Day traders employed at firms average $96,774 a year, with a median around $78,000, per ZipRecruiter’s June 2026 job data. Independent day traders trading their own money are a different story: in the largest study of people who kept at it, 97% lost money, and the single best performer out of 1,551 averaged $310 a day.
Those two answers describe two different jobs. Most articles blur them together, which is how you end up believing the average person who opens a brokerage account makes six figures. They don’t. Here’s the split, the studies, and the math.
Two different jobs hiding in one question
When a salary site reports a “day trader salary,” it’s measuring people who trade as employees: prop firm traders, traders at market-making desks, anyone with the word trader in a job posting. These people trade firm capital, get a base or a payout split, and can’t blow up their personal savings doing it.
ZipRecruiter’s numbers, verified against its salary page in June 2026, break down like this:
| Percentile | Annual pay |
|---|---|
| 25th | $56,500 |
| Median | $78,000 |
| Average | $96,774 |
| 75th | $105,500 |
| 90th | $185,000 |
That works out to roughly $8,064 a month at the average. Real money, and a real career path, but it’s a job you get hired into. It usually means a finance background, a track record, or passing a prop firm evaluation, and the firm controls your size, your risk, and your share of the profits.
The independent trader, the person this question is usually really about, has no salary. There’s only P&L minus commissions, fees, data, software, and taxes. And the P&L distribution for independents is brutal.
What the studies say about independent traders
Academic studies of retail day traders put the share who profit anywhere from 36% down to 3%, and the spread is mostly about how long the window is and who gets counted.
Jordan and Diltz tracked 324 US day traders through 1998 and 1999 and found 36% profitable net of fees, measured during one of the most forgiving markets in history. Barber, Lee, Liu, and Odean studied every day trader on the Taiwan Stock Exchange from 1992 to 2006, around 360,000 people in an average year, and found about 15% earned positive abnormal returns net of fees in a given year.
The harshest and most useful study is Chague, De-Losso, and Giovannetti, who followed all 19,646 individuals who started day trading Brazilian index futures between 2013 and 2015. Their key finding is that the success rate falls the longer people persist:
| Days traded | Share with positive net profit |
|---|---|
| 1 day | 29.8% |
| 2–50 days | 15.5% |
| 51–100 days | 8.9% |
| 101–200 days | 6.8% |
| 201–300 days | 5.4% |
| 300+ days | 3.0% |
Read that table again. It runs backwards from every other skill. In professions where practice builds skill, the people who stick around get better. Here, the longer people traded, the more likely they were to be losing, a pattern the authors compare to roulette. They also tested directly for learning across the 1,551 traders who persisted 300+ days and found none: expected daily profit stayed negative and didn’t improve with experience.
Now the part nobody mentions: even the winners barely won. Of those 1,551 persistent traders, 47 made any money at all. Seventeen of them (1.1%) out-earned the Brazilian minimum wage of about $16 a day. Eight (0.5%) out-earned a bank teller’s starting pay of about $54 a day. The best trader in the entire dataset averaged $310 a day, with a standard deviation of $2,552. The group’s average daily result was a loss of $48.81.
The Taiwan data tells the same story at the top end: out of roughly 360,000 day traders in an average year, about 1,000 (under 1%) showed skill that persisted from one year to the next. Repeatable profitability exists. It’s just rarer than almost anyone entering the business believes, which is exactly why most day traders lose money.
Fair caveats: the Brazilian study covers leveraged futures, not US stocks, and the data predates 2018. But no comparable US dataset shows persistent retail day traders doing meaningfully better, and the Taiwan study covers 15 years of an entire stock market. The burden of proof sits with anyone claiming the typical outcome is different here.
The math of replacing a salary
Say your target is $80,000 a year, near the salaried median. Across 250 trading days, that’s $320 a day. The best performer out of 1,551 persistent traders in the Brazilian data averaged $310. Your business plan requires you to be better than the best documented survivor in the largest study available.
The required return depends entirely on account size:
| Account | Daily return needed for $320/day | Simple annualized |
|---|---|---|
| $50,000 | 0.64% | 160% |
| $250,000 | 0.13% | 32% |
| $500,000 | 0.06% | 16% |
On a $50,000 account you need 160% a year, sustained, after costs. On half a million, the required return starts to look like something a skilled trader could plausibly do in a good year, which is the quiet truth of this business: day trading income scales with capital, and the people who can fund a $500,000 account rarely need the income.
