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Day Trading Salary: How Much Do Day Traders Make
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Day Trading Salary: How Much Do Day Traders Make
Social media is full of “gurus” who claim they make six figures a month from day trading. In this post, we cut through all the hype and deal with the real facts on day trading salaries.
Our team curated verified data from five salary aggregators to bring you the latest and most accurate statistics.
Read on to learn the truth about how much day traders make in 2026. We’ll also reveal what's affecting your earnings, how long it typically takes to become profitable, and what the top earners do differently.
How Much Does the Average Day Trader Make
In the United States, the average day trading salary is $10,156 per month. This is the equivalent of $121,885 a year.
Based on data collected by sites like Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter, and Indeed, day traders earn as low as $5,472 a month, which is the average salary at the entry level. Top earners in the field received $19,361 per month, on average.
Those figures include institutional traders employed by investment companies, prop firm traders, part-time traders, and independent traders. The main criterion is that the individual buys and sells financial instruments—such as stocks, forex, or cryptocurrencies—within the same trading day.
Full Report of Day Trader Salaries
Several websites have curated reports on day trading income in the United States. We combined the latest reports from five popular salary aggregators:
Some platforms, like ZipRecruiter, source most of their data from self-employed traders, while others, such as Glassdoor, include a large number of career professionals in their surveys. You can see these differences reflected in the numbers below.
To get the most accurate data, we found the average of all reported data while trusting larger samples more.
Please note: The reports from those sites don’t take into account day traders who lose money or who don’t make any money. In fact, studies have shown that only 36% of day traders make any money. Based on that research, the above data only applies to the minority of day traders.
Factors Affecting Day Trading Income
The following factors can determine how much money a day trader makes.
Starting Capital
The more money you trade with, the higher your potential profit. One reason prop firms are so popular among day traders is that they provide access to funded accounts with substantial capital. Hence, traders get to maximize profit without risking their own cash. But beware—more capital also means larger risks.
Market Conditions
Favorable market conditions, such as high volatility, liquidity, and trading volume, allow traders to profit from the smallest price fluctuations.
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Top earners leverage technical analysis and price trends to make the best possible decisions.
Commissions and Costs
Brokers often charge a fee for executing buy/sell orders. That fee is called a commission, and it’s one of the many costs associated with day trading. Besides commissions, software fees, subscriptions, taxes, bid-ask spreads, and other charges could pile up and eat into your returns. To minimize these costs, day traders often seek platforms with no subscription fees, low commissions, or access to free tools.
Trading Strategies
The small percentage of traders who make consistent profit usually do so because of their strategies. It’s pretty simple. A strong strategy can lead to better trades and higher profits, while a weak one can cost you money.
Win-Rate and Risk Management
Winning often isn’t enough to make you substantial money—you also have to win big. And when you lose, which is inevitable, you shouldn’t lose too much. That’s where proper risk management skills can help. Stop-loss orders, position sizing, take-profit orders, and loss limits can help you improve your win-rate, maximize profit, and minimize losses.
How Long Does It Take to Become Profitable At Day Trading?
It typically takes six months to two years to become consistently profitable as a day trader. This timeframe includes the learning period where the trader becomes familiar with the market and its different conditions.
While it’s possible to make early profits if your strategy works well, you could eventually lose money when market conditions change. Only experience and skill will allow you to adapt to those changes at the right time, thereby maintaining long-term profitability.
You can reduce the time it takes to become profitable by doing the following:
- Joining a quality prop firm
- Working with a mentor
- Spending more hours trading
- Frequent testing and improvement
How Day Traders Make Profit
Here’s how some of the world’s best day traders make money:
Picking the Right Assets
To take regular profits, you need to choose the right assets more often than not. In day trading, highly liquid and volatile assets usually have the biggest profit potential and top earners know this.
A 2018 case study examined one consistently profitable proprietary day trader over 61 trading days using 768 transactions. The trader’s profits came from a repeatable asset-selection process rather than random stock picking.
We recommend that you read our recent guide on how to pick the right stocks in 2026.
Finding Winning Strategies
Top earners develop or adopt strategies that consistently take advantage of market conditions. They create repeatable processes using entry/exit criteria and mitigate losses with risk management tools like stop-loss levels, profit targets, take-profit orders, and maximum drawdowns.
Amal Tyagi, a senior analyst at Ernst & Young, made 26.98% profit in 2 months using a form of high-frequency trading strategy.
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We curated a list of the best 15 day trading strategies you should know before you begin your career. Please note that no tactic works forever, and you’ll have to frequently change, update, and adapt it.
Staying Disciplined
Day trading requires patience, mental strength, and the ability to control one’s emotions. Avoid greed, fear, stubbornness, and regret if you want to become profitable. Stick to your trading plan and risk management rules until you have empirical evidence that they no longer work.
Joining High-Paying Prop Firms
There are thousands of firms that will give you a starting capital in exchange for a share of the profits. However, only the highest-paying prop firms offer you more than 80% of the profit share. These companies supply as much as $500K in funding and can even scale your capital to millions. Whether or not the capital is real or simulated doesn’t matter, so long as you earn real profits.
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AtlasFunded, a leading prop firm, pays out $3,492 on average—one of the highest in the industry.
Bottom Line
Making more than $10K a month in day trading is possible but may take you several months or years to achieve. You don’t need to risk your capital to get started as a day trader. AtlasFunded can provide you up to $400K and 100% profit split. All you need is to pick an evaluation type and pass the challenge. You can also skip the challenge and get instant funding.
Pick the right assets, find winning strategies, and stay disciplined if you want to join our long list of prop traders making $10K+ every month.
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