The Best Free Stock Market Games for Students (2026)

Every August, some version of this question lands in our inbox: my department has no budget, my state just added a personal finance requirement, and I need students doing something more interesting than a worksheet. What's free?

Given the propensity for State Boards to pass requirements without allocating the necessary funding, it's a valid question; and while a majority of Rapunzl's services require a vendor contract with a school or district, we also wanted to pull together a list of free options to guide how you can begin crafting a free personal finance course.

One note before the list. Free classroom software is almost always underwritten by someone. Usually a bank, a foundation, or an industry association. That doesn't make the content bad; several of the tools below are excellent. But you'll quickly recognize that the free options all have specific gaps and most teachers will find themselves piecing a few of these options together.

1. HowTheMarketWorks

Before going any further, it's worth mentioning that HowTheMarketWorks is probably the strongest free option built specifically for middle and high school students.

Teachers create a private contest for their class, set the dates around the actual school calendar, choose the starting balance, and adjust commission rates and other rules across 30-plus settings. Students trade stocks, ETFs, bonds, and mutual funds. There's a learning library with over 50 assignable lessons and a 10-chapter Investing101 course, plus exports of class trading activity and live chat support.

The feature worth stealing regardless of what platform you use: Trade Notes, which requires students to write a justification with every trade. It converts clicking into reasoning and gives you something real to assess.

The catch is the $100,000 starting balance. It's the industry default and it quietly teaches the wrong scale to a 16-year-old.

Best for: a teacher who wants maximum control over a free contest and something structured to assign alongside it.

2. The Stock Market Game (SIFMA Foundation)

The grandparent of the category, run by the SIFMA Foundation, with decades of history and deep ties to state councils on economic education. A lot of teachers played it themselves. So did Rapunzl's founders, who met in high school and competed in it together.

It's often free or heavily subsidized through your state's Council for Economic Education, which many teachers don't realize. It's genuinely worth a five-minute email to your local office before you pay for anything because the costs are typically geared towards corporate sponsorships, rather than district budgets.

The trade-off is age. Not much has been updated since those founders played it. Pricing has historically been delayed rather than live, and the interface shows its years. For a two-week unit that's fine. For a semester it starts to feel dated to students who have a brokerage app in their pocket.

Best for: teachers who want an established, credible program with local affiliate support and don't need live data.

3. Investopedia Stock Simulator

Free, no school affiliation required, and it sits next to the largest finance glossary on the internet, which is legitimately useful when a student asks what a limit order is mid-trade.

But it's built for adult retail investors, not classrooms. There's no real teacher dashboard, no assignment structure, no grade export, and no protections designed around student data. You can run a class in it, but you'll be tracking everything manually in a spreadsheet or supplementing the course with EVERFI and NGPF curriculum resources.

Best for: an after-school investing club, an independent study, or a single motivated student. Not a full class.

4. MarketWatch Virtual Stock Exchange

Free, no school affiliation required, and the fastest setup here. You name a game, set the dates, pick the starting cash, decide whether short selling and margin are allowed, and send students a join link. Ten minutes, no procurement conversation, nobody to email.

It's good at what it is, and it's a trading game attached to a financial news site, which does more teaching than anyone intends. Around the trade ticket, students see a page built for urgency: what's moving, who's up, what to watch today. It frames the market as a scoreboard, the exact instinct a first investing unit should be complicating.

The other gaps are practical. There's no curriculum and no lesson library, so anything assignable you build yourself. And the game is the record, so when it ends, the artifact ends with it. If you need something to point at in June, or something an administrator can read, this isn't it. A simulator built for a classroom keeps the trail.

One rule repairs most of the damage: cap position size, or borrow the Trade Notes idea from HowTheMarketWorks and require a one-sentence rationale with every trade. Left alone, students work out within days that the fastest way up a two-week leaderboard is one concentrated bet on the most volatile thing available. They're not wrong. That's the flaw in short contests generally, not in this one.

Best for: a one-week competitive burst, an investing club, or the odd week before a break, when you want energy rather than evidence.

5. Wall Street Survivor

The gentlest on-ramp in the category. Registration is free, students get a $100,000 virtual account, and they can trade stocks, ETFs, options, crypto and forex inside invite-only contests you customize down to whether margin and day trading are allowed. The courses are short and beginner-friendly, and students who find a candlestick chart intimidating often warm up faster here than anywhere else.