The risk math is just as unforgiving. Risking 1% of a $50,000 account is $500 a trade. Win 55% of your trades at two-to-one risk-reward, one trade a day, and the expectancy is about $325 a day on paper. A sustained 55% win rate at two-to-one is an elite edge that the persistence data says almost nobody holds. And even the eight Brazilian traders who beat a bank teller’s wage did it with daily standard deviations between $632 and $3,308. At that volatility, a routine losing streak produces a drawdown measured in months of income. Run your own numbers in the position size calculator before you run them with real money.
One more haircut: independent trading profits are short-term capital gains, taxed at ordinary income rates. The day trading taxes guide covers what that does to the net.
What changed in 2026: the $25,000 rule is gone
For two decades, the pattern day trader rule required $25,000 in a margin account to day trade actively. That rule has been eliminated. FINRA replaced it with intraday margin requirements, effective June 4, 2026, with brokers permitted to transition as late as October 20, 2027. There’s no $25,000 minimum and no pattern day trader designation; instead, your broker monitors that your account holds adequate equity against your open positions during the day. Fall short and you have an intraday margin deficit to satisfy promptly; do it repeatedly and your account can be restricted for up to 90 days. Leveraged trading still requires $2,000 in equity. The full breakdown is in our guides to the old rule and what replaced it and the new intraday margin requirements.
What does the rule change do to the income question? Nothing. It lowers the barrier to entry, not the difficulty of the game. A $5,000 account that was locked out under the old rule can now trade freely, and the persistence data above applies to it in full. Easier access plus an unchanged loss distribution means more people experiencing the distribution, not a better one.
What to do with these numbers
If the goal is trading income with a paycheck attached, the salaried route is the one with a positive median: prop firms and trading desks, entered through evaluations or a finance career. If the goal is independent trading anyway, treat the first year as tuition. Learn the job before funding it, starting with how to start day trading, then put six months of trades through a simulator using one of the best paper trading apps or a dedicated replay tool from our day trading simulators comparison. If your sim results can’t beat the math in this article, your live results won’t either. And if you’re still weighing the whole endeavor, the honest cost-benefit lives in is day trading worth it.
FAQ
What percentage of day traders are profitable?
Between 3% and 36%, depending on the study and the time window. Short windows in strong markets produce the high numbers; the largest study of traders who persisted 300+ days found 3% profitable net of fees, and Taiwan market data puts predictably skilled traders below 1%.
Can you make $1,000 a day day trading?
$1,000 a day is roughly $250,000 a year. In the largest study of persistent day traders, the single best performer out of 1,551 averaged $310 a day, with daily swings of $2,552. A small number of well-capitalized traders clear $1,000 days; as an expectation for someone starting out, the data says no.
How much do day traders make per month?
Employed traders average about $8,064 a month per ZipRecruiter’s June 2026 data. Independent traders have no typical monthly figure because the median outcome across studies is a loss; the Brazilian persistence study found an average daily result of negative $48.81 among traders with 300+ days of experience.
Do you still need $25,000 to day trade?
No. FINRA eliminated the pattern day trader rule and its $25,000 minimum, replacing it with intraday margin requirements effective June 4, 2026. You need $2,000 in equity to trade with leverage in a margin account, and your broker monitors intraday equity against your positions instead of counting trades.
How much can you make day trading with $10,000?
Run the arithmetic backwards. Replacing a $78,000 median salary on $10,000 requires $312 a day, a 3.1% daily return, which is not a sustainable target in any documented dataset. A $10,000 account risking 1% per trade puts $100 at risk per position; a strong trader at that size is building skill and a track record, not an income.
Sources
- Chague, De-Losso, and Giovannetti, Day Trading for a Living? (2019)
- Barber, Lee, Liu, and Odean, The Cross-Section of Speculator Skill: Evidence from Day Trading
- Jordan and Diltz, The Profitability of Day Traders, Financial Analysts Journal (2003)
- FINRA, Understanding the New Intraday Margin Requirements (April 2026)
- FINRA, Regulatory Notice 26-10 (April 2026)
- ZipRecruiter, Day Trader Salary (June 2026)