Lark Funding Review 2026: Free Retry & Bonus Explained

Lark Funding is a forex prop firm that offers traders up to $300k in funding.

Rather than offering generic challenges, Lark has a unique offering with extra rules and benefits that you won’t see at other firms. Features like free challenge retries and monthly bonuses set it apart from the competition, but are these worth your time or just gimmicks you should ignore?

In this Lark Funding review and guide, we’ll break down all the rules and unique features that you need to know, so you can decide if Lark is the right prop firm for you.

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Firm Overview

Location	🇨🇦 Montreal, Canada
Year Founded	2022
Owner	Matt Letourneau
Trading Platforms	DXTradecTraderMatch Trader
Instrument Type	Contract For Difference (CFD)
Trading Assets	ForexCommoditiesIndicesCryptoStocks
Leverage	Up to 1:50
Spreads	From 0.1 pips
Commissions	Up to $7 per lot round trip
Maximum Allocation	$200k for Evaluation Accounts$100k for Instant Accounts
Payment Methods	CardCrypto
Payout Methods	Rise
Payout Frequency	On DemandWeeklyBiweeklyMonthly
Total Payouts	~$1 million

Lark Funding was founded by Matt Letourneau in 2022. Based in Canada, the prop firm has a 4.5 rating on TrustPilot across over 600 reviews.

Approaching $1m in payouts, Lark is relatively small for a prop firm, but has proven it can pay traders on time without issues.

Now let’s break down and compare the firm’s challenges – because they’re definitely not all made equally.

Lark Funding Challenges

Lark Funding offers two evaluation challenges and an instant account:

• Lark 1-Step – An attractive challenge with a 10% profit target, 7% static maximum drawdown and 5% balance based daily drawdown. Not only are these parameters better than most 1-Steps, but the Lark challenge also has the added benefit of free challenge retries and a monthly bonus on the funded account. The evaluation fee is very expensive, but the perks justify this high price.
• Lark 3-Step – A difficult challenge with profit targets of 5%, 4% and 3%, with 5% static maximum drawdown and no daily drawdown limit. While it has a low evaluation fee, the challenge is so hard to pass that, overall, it provides low value.
• Lark Instant – An extremely expensive account with 8% trailing maximum drawdown and 5% daily drawdown. Costing up to $4.5k, it is too expensive to be a viable option.

	Instant	1-Step	3-Step
Scores
TPJ Rating	D	A	D
Difficulty Score	—	1.4	4.8
Value Score	— —	1.2x – 3.1x 1.2x – 3.1x	0.7x – 2x 0.7x – 2x
Challenge Rules
Phase 1 Target	—	10%	5%
Phase 2 Target	—	—	4%
Phase 3 Target	—	—	3%
Max Drawdown	8% TRAILING (B)	7% STATIC	5% STATIC
Daily Drawdown	5% BALANCE & EQUITY	5% BALANCE	—
Profit Split	Up to 90%	Up to 80%	Up to 80%
Max Leverage	1:50	1:30	1:50
Time Limits	—	Unlimited	Unlimited
Payout Frequency	On-demand Monthly	Weekly Biweekly	Weekly Biweekly
Pricing Prices Value Scores Show All Prices
Price Range	$200 – $4,500 $200 – $4,500 — —	$200 – $1,500 $200 – $1,500 1.2x – 3.1x 1.2x – 3.1x	$105 – $700 $105 – $700 0.7x – 2x 0.7x – 2x
$5k	$200 $200 — —	—	—
$10k	$400 $400 — —	$200 $200 1.2x 1.2x	$105 $105 0.7x 0.7x
$25k	$1,125 $1,125 — —	$300 $300 1.9x 1.9x	$175 $175 1x 1x
$50k	$2,750 $2,750 — —	$500 $500 2.3x 2.3x	$280 $280 1.2x 1.2x
$100k	$4,500 $4,500 — —	$800 $800 2.9x 2.9x	$370 $370 1.9x 1.9x
$200k	—	$1,500 $1,500 3.1x 3.1x	$700 $700 2x 2x
	Instant	1-Step	3-Step

