Topstep's daily loss limit ends more evaluations than any single bad trade. It is not the trailing drawdown that traders obsess over. It is a separate, simpler cap: lose more than a set amount in one trading day and your account is locked until the next session opens.
What the Topstep daily loss limit is
The daily loss limit, or DLL, is the most you are allowed to lose in a single trading day. Reach it and Topstep flattens your open positions, cancels your working orders, and blocks new trades until the next session begins. The amounts scale with account size:
$50K account $1,000 daily loss limit
$100K account $2,000 daily loss limit
$150K account $3,000 daily loss limitThese figures apply to the Trading Combine and the Express Funded Account, per Topstep's own documentation.
When it resets
The DLL is a daily cap, so it resets every day. The reset happens at 5:00 PM CT, the start of the new CME trading day, not at midnight and not on your local morning. A loss taken at 3:00 PM CT and a trade placed at 6:00 PM CT the same evening fall on opposite sides of the reset. The session itself runs from 5:00 PM CT to 3:10 PM CT the following afternoon.
Knowing the exact reset time is not trivia. Traders who think in calendar days routinely miscount their remaining room near the session boundary and either stop too early or, worse, treat a fresh session as a continuation of a bad day.
Optional in the Combine, automatic when funded
A detail that catches new Topstep traders: the daily loss limit is optional in the Trading Combine and the Express Funded Account, and automatic in the Live Funded Account. During the evaluation stage you can choose whether to run with a daily limit at all. Once you are trading a live funded account, it applies whether you want it or not.
The logic is simple. While you are being evaluated, the firm is testing you. Once its own capital is at risk, the firm protects it.
Daily loss limit vs maximum loss limit
This is the distinction that trips people up. Topstep enforces two different loss rules at the same time:
- The daily loss limit caps losses within a single day and resets each session.
- The maximum loss limit is a trailing lifetime drawdown that follows your account balance up and never moves down.
They are not the same number and they do not reset together. You can stay comfortably under your daily limit and still breach the trailing maximum loss limit over several grinding days. We covered the trailing limit and why it traps traders in a separate post. For this article the point is only that the daily limit is the per-session guardrail sitting inside the larger trailing one.
What happens when you hit it
Hitting the DLL is not a failure in the way blowing the trailing limit is. When you reach the daily loss limit, three things happen:
- open positions are flattened
- working orders are canceled
- you cannot place new trades until 5:00 PM CT
Crucially, reaching the daily limit is not treated as a rule violation. Your account stays eligible. You return the next session and carry on. That makes the DLL a circuit breaker rather than a death sentence, and it should be treated that way.
How to actually track it
The mistake is tracking the limit in your head while you sit in a position, because open profit and loss swings faster than you can do mental arithmetic under pressure. Set a hard number before the session: the dollar loss at which you stop for the day, placed comfortably inside the firm's limit rather than exactly on it. On a $50K account with a $1,000 daily limit, your personal stop might be $600. The firm's limit should never be your first line of defense. It should be the line you have already promised yourself you will never reach.
The cleaner habit is to log every trade and review each day's loss against the limit afterward, so you can see how often you flirt with it. A run of days that end near the daily limit is a sizing problem, not a willpower problem, and the fix is smaller contracts, not more grit.
The takeaway
The daily loss limit is the most forgiving rule Topstep enforces, because it resets. It costs you a day, not your account. Treat it as a backstop you never actually touch by setting a stricter daily stop of your own, remember that it resets at 5:00 PM CT and not at midnight, and never confuse it with the trailing maximum loss limit that genuinely ends evaluations. The traders who pass decided their daily number before the open. The ones who fail discovered the firm's number at 2:55 PM.