How the prop-firm tiers work
Payout Court places prop firms in tiers from S to F using receipts: payout emails that traders forward to us. Every tier comes from the public formula below, and every number links to its evidence and to the firm's free right of reply.
Nothing on the tier list can be bought. Firm Desk, the paid service for firms, is never an input, and neither are the trader gut-check votes. The ranking code never reads either, and a check in our build fails if it ever does.
The rules at a glance
Upload
The trader saves the firm's payout email, approved or denied, as an .eml file and uploads it.
Signature checked
We check DKIM, the email's sender signature. It proves who sent the email, not that money reached a bank.
A person reviews it
Names and account numbers are redacted, and a person reviews every receipt before anything about it is published.
Receipts set the tier
A firm gets a tier from 10 weighted receipts sent by 5 different people within 180 days. Until then: No verdict yet.
Before any tier
- 10weighted receipts
- 5different senders
- 180day window
Below that a firm is NR, "No verdict yet": shown with its counts, never as a low score.
What one receipt weighs
- Verified: DKIM-signed by the firm's own domain1.0
- Partly verified: signed by a shared email provider0.5
- Public post, not verified (timeline only)0
What the score is made of
- 60% receipt denial share (forwarded to us)
- 25% payout speed
- 15% reviewed rule changes
Money is never an input.
- F, score below 45
- D, score 45 to 54.9
- C, score 55 to 64.9
- B, score 65 to 74.9
- A, score 75 to 84.9
- S, score 85 and above
NRNo verdict yet
- Receipts
- 2 denials and 14 approvals or payments sent, weighted, from 9 senders in the last 180 days: past the minimum of 10 from 5
- Pooled prior
- μ = 0.30, the average across all firms
- Speed
- a median of 30 hours, over 8 receipts that carry both dates
- Rule changes
- one reviewed minor change, severity 1
p̂ = (2 + 20 × 0.30) / (2 + 14 + 20) = 0.222S_speed = 1 - ln(31) / ln(337) = 0.410R = min(1, 1 / 15) = 0.067Score = 100 × [0.60 × (1 - 0.222 / 0.5) + 0.25 × 0.410 + 0.15 × (1 - 0.067)] = 57.6
57.6 lands in C tier C.
What counts as a receipt
A receipt is an email from a prop firm about a payout: a denial, an approval, or a payment sent. Traders save it as an .eml file and upload it on the submit page.
How a receipt is checked
A firm's mail system normally signs every email it sends with DKIM. We check that signature on the original email and record the signing domain (d=), the selector (s=), and the public key the domain published at the time, with its SHA-256 fingerprint, because keys rotate and the archive lets anyone re-check later. A receipt is verified only when all of these hold:
- the signature is valid;
- the signing domain is, or is a parent of, a domain we list for the firm;
- the signature covers the From, Date and Subject headers;
- the whole body is signed (a signature that covers only part of the body could hide added text, so it fails);
- the From address's domain matches the signing domain;
- the email is dated within the last 18 months and not in the future.
A receipt is partly verified when the valid signature comes from a shared email or helpdesk provider (such as intercom-mail.com, zendesk.com, sendgrid.net, freshdesk.com, mailgun.org), the From address is at the firm's domain, and a moderator has confirmed that the firm sends through that exact provider domain. It counts at half weight.
An inline forward rewrites the message and breaks the signature. We accept it, but it can only ever be unverified, and unverified receipts are never scored. The same file, the same message for the same firm, or the same signature is counted once.
If the email was addressed to someone other than the person who sent it to us, the reviewer sees that, and the receipt is not used unless it is clear the email is theirs. A person reviews every receipt before it is published.
Which receipts are scored
Published receipts from the last 180 days, weighted by how they were checked:
| Checked as | Weight |
|---|---|
| Verified: DKIM-signed by the firm's own domain | 1.0 |
| Partly verified: signed by a shared email provider | 0.5 |
| Public post, not verified (timeline only) | 0 |
1. Receipt denial share (forwarded to us)
D is the weighted count of denials, and A the weighted count of approvals and payments sent. Across all firms we compute a pooled prior μ = ΣD / Σ(D + A), kept between 0.05 and 0.5, with prior strength m = 20. A firm's share is the posterior mean
p̂ = (D + m·μ) / (D + A + m)with a 90% credible interval from the Beta(D + m·μ, A + m·(1 - μ)) distribution, shown as a bar on each firm's page. The prior pulls small samples toward the average of all firms, so a firm with three receipts cannot sit at an extreme.
Share of receipts forwarded to us, not of all payouts. People forward denials more often than approvals, so absolute numbers run high; compare firms with each other, not with zero.
Minimum sample. A firm gets a tier only with D + A of at least 10 weighted receipts and receipts from at least 5 different senders. Below that it is NR, "No verdict yet", shown with its counts.
2. Payout speed
The median number of hours from the payout request to the firm's decision, over receipts that carry both dates. With fewer than 5 such receipts the neutral value 0.5 is used. Otherwise, with h the median hours:
S_speed = clamp(1 - ln(1 + h) / ln(1 + 336), 0, 1)336 hours is 14 days: a median of 14 days or more scores 0.
3. Rule-change penalty
Changes to a firm's own rules pages that a person has reviewed and classed as unfavourable to traders, in the last 90 days, each with a severity: minor 1, material 3, retroactive 6.
R = min(1, Σseverity / 15)Only reviewed changes count. A change our crawler detected but nobody has reviewed yet shows on the timeline as "Change detected, not yet reviewed" and never moves a score.
