if only secondarily-sourced, pattern of account-termination disputes over large payouts where the stated reason ('account integrity and exclusive ownership issues') was reportedly not accompanied by specific trade evidence, and a reported risk-team review process that, in one account, declined a trader's request for an evidentiary chart walkthrough before finalizing a termination. Both rest on Forex Peace Army content that returned HTTP 403 on direct fetch — flagged for independent re-verification rather than treated as settled fact.

Reviews

What readers report

Member reviews are kept separate from our editorial assessment and from the provider score — they are moderated, not curated for tone.

No approved member reviews yet. An empty review list is not a negative signal — it means nobody has published one here.

Write a review

Sourcing

Where this data came from

If a field is missing here, treat it as unverified rather than as a negative.

Verification statusRecently checked
Data confidenceMedium
Last checkedSep 2, 2026
Last fully verifiedSep 2, 2026
Reviewed byNot recorded
Attached sources

Editor note: Prop firm — regulatory status intentionally not a scoring dimension (matches PROP_DIMENSIONS in src/lib/scoring.ts and The5ers' own Terms, which explicitly disclaim being a broker-dealer or regulated financial institution — the platform is a simulated/fictitious-funds evaluation environment; see Source #4). Good primary coverage on programs/rules/prohibited-practices/entity info (Sources #1, #4, #5, plus the official Jan-2025 price-change statement, Source #3) fetched directly from the5ers.com and the company's own X account. Two areas rest on secondary corroboration only, flagged explicitly rather than asserted as settled: (a) exact current per-size pricing and account-size lineup — the live High Stakes page returned an internally inconsistent pricing table on automated fetch, so the Jan-2025 official price notice was used as the anchor instead, with the discrepancy noted rather than silently resolved; (b) payout-dispute complaint patterns and the exact refund/withdrawal mechanics, since both help.the5ers.com pages 404'd and the Forex Peace Army review page 403'd on direct fetch — re-check all of these when the primary pages become accessible. The Feb 2024 US-CFD-trader suspension (Source #7) is press-corroborated and dated, but no confirmation of it being lifted was found, so its current 2026 status should be treated as unconfirmed rather than assumed resolved. The referral link's `?afmc=` tracking parameter and the supplied checkout coupon code match The5ers' documented in-house Affiliate Hub mechanic generically, but the specific commission rate for this program was not independently verified from a primary page.