1-Step Challenge

Stage	Profit Target	Max Drawdown STATIC	Daily Drawdown BALANCE
Phase 1	10%	7%	5%

Difficulty Score

1.4

Value Score

1.2x - 3.1x

1.2x - 3.1x

TPJ Rating

A

Highlights

• Monthly bonuses on funded account
• Smart restart means each evaluation allows three attempts
• Large 7% static maximum drawdown for a 1-Step
• Large balance based daily drawdown

Trade-offs

• Very high evaluation fee - especially on lower size accounts

Profit Split	Up to 80%
Maximum Leverage	Up to 1:30
Time Limits	Unlimited
Minimum Trading Days	0
News Trading	✓ Allowed
Weekend Holding	Add-On Required
Payout Frequency	WeeklyBiweekly

Challenge Pricing

$10k

$200

$200

$25k

$300

$300

$50k

$500

$500

$100k

$800

$800

$200k

$1500

$1500

Buy Lark Funding 1-Step Challenge

The Lark 1-Step is one of the best prop firm challenges for conservative traders. It has a profit target of 10%, with 7% static maximum drawdown and 5% balance based daily drawdown. These drawdown limits are already a step ahead of most 1-Step challenges that offer 6% trailing max drawdown and 3% daily DD.

But the Lark 1-Step’s biggest value-add comes from the smart restart and monthly bonus features.

Smart Restart Guarantee

The Smart Restart Guarantee means every 1-Step evaluation includes four attempts. This allows you to reset your challenge account, provided you satisfy the following criteria:

• No individual trade incurs a loss greater than 1% of the account balance
• Your maximum overall drawdown is more than −5%

If this criteria is fulfilled, you can select the ‘surrender account’ button on the dashboard, which will close the account and issue an 100% discount code for a new evaluation. You can do this up to 3 times per account.

This means you have 4 chances to pass the Lark 1-Step. The first three with 5% maximum drawdown (because this is the limit to be eligible for a reset), then the final with 7% maximum drawdown (making use of the full account drawdown, as no more resets are available).

The caveat of this feature is that you can’t lose more than 1% on any single trade to remain eligible. In practice, this means risking 0.75% per trade or lower to account for slippage.

This is why the Lark 1-Step is most suitable for patient traders. Taking advantage of the smart restart guarantee requires conservative risk management. But doing so greatly improves your chance of passing, given that it provides four attempts.

With a 10% profit target and 7% maximum drawdown, the Lark 1-Step already has a difficulty score of 1.4, one of the lowest in the industry (which is a good thing!). And this isn’t even factoring in challenge retries.

If we do consider retries, the difficulty score is around 0.8, which is by far the best difficulty score in the industry right now. Meaning if you take advantage of the smart restart guarantee, the Lark 1-Step is one of the easiest prop firm challenges to pass.

However, the usage of ‘easy’ here requires some nuance. Passing the Lark 1-Step is not easy in the sense of full porting an account and passing in a few hours, as is possible with other challenges.

Instead, the Lark challenge offers the easiest profit target to achieve, given the maximum drawdown (when factoring in retries across the whole evaluation process).

Taking advantage of the Smart Restart Guarantee is no easy feat – a 10% profit target with 0.75% risk is an over 13R gain to pass. But the monthly bonus feature on the funded account means patience is rewarded.

Funded Stage – With Monthly Bonus

The Lark 1-Step pays out an 80% profit split as well as a monthly bonus of $50-$1,000.

To qualify for the monthly bonus (described as a data consistency fee), you must:

• Keep overall drawdown above -3.5%
• Have at least 3 profitable trading days of 0.5%, which are recorded in the trade journal

You can continuously earn the monthly bonus by meeting the requirements. However, eligibility is sequential, so if you fail to meet the requirements one month, then you will no longer be eligible for monthly bonuses on that account.

Pricing vs Value

The key disadvantage of the Lark 1-Step is the extremely high price. An $100k account costs $800, which is around 50% more expensive than the competition.

However, the competitive challenge parameters paired with the smart restart guarantee and monthly bonus mean I believe the Lark 1-Step justifies the high price. But this is only the case for the larger account sizes, as small accounts provide significantly lower true backing per dollar.

Therefore, the Lark 1-Step is best suited to experienced and patient traders who are prepared to buy large evaluations. For traders in this category who can take advantage of the smart restart feature, this challenge should have a very high pass rate.

For traders who prefer aggressive risk-taking on challenges or want to take smaller evaluations, other firms’ 2-Step evaluations are a better fit. Taking 2-Steps will lead to a higher fail rate, but similar value scores mean total ROI should be similar in the long run.

3-Step Challenge

Stage	Profit Target	Max Drawdown STATIC
Phase 1	5%	5%
Phase 2	4%	5%
Phase 3	3%	5%

Difficulty Score

4.8

Value Score

0.7x - 2x

0.7x - 2x

TPJ Rating

D

Highlights

• Static maximum drawdown
• Balance based daily drawdown

Trade-offs

• Low maximum drawdown
• High difficulty score
• Low value score

Profit Split	Up to 80%
Maximum Leverage	Up to 1:50
Time Limits	Unlimited
Minimum Trading Days	0
News Trading	✓ Allowed
Weekend Holding	Add-On Required
Payout Frequency	WeeklyBiweekly

Challenge Pricing

$10k

$105

$105

$25k

$175

$175

$50k

$280

$280

$100k

$370

$370

$200k

$700

$700

Buy Lark Funding 3-Step Challenge

The Lark 3-Step challenge has profit targets of 5%, 4% and 3%, with 5% static maximum drawdown and no daily drawdown limit.

While the profit targets may look low, they are substantial relative to the maximum drawdown. This, paired with the compounding difficulty of 3-step challenges, results in an extremely high difficulty score of 4.8.

Even though the 3-Step has relatively low prices, the low maximum drawdown and high difficulty score mean the challenge has very low value scores.

The 3-Step account offers a surrender account feature. If you want a fresh start at any phase of the challenge or on the funded account, you can click the surrender account button on the dashboard. To qualify, you must:

• Not exceed 70% of your available drawdown (your account can’t be down more than 3.5%)
• Not have lost more than 1% on a single trade

When clicking the surrender account button, your account will be closed, and you’ll be issued a 75% off discount code to start again at phase 1. This is a nice feature that forgives unlucky starts to the challenge. However, it compensates enough for the low value that the challenge offers.

Therefore, this challenge has been given the lowest possible TPJ rating of D, and I would not recommend taking it under any circumstances.

Instant Account

Stage	Max Drawdown TRAILING (B)	Daily Drawdown BALANCE & EQUITY
Funded	8%	5%

TPJ Rating

D

Highlights

• Large maximum drawdown for an instant account

Trade-offs

• Extremely high prices
• Trailing maximum drawdown

Profit Split	Up to 90%
Maximum Leverage	Up to 1:50
Minimum Trading Days	0
News Trading	✓ Allowed
Weekend Holding	Add-On Required
Payout Frequency	On-demandMonthly

Challenge Pricing

$5k

$200

$200

$10k

$400

$400

$25k

$1125

$1125

$50k

$2750

$2750

$100k

$4500

$4500

Buy Lark Funding Instant Account

The Lark Instant account offers direct access to the funded stage with 8% balance based trailing drawdown and 5% daily drawdown.

The account offers a 90% profit split. The first withdrawal can be requested on demand, then subsequent withdrawals are every 30 days.

The Lark Instant evaluation fee is ridiculously high, with a $100k account costing $4,500. Instant accounts are generally not worth taking, and Lark’s offering is definitely not an exception to this rule.

If you do take the Lark Instant challenge, it pays out a 90% profit split. The first payout can be requested on-demand, then subsequent payouts are every 30 days.