4. Score and tiers
Score = 100 × [0.60 × (1 - min(p̂, 0.5) / 0.5) + 0.25 × S_speed + 0.15 × (1 - R)]| Tier | Score |
|---|---|
| S | 85 and above |
| A | 75 to 84.9 |
| B | 65 to 74.9 |
| C | 55 to 64.9 |
| D | 45 to 54.9 |
| F | below 45 |
A firm marked closed is placed in F and labelled "Closed". A firm marked paused keeps its last score, frozen, and is labelled "Paused". A firm whose status we cannot establish is labelled "Status unclear". Scores are append-only: each ranking run adds a new row, and "How this score was computed" on each firm's page prints every input it used.
The daily rules check
Once a day we fetch each firm's public rules, FAQ and payout-policy pages, usually 3 to 6 per firm, preferring help-centre articles because they are stable. Our crawler identifies itself as PayoutCourtBot/0.1 (+https://tierlist.lol/prop-firms/methodology), obeys robots.txt, makes at most one request every 5 seconds to any host, and sends conditional requests. It never works around bot protection: where a firm's site refuses plain requests we use its help-centre pages or the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, or mark the page "not monitorable".
Each page is reduced to its main text, with navigation, footers, cookie banners, timers and discount codes removed, and fingerprinted. A new fingerprint stores a dated snapshot and a line-by-line diff, tagged by keywords such as consistency, payout, drawdown, news, KYC or "effective immediately". The timeline shows the change at once; a person then classes it as cosmetic, neutral, favourable or unfavourable to traders. We quote only the changed lines, with the capture date and a link to the page.
rulesofprop.com already tracks prop-firm rules pages daily. This is not a new idea; here it serves as one input to the score and as the timeline that explains why a firm moved.
Data sources
- Emails traders forward to us or upload, checked as above.
- Firms' own public rules, FAQ and payout-policy pages.
- Public posts on X about a firm's payouts, shown on the timeline as "Public post on X, not verified by Payout Court. The firm can reply.", and never scored.
- Replies and statements from the firms themselves.
Known biases
- Forwarding bias. People forward denials more often than approvals, so every firm's denial share runs high. Compare firms with each other, not with zero. We ask for approvals as loudly as for denials to narrow the gap.
- Small samples. A few receipts say little. The prior, the minimum sample and the interval bar are there so a handful of emails cannot set a tier.
- The denominator problem. We never see all of a firm's payouts, only the receipts forwarded to us. No number here is a firm-wide rate, and none should be read as one.
- Others count too. rulesofprop.com also tracks firms' rules pages daily, and PropFirmMatch shows counts of denials reported to it. Our numbers are built only from receipts forwarded to us and from firms' own pages.
What we publish, and what we do not
We publish only: the checked fact that an email DKIM-signed by a firm's domain said something, in categories; aggregates computed by this formula; and changes to the firm's own rules pages, quoted with the capture date.
Up to 600 characters of the firm's own words may appear with a receipt, after redaction. Excerpt text is held for 72 hours after the firm is notified, or until it replies, and hidden while a report is disputed. Excerpts are not published yet: for now only counts and stated-reason categories are public.
Redaction. Before anything leaves private storage we remove quoted replies from the trader, signatures and footers, and redact every email address, the trader's name, firm staff names (their role stays, for example "[Risk team]"), account, login and ticket numbers, IP addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, links carrying tokens, and card and IBAN numbers. A moderator can redact more, never less.
Retention. The raw email stays in private storage for 12 months after we receive it, so we can prove what we published, and is then deleted. Public pages never link to it.
How firms reply, free
When we publish a denial, we email the firm's public support address a one-click reply link for that report. It needs no login, no payment and no claim, and it works for 30 days. The reply appears directly under the report, in the same type size. A firm can also post one firm-wide statement on its page, and it can dispute a report: the report is labelled "Disputed by the firm, under review (7 days)", its text is hidden during the review, and its count stays. More for firms.
Money cannot buy truth
Firm Desk, the paid service for firms, does not and cannot change a score, a tier, which reports are shown or their order. A firm that pays says so on its page. There are no affiliate links on the tier list or on any firm page, and we earn nothing when a trader signs up with a firm.
Rule facts
Each firm's page also carries rule facts: payout frequency, profit split, and whether it allows copy trading, EAs, news trading, hedging and weekend holding. Every one of them links to a source on the firm's own site, carries a short quote in the firm's own words, and shows the date we checked it.
A blank fact means we have not checked that rule yet, not that the firm disallows it: it renders as "Not checked yet", with a link to the firm's rules page, never as "No".
When a firm changes a rule, the old row is kept and superseded, never edited in place, so the full history stays on the firm's timeline.
What is different here: every rule shown quotes the firm's own words, with a source link and a checked date, and there are no affiliate links anywhere on these pages.
Corrections and takedowns
If a number or a report here is wrong, tell us through the notice form. We review every notice and correct what is wrong. Each correction is recorded, with its reason, in our moderation log, which is not public; a notice we act on is also listed in the public removal log.
The notice form also takes takedown requests under the EU Digital Services Act, with three reasons for Payout Court: "Inaccurate report", "Personal data" and "Not from the firm". Each decision is recorded with its reason, the person who sent the notice is told the outcome by email from the operator, and removals are listed in the removal log. A trader who asks to withdraw their own receipt has it withdrawn within 72 hours, no questions asked.
Changelog
| Method | Date | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| v0.1 | first version |
Not financial advice
Payout Court describes receipts forwarded to us. It does not recommend any firm or evaluation, and nothing on these pages is financial advice. Prop-firm evaluations are simulated-trading services.