Best gold IRA companies

Any list of the best gold IRA companies tells you more about the publisher's commission structure than about the firms, and of the 12 we hold fee records for, the ones worth your attention differ less than their marketing suggests. What actually varies is what they charge, what they will open an account for, and how much of that they will tell you before you are on the phone, so those are the things compared below.

Only 12 of 12 dealers we track publish a setup fee at all.

That is 100% of the set, checked on April 17, 2026. The rest give the figure on a call, which is a choice rather than an oversight, and it is the single most useful thing to know before you make one.

How to choose between them

Work out your rollover amount first, because it decides which companies will take you and how much the flat annual charges matter. A $180 administration fee is a rounding error on $250,000 and a real drag on $25,000, and the same schedule can be the cheapest or the dearest option depending only on the size of the account it sits on.

• Ask for the schedule in writing before the call. A company that will not send one has answered a different question you also needed answering.
• Ask what the metal costs over spot. The markup is usually larger than every fee combined and it is the number least likely to be volunteered.
• Ask which custodian they use. The annual administration charge and the depository storage fee are billed by the custodian rather than the dealer, so the dealer's own schedule is only ever part of what you will pay.
• Ask whether the coin is IRA-approved bullion or a numismatic piece. Graded and proof coins carry the widest markup over the spot price and do not qualify for the account at all, which is a combination worth catching before the paperwork rather than after.
• Ask what the buyback spread is. The cost of selling is set when you buy, and it decides how far the price has to move before you are level.

The comparison

Alphabetical, because we publish no score and any ordering here would read as one. Every figure below is either taken from a schedule the company publishes or derived from a range it states, and which of those applies is in the basis column.

The fee calculator totals these against a specific transfer amount, which is the only way to compare two schedules that charge differently. For two companies side by side over a decade there are 45 head-to-head comparisons, and if you are still working out which company does what, the directory of dealers and custodians separates the 3 roles first.

Our method

Every company here is assessed against the same six headings in the same order, and a commercial relationship changes which links carry a commission and nothing else about the page. No company has paid for a position, and none has seen a page about it before publication. That is set out in full in the methodology and the disclosure.

What is missing from this page