A breach is the moment an account's state crosses a limit written into the rules of the evaluation. Detection is almost always automatic: the platform monitors equity, position size, instrument type and session times continuously, and acts on the condition being met rather than on a review after the fact. In practice this means the account is closed or flagged at once, open positions are liquidated, and there is no notice period and no chance to trade the balance back above the line. Two categories behave differently. A hard breach — typically a maximum loss measured against the whole account or against a single day's starting point, but also prohibited activity such as trading through a restricted event or holding beyond a permitted window — ends the evaluation. A soft condition, such as a consistency requirement, a minimum number of active days, or a rule on how profit is distributed across trades, generally does not end anything: it defers a payment, reduces the portion that can be withdrawn, or requires further activity before a request is processed.
The payment made when the evaluation was purchased is normally not returned after a hard breach. Many programmes advertise a conditional return of that payment, but the condition is completion — reaching the funded stage, or a first successful payment request — not participation. A breach removes the condition rather than triggering it.
What remains afterwards varies by programme. Some allow a paid reset, restoring the original starting balance and clearing the drawdown history while keeping the same account. Some issue a retry at a reduced charge, sometimes only for specific breach types. Some offer nothing beyond purchasing a fresh evaluation at the standard rate.
A breach at the funded stage is a different event from one during an evaluation. The evaluation stage ends a process that had produced no entitlement. The funded stage can terminate an arrangement under which a simulated profit share had already accrued but had not yet been paid, and programmes differ on whether pending amounts survive termination. That distinction, along with the exact measurement basis for each limit, is set out in the contractual terms rather than on the promotional page, and the two are not always phrased identically.