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IBKR Pattern Day Trader (PDT) Rules in 2025
Pattern day trading rules at Interactive Brokers. Pattern day trader PDT requirements and limits for
margin and cash accounts above/below $25,000 balance. How many day trades does IBKR allow?
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Pattern Day-Trading at Interactive Brokers
Since Interactive Brokers (IBKR) focuses on professional traders, it’s no surprise that the company allows day trading. If you decide to day trade at IBKR, you will need to follow the same rules that other U.S. brokers use. Here are the details:
IBKR’s Pattern Day-Trading Rules
If you are day trading with an Interactive Brokers account in the United States, you must follow FINRA’s rules for short-term trading. This means you need to avoid:
1) Making more than 3 securities trades within a 5-business-day period.
2) Having day trades that are more than 6% of all your trades in the account.
If you break either rule, you will have to deposit $25,000 in your account. You can trade with this money, but make sure your account equity stays above that amount.
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Getting Around IBKR’s PDT Rule
If you can’t deposit $25,000, you can open a cash account instead of a margin account. Cash accounts do not have to follow the PDT rule.
Another way to avoid the pattern day trading rule is to trade things that are not called securities. Futures and forex are examples, and they are not covered by FINRA’s rules. This means you can day trade them without worrying about the PDT rule.
You can also swing trade. This means you open a position and close it the next day or in the next two weeks, but not on the same day. The PDT rule only applies to trades that open and close on the same market day.
Using IB’s Software for Short-Term Trading
Interactive Brokers has a strong desktop platform called Trader Workstation. It lets you place bracket orders, which many day traders use. To do this, click on the advanced tab on the trade ticket and check the box for bracket order. You can then enter stop-loss and take-profit orders along with your main order.
The trade ticket also offers other advanced orders for day traders, such as OCO, hedge, adaptive, and IBALGO.
Trader Workstation tracks your day trades automatically. To see this, click on the Account tab in the top menu (in Mosaic mode) and pick Account Window.
Scroll down to Available for Trading and check for a green minus sign on the far right (not a plus sign). Near the bottom, you’ll see Day Trades Left.
This shows how many day trades you can still make before your account is flagged as a PDT account. Besides today, the display also shows how many day trades you have left for the coming days.
In our screenshot below, the software says we have unlimited day trades left. That’s because we were in demo mode for our research. In this mode, you can day trade as much as you want.
If you are in live mode and have more than $25,000 in your account, the Day Trades Left field won’t show up because your account can’t be flagged as a PDT account.
Alternative For Traders
For active traders, a good alternative broker is Charles Schwab.
It has no commissions on most products, pays higher interest on cash, and offers easy-to-use advanced trading tools.
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Updated on 6/17/2025.
Chad Morris is a financial writer with more than 20 years experience
as both an English teacher and an avid trader. When he isn’t writing
expert content for Brokerage-Review.com, Chad can usually be found
managing his portfolio or building a new home computer.
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