The line moves once a day. It cuts continuously. Those are different clocks, and the gap between them is where accounts die.
Your Maximum Loss Limit rises with your end-of-day balance and never moves down. A losing day does not give room back. So the number that sets your floor is not what you started with, it is the highest you have ever closed.
Topstep's own words: "It rises as your end-of-day balance grows, but never moves down. Once it reaches your starting balance, it locks permanently."
That is the gentle part, and it is genuinely gentler than Apex. An intraday spike that you do not close does not permanently cost you room here. Only the close counts.
Now the dangerous part
The line only moves at the close, but it is armed against your live equity, including open losses, every second of the session.
Topstep again, verbatim: "If your balance hits it at any point during the trading day, including on unrealized P&L, your account is liquidated immediately."
An open position that drags you to your limit at 2pm is a breach at 2pm. Recovering by the close does not undo it, because the account is already gone. The breach happened first, and nothing that comes after it matters.
Topstep is blunt about these: the limit cannot be adjusted or changed, and they make no exceptions.
The $100 mistake
This is the single most common error people carry between firms, and it comes from reading Apex's rules and applying them here.
Apex freezes its threshold at starting balance plus $100.
Topstep locks at your starting balance exactly. There is no buffer. Not one dollar.
If you carry the Apex habit into a Topstep account, every calculation you make overstates your room by $100 for the entire life of the account. On a bad day that is the difference between a stop-out and a liquidation.
Express Funded accounts start at zero
On a Trading Combine your account starts at the size on the label, so the arithmetic feels normal. On an Express Funded Account it does not.
An Express Funded account starts at $0. The 50K on the label is buying power, not money. Your limit opens at negative $2,000 and climbs toward $0 as you make closes.
Anchor your mental math to the headline account size here and every number you produce is wrong by the full $50,000. This is the most expensive misunderstanding on the platform, and it is entirely avoidable.
There is one more twist. After your first approved payout, Topstep forces the limit to $0 regardless of where it had climbed to. If it had not reached $0 yet, that is a gift. If you were above, it is not.
Your daily loss limit might not exist
Most traders assume something will stop them before the account is gone. On Topstep, that assumption is optional, and the default is off.
Topstep's Daily Loss Limit is a feature you either add at checkout or set yourself in TopstepX Risk Settings. If you did neither, nothing stops you at $1,000 down. The trailing Maximum Loss Limit is your only hard floor, and hitting that one is terminal rather than a timeout.
If you did set one, it resets at 5:00 PM Central, and hitting it is a lockout that the account survives. Two completely different outcomes, decided by a checkbox you may not remember ticking.
Run your own account through it Every Topstep plan, the Combine and Express Funded and Live, with the optional daily loss limit modelled either way. Free, no signup.What Topstep tells you to do about it
Their own best-practice list is short and, for once, exactly right:
- Use stop losses before you approach the limit, not after
- Monitor unrealized profit and loss, not just closed trades
- Leave a buffer above the limit when the market is fast
All three exist because the limit cuts on live equity. Every one of them is really the same instruction: know the number while you are in the trade, not after.
Read it yourself
Everything above is read from Topstep's own help center. Rules change without notice, so check them against the source rather than trusting this page: