Moving an account
Can this move without a tax bill?
A direct trustee-to-trustee transfer is not a taxable event. An indirect one is, the moment it misses the 60-day window. Every rule here is cited to the IRS publication it comes from.
Read the pageIndependent. We do not sell metal.
Run the numbers
before the sales call.
12 calculators, 19 live market trackers and gold prices going back to April 1968, so you can price a gold IRA rollover yourself instead of taking a dealer's quote on trust.
- 12 dealers priced on one identical account
- 19 market trackers, rebuilt on every deploy
- 0 customer ratings, because we have no customers
Fees and costs
What 12 dealers charge on the same account
Every dealer here is priced on the same account over 10 years: the setup fee once, then administration and commingled storage every year. The markup on the metal is quoted per order and sits outside these totals, so ask each dealer for it in writing. Advantage Gold, our paid partner and our top pick for first-time buyers, sits first because it opens an account at $5,000 and walks a new buyer through the rollover, and the rows below it are ordered by fees. Partner status sets that first row and never the figures in it, as the disclosure page explains, and our Advantage Gold review covers the company in full.
| # | Dealer | Setup | Annual | Storage | Minimum | 10-year fees | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Advantage Gold Our top pick Visit siteon Advantage Gold's site | $50 | $100 | $100 | $5,000 | $2,050 | Third party |
| 2 | Oxford Gold Group Lowest fees | $50 | $175 | Included in the annual fee | $25,000 | $1,800 | Third party |
| 3 | Goldco | $50 | $80 | $100 | $25,000 | $1,850 | Published |
| 4 | American Hartford Gold | $0 | $100 | $125 | $10,000 | $2,250 | Third party |
| 5 | Augusta Precious Metals | $50 | $125 | $100 | $50,000 | $2,300 | Third party |
| 6 | Birch Gold Group | $50 | $125 | $100 | $10,000 | $2,300 | Published |
| 7 | Preserve Gold | $50 | $125 | $100 | $10,000 | $2,300 | Third party |
| 8 | Noble Gold Investments | $80 | $125 | $100 | $20,000 | $2,330 | Third party |
Published means the dealer prints the figure. Third party means it comes from independent reviews and reporting, such as LendEDU or Money.com, named on each dealer's page, and the dealer has not confirmed it. These are list fees before any waiver, and several dealers waive fees on larger rollovers. A dealer that publishes nothing looks cheap on this model, which is a gap in the data rather than a finding about the dealer.
Start here
The two questions people arrive with
Readers arrive at this category from one of two places: they are moving an existing retirement account and want to know whether it can move without triggering a tax bill, or they have been quoted a price and want to know whether that price is reasonable. The two pages below take those in turn, and the market data beside them is the same series every figure on this site is checked against.
Work it out
12 calculators, one question each
Each one answers a single question you would otherwise have to take a salesperson's word on, and every calculation runs inside your own browser rather than on our server, which means the figures you type are never sent anywhere, no calculator asks for an email before it will show you a number, and no dealer receives what you entered.
- Gold IRA fee calculator What will this account cost me to open and hold? Open the calculator
- Coin premium calculator How far above spot is this coin quote? Open the calculator
- Rollover eligibility checker Can my account actually move, and by which route? Open the calculator
- Allocation calculator How much of a portfolio would this be? Open the calculator
- RMD calculator What will I have to take out, and when? Open the calculator
- Inflation calculator What is a past gold price worth in today's money? Open the calculator
What goes wrong
The complaints in this category follow a small number of repeating shapes, and most of them turn on price rather than fraud. A coin sold at a large markup over its metal content is legal, it clears every disclosure requirement, and it can still cost more than a decade of account fees. We publish the patterns, the enforcement record, and the questions that surface a markup before you agree to anything.
How this site makes money
We earn money when dealers receive readers from us. A dealer pays us when a reader who completes our matching quiz is introduced to it, and our partner pays us for readers who reach it through links on this site. We are paid per reader, not per position. Partner status can affect where a company appears, and no company can pay for a better review or rating.
Compensation affects which companies we feature and the order they appear in, including which one is listed first, and Advantage Gold is our paid partner. It never changes a fee, a minimum or a rating we print, and where a page carries a paid link the disclosure sits at the top of that page rather than in the footer.
We do not sell metal, hold accounts, or take a fee from you. We are not a dealer, a custodian, a broker or an adviser, and nothing here is investment, tax or legal advice.