Two things don't show up in the reviews.

The first is that your list of independent free options is shorter than it looks. Wall Street Survivor is a Stock-Trak property, and so are HowTheMarketWorks, PersonalFinanceLab, and Stock-Trak's own university platform. Three entries on this list trace back to one company. That's not a scandal; Stock-Trak has been at this since before your students were born. But if you're piloting two tools this fall, pick them from two vendors.

The second is monetization. Wall Street Survivor is aimed at retail adults and pays for itself the way consumer finance sites do: brokerage referral offers, sign-up-bonus promotions, and ranked stock-newsletter reviews sitting a scroll away from the game. Unremarkable for an adult browsing on their own time. A different proposition for a 16-year-old on a school Chromebook, one click from a real-money brokerage offer, in a class period you're responsible for. Open the pages your students will land on before you assign it.

One more thing: the platform's own disclaimer puts quote data at least 15 minutes behind. Fine for a multi-week contest, not fine if the point of Tuesday is watching a number move. Classroom management is thin by design; the school-facing product in this family is HowTheMarketWorks.

Best for: an individual student easing in, or a differentiated option for kids who need a gentler start, once you've previewed the page.

6. Where Rapunzl fits

Rapunzl isn't free, so it doesn't belong on a free list. But it belongs in the decision, because most teachers searching for a free game are actually solving one of two problems and only one of them is a budget problem.

If the problem is genuinely money, pick from the five above and run a good unit. Seriously.

If the problem is that students go through the motions and forget it by June, free contests generally don't fix that, and it's worth knowing what the alternative looks like. Students manage a simulated $10,000 portfolio of stocks and crypto on live Nasdaq pricing, inside a standards-aligned course that scales from a three-week unit up to a 28-week year-long course in English and Spanish, with an Educator Dashboard that produces grade exports and state standards crosswalks.

The piece that changes student behavior most is the national scholarship competition, which is free for students to enter, runs January through late April, and recently included 50,000+ students from 500+ high schools. Rapunzl has distributed $300,000+ in scholarships since 2018.

That's the honest gap. Free games give students a leaderboard. A scholarship gives them a reason to still care in March. Students in the program average 34% on financial literacy assessments coming in, against a 64% national average, and 93% coming out.

How to choose in about five minutes

Answer three questions.

How long is the unit? Under two weeks, any free option works. A full semester, you need curriculum, not just a contest.

Do you have to prove standards coverage? If your state added a requirement recently and an administrator will ask for documentation, none of the free games hand you a crosswalk. You'll build it yourself.

What's actually broken? If it's budget, use a free tool without apology. If it's engagement, adding a sixth free simulator to the pile won't help.

And call your state's Council for Economic Education before you decide anything. In a lot of states they'll cover The Stock Market Game outright, run free professional development, and tell you what neighboring districts are using. It's the most underused free resource in this whole category.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best free stock market game for a high school class? For most classrooms, HowTheMarketWorks, because it was designed for schools and gives teachers real contest controls, assignable lessons, and activity exports. The Stock Market Game is the strongest alternative, especially where your state council subsidizes it.

Do free stock market games use real-time prices? It varies. Several use real-time or near-real-time data; The Stock Market Game has historically run on delayed pricing. If live data matters to your lesson, confirm it with the vendor before the semester starts.

Can a free game satisfy my state's personal finance requirement? On its own, usually not. A simulation is an activity, not a standards-aligned course. You would pair it with a curriculum and document the standards coverage yourself.

Is it safe to have students trading with real money instead? No, and please don't. The entire point of simulation is that students can make a bad call in October and learn from it instead of losing money they need.

How much class time does a stock simulation take? Most teachers budget 10 to 15 minutes a couple of times a week for portfolio check-ins, plus a longer session at the start and a reflection at the end. It works as a running thread through a unit rather than a block of consecutive days.

Want to see what live-data investing looks like next to a free contest? Start a free Rapunzl teacher demo account and compare them side by side before you commit your semester.

By Nate Thomas, School Partnerships Lead at Rapunzl and former classroom teacher.