Account reset
An account reset is a paid option that restarts a challenge account at its original balance, with all rules and statistics wiped, after a breach or a deep drawdown.
Resets are commonly offered on challenge phases rather than funded accounts, and are priced below a fresh attempt. After the reset, everything starts over: balance, drawdown allowances, minimum trading days, and any progress toward the target. Some firms offer resets automatically after an account breach; others also let struggling traders reset early, before a breach, to escape a hole too deep to climb out of within the rules.
That early-reset case is the practical one. An account down 8% against a 10% maximum drawdown must earn its entire target with 2% of room left, and a reset reprices that situation to a fresh account for less than a new fee.
The commonly cited danger is serial resetting — paying repeatedly to undo the same behavior, most often revenge trading after a losing day. A reset restores the balance but not the process that lost it, and fee spend across resets is part of the true cost of a challenge, tallied in what a prop firm challenge costs.
In a prop-firm challenge
A reset is cheapest when the mistake that forced it will not be repeated. Some traders rehearse the same rulebook in a simulator until breaches stop before paying again; the options for doing that are compared in practicing prop firm challenges free.