How much money
The famous answer — $25,000 — is a repealed rule. The computed answer is lower, and harder.
Facts checked on October 22, 2026
Until June 2026, the pattern day trader rule made $25,000 the legal answer for margin day trading in the US. FINRA's replacement took effect on June 4, 2026: the count and the minimum are gone, replaced by intraday margin standards, and brokers are phasing in through October 2027. So the question is open again — and 'open' is not the same as 'any amount works.'
Computed minimum viable capital for us stocks — day trading: $1,000 (risk term $300 · cost term $1,000 · about $20 a month of costs at beginner frequency). Survival floor: $75. At about two round trips a day — 40 a month — spread and slippage on the smallest sensible positions run about $20 a month, and it takes $1,000 of capital to hold those costs under 2% a month. The risk term is smaller ($300), so the cost term sets the minimum. Separately, a hard floor: day trading on margin still requires $2,000 of minimum equity. Below that you are in a cash account, trading on settled funds only — legal, but a different rhythm than the videos show.
The repeal is federal; the implementation is per-broker. Robinhood, Webull, tastytrade, Public, moomoo and Fidelity state June 4, 2026; Schwab states June 8; E*TRADE June 9; Interactive Brokers announces removal with no date published; several large firms have published nothing we can find. Our PDT tracker keeps the dated table from the brokers' own pages — check your broker's row before you plan around the new rules.
About 5% of day traders are profitable after costs, in the full-market studies (Barber et al.; Brazil's study: 3% made money over a year, 1.1% above minimum wage). The rule change decided who may try with a small account. It did not change what trying costs, or how it usually ends — which is why this site's verdict for day trading is computed from costs and unit risk, exactly as it would have been under the old rule.
Prop firms still sell challenges as a way to 'bypass PDT.' The rule they claim to bypass no longer exists. What the challenge actually sells is a rules test with an expected cost — computed on our prop-firm page.
Run the checker with your numbers
The verdict gives you the arithmetic for your market and your capital. The Start-or-Wait Kit gives you the complete workbook: the demo-record audit (the 50-trade review grid), the staged capital plan up to your market's minimum viable capital, the 90-day learning plan week by week, and the real-cost tracker — the spreadsheet experienced traders build by hand, ready to fill in.
Included in the $39 Start-or-Wait Kit
Sources: FINRA Regulatory Notice 26-10 (April 20, 2026) and the brokers' own pages for the PDT tracker; ESMA Decision (EU) 2018/796 and the AMF restatement for European CFD loss figures; ASIC Report 828 (FY2023–24) for Australia; CFTC retail forex materials for the United States; Barber, Lee, Liu & Odean (Taiwan market data) and Chague & De Losso (Brazil) for day-trading outcomes; the FPFX Technology dataset of 300,000+ prop-firm accounts, reported by Finance Magnates (2024); broker-published minimum deposits and margin schedules as dated on the dataset page. If a figure has moved since our check date, the issuer's own publication wins — and write to help@doogex.com so we can correct ours.