The PDT Rule Is Gone. Here’s What Changed Yesterday.

If you’ve ever had to sit out a trade because you were about to hit the four-day-trade limit, that constraint is gone. FINRA’s amendments to Rule 4210 took effect June 4, 2026, eliminating the pattern day trader framework that has restricted retail traders since the early 2000s.

So what does that actually mean for you.

What was eliminated

The pattern day trader rule had two components: a trade count trigger (four or more day trades in five business days earned you a PDT designation) and a minimum equity requirement ($25,000 to maintain a margin account once designated).

Both are gone. There is no longer a PDT designation, no trade count, and no $25,000 floor. The SEC approved FINRA’s proposed amendments on April 14, 2026 (SR-FINRA-2025-017), and FINRA published Regulatory Notice 26-10 on April 20 with a June 4 effective date.

What replaces it

The old rule is replaced by an intraday margin standard. Instead of tracking trade counts, brokers now monitor your account’s intraday margin deficit, the gap between your margin requirement and your account equity at any point during the trading day.

Buying power is calculated dynamically based on the actual risk of your positions, not an arbitrary dollar threshold. Margin accounts with more than $2,000 in equity can day trade without frequency restrictions. If your account runs an intraday deficit, you’ll need to cover it promptly as repeated failures can result in a 90-day restriction on opening new positions.

What this means for automated traders

If you’ve been designing strategies around the PDT constraint, capping trade frequency, holding overnight to avoid a count, or maintaining a separate cash account, those workarounds are no longer necessary.

More practically, automated intraday strategies that were only viable on accounts above $25,000 can now run on smaller ones. The capital barrier to testing a live intraday system just dropped.

The tradeoff: margin discipline becomes more important, not less. The old rule was blunt, it stopped you from trading. The new rule lets you trade freely, but it will penalize you if your intraday margin exposure gets out of hand. If you’re running an automated system, your position sizing and risk settings need to be dialed in before you let it loose.

Check your broker before you change anything

The rule is live as of June 4, but brokers have until October 20, 2027 to fully implement it. Some have already moved: Alpaca, Tradier, and Webull updated on June 4, Charles Schwab is scheduled for June 8. Others will take longer.

Before you remove any PDT guardrails from your strategy or automation, confirm that your broker has actually switched over to the new framework. For RelayDesk users today, all integrated brokers support the new framework. A strategy designed for the new rules running on a platform still enforcing the old ones will run into problems fast.

The bottom line

The $25,000 floor is gone, and with it the trade count that shaped how retail traders approached intraday strategies for the past two decades. The new framework is more flexible, but it shifts the responsibility for margin management onto you.

If you’re running automated strategies, now is a good time to review your position sizing rules and risk settings, not because you have to, but because the old constraints that may have been doing some of that work for you are no longer there.