Drawdown Rules

The Lark 1-Step and 3-Step have static maximum drawdown. The Lark Instant has balance based trailing maximum drawdown.

The Lark 1-Step has balance based daily drawdown, while the Lark Instant has balance and equity-based daily drawdown. The Lark 3-Step does not have a daily drawdown limit.

	Instant	1-Step	3-Step
Max Drawdown	8% TRAILING (B)	7% STATIC	5% STATIC
Daily Drawdown	5% BALANCE & EQUITY	5% BALANCE	—

Lark Funding Payouts

Lark Funding offers payouts through Rise. The minimum payout is $100, and payout incurs a $40 transaction fee.

The reward split for the Lark 1-Step and 3-Step is 80%.

The 3-Step reward split can be increased to 90% by using the profit split add-on, which increases the evaluation fee by 20%. This is not recommended only increases the profit split by 11.25% (proportionally compared to 80%), which is less than the 20% price increase.

The Lark Instant account offers a 90% profit split.

Payout frequency is biweekly for the Lark 1-Step and 3-Step. These challenges can be upgraded to weekly payouts with an add-on that increases the evaluation fee by 30%. I wouldn’t recommend this, as it’s not worth the price.

The first Lark Instant payout is on-demand, then subsequent payouts are monthly.

	Instant	1-Step	3-Step
Payout Frequency	On-demand Monthly	Weekly Biweekly	Weekly Biweekly

Lark Funding has paid out nearly $1m to traders. Over $400k of this can be verified on the Rise blockchain.

Trading Platforms & Conditions

Lark Funding offers DXTrade, cTrader and Match Trader as trading platforms. Match Trader also offers TradingView integration, but notably, MetaTrader 5 is not offered by the firm.

Spreads & Commission

Lark Funding offers raw spreads from 0.1 pips. Commissions are $7 per lot round-trip for Forex and Metals. For stocks, commission is 4 cents per share. Crypto, Indices and Oil are commission-free.

Leverage

Leverage depends on asset class and account type. The Lark 3-Step challenge and Instant account offer up to 1:50 leverage. The Lark 1-Step offers leverage up to 1:30.

Trading Restrictions

Weekend Holding

Weekend holding is not allowed by default at Lark Funding, but can be enabled by purchasing the weekend holding add-on, which increases the evaluation fee by 10%.

Weekend Holding

	Instant	1-Step	3-Step
Challenge Phase	—	Add-On Required	Add-On Required
Funded Phase	Add-On Required	Add-On Required	Add-On Required

News Trading

News trading is allowed on all Lark funding accounts. However, the All-Or-Nothing restricts gambling on news events.

Holding shares during earnings, dividends or corporate actions is prohibited.

News Trading

	Instant	1-Step	3-Step
Challenge Phase	—	✓ Allowed	✓ Allowed
Funded Phase	✓ Allowed	✓ Allowed	✓ Allowed

Funding Allocation

Lark Funding has a maximum account allocation of $200k for evaluation accounts and $100k for instant accounts. The firm does not currently offer a scaling plan.

Prohibited Strategies & Additional Rules

• All-or-Nothing & Gambling-Based Trading: Lark Funding prohibits all-or-nothing and gambling-style trading. All-or-nothing trading refers to a style of trading where a trader could breach, or come close to breaching, the drawdown limits in a single trade due to the large volume of positions, lots executed, or margin use.
• Risk Management Guidelines: As a general guideline, we recommend not exceeding the following overall margin utilisation. Continuously exceeding these guidelines will lead to an account breach:
  • Forex: 50%
  • Metals: 50%
  • Indices: 75%
  • Oils: 75%
  • Crypto: 75%
  • Stocks: 75%
  • Lark also recommends a maximum risk per simulated trade idea of up to 1.5%
• Gain Limits: The daily and/or per-trade gain limit is set to $10,000. Trades executed at similar times or closed in several parts will count as a single trade. Gains made across multiple phases on a single day will be considered toward the daily gain limit. Exceeding the gain limit on the challenge will lead to an account violation, with a free restart from Phase 1 provided. On the funded account, trades exceeding the $10k limit will be excluded from the payout. Three violations on the funded account result in an immediate account breach with no payout.
• Stop Loss Required: Trading with a stop loss is required with Lark Funding. However, this is only a soft breach, so any trades breaking this rule will be closed, the account will not be breached. If you would like to trade without a stop-loss, you can purchase the stop-loss add-on which increases the evaluation fee by 10%.
• Copy Trading is allowed if the trader owns and controls all accounts involved.
• High Frequency Trading, Reverse Trading & Group Hedging is prohibited and will lead to account termination.
• Holding Shares Into Earnings, Dividends, or Other Corporate Actions is prohibited and will lead to account termination.
• Inactivity Rule: You must take a trade at least once every 30 days to keep your account active.
• KYC Process: Lark requires identity verification through Veriff before payout.

Extra Features

Lark Funding offers a large list of extra features to improve the trader experience:

• Pass Assist Feature: As soon as your floating balance hits the profit target, Lark will automatically detect it as a pass, meaning you don’t need to sit and wait to close the trade to pass the challenge.
• Lark Gain Protector: Traders are allowed to request a payout even if they breach the daily drawdown. To be eligible, you can’t have a loss more than 1% of the account size and you need a minimum 5 trading days.
• Zero Pause Trading: After requesting a withdrawal, you can begin trading after the payout is approved (usually within 3 hours). Previously, you had to wait until the payout was sent.
• Free AI Trading Journal & TradingView: Lark offers free access to the in-house TrackAlpha AI trading journal and 30 days of free TradingView subscription with 1-Step evaluation purchases

Lark also offers funded account resets and challenge add-ons, which we’ll cover in depth now.

Funded Reset

Lark offers the potential for a second chance on the funded account. If you breach the account, you can send an email to support@larkfunding.com to request a funded account reset.

This reset is not guaranteed. Upon the request, the firm will review your trades to determine if you are eligible. Criteria that influence approval are:

• The more trading days on the funded account, the better
• No loss of more than 1% of the account balance. The smaller the loss, the better
• Consistent trading strategy

If you are approved, you will be given the option to pay around 3-5x the evaluation fee to reset the account.

Add-Ons

At checkout, Lark offers optional add-ons to improve challenge rules. Purchasing these add-ons increases the evaluation fee by a set percentage.

The only add-on I’d recommend is the weekend holding add-on if you are a swing trader and weekend holding is a non-negotiable.

The stop-loss add-on is unnecessary because you should be trading with a stop loss anyway. If you prefer trading without one, you can just place a stop loss far away from the market to circumvent the rule. Also, the stop loss rule is only a soft breach, so it is not a large deal if you forget about it.

The weekly payouts upgrade is a nice benefit, but an evaluation fee increase of 30% is very expensive.

This 90% rewards add-on is not recommended, as it only increases the profit split by 11.25% (proportionally compared to 80%), which is less than the 20% price increase. In other words, using the profit split add-on reduces PATB (profit split-adjusted true backing) per dollar, which is undesirable.

Lark Funding Review Conclusion

In conclusion, Lark funding has an excellent 1-Step challenge, but its Instant and 3-Step offerings fall behind the competition.

Most of the firm’s perks and benefits require conservative risk of less than 1% per trade, so Lark Funding is best suited for conservative traders. But for experienced traders who have enough patience, the Lark 1-Step is a great opportunity, given that the Smart Restart feature offers 4 attempts to pass. Also, free access to the AI Trading Journal and TradingView is an added benefit.

Features like the Pass Assist, Gain Protector and Funded Reset help improve the trader experience as well.

As a smaller player in the space, Lark is best used alongside larger firms to ensure a well-diversified trading setup. But in an industry full of copycat challenges, Lark’s 1-Step challenge stands out as a unique choice that’s definitely worth considering.

Buy Lark Funding Challenges

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