Gold IRA rollover

A gold IRA rollover moves money from an existing retirement account into a self-directed IRA that holds physical metal, and taken through the right route it triggers no tax and no penalty at any age. The process runs the same way whichever account you start from, and the 2 places it goes wrong are procedural rather than financial.

What can move, and what cannot

The 401k case has enough specifics of its own to sit on a separate page, so the withholding trap and the in-service question are covered in detail under 401k to gold IRA.

Transfer or rollover, and why the word matters

A direct trustee-to-trustee transfer moves the money between institutions without it ever reaching you, nothing is withheld, and you can do as many as you like in a year. An indirect rollover pays the money to you and gives you 60 days to redeposit it, which sounds equivalent and carries two conditions that the direct route does not.

The first is withholding, since a workplace plan paying you directly must withhold 20% for federal tax, and you have to replace that from savings to complete the rollover in full. The second is the one-per-12-months limit, which applies across all your IRAs combined rather than per account, and direct transfers are exempt from it entirely.

The sequence that works

1. Open the self-directed IRA with the custodian first, because the receiving account has to exist before anything can be sent to it.
2. Give the old plan the receiving account details and use its transfer paperwork, so the money moves institution to institution.
3. Wait for the cash to settle in the new account, which usually takes one to three weeks depending on how the old plan sends it.
4. Choose the metal only after the funds have landed, because a dealer pricing coins before the money exists has an incentive to keep the conversation moving.

Step 4 is where the cost of the whole exercise is decided, and it is the step the transfer paperwork says nothing about. Price it with the premium calculator before agreeing to anything.

What the move costs

The transfer itself is usually free or close to it, and the cost arrives in the account that receives it. Setup, annual administration and storage are set out on the fees page, checked on April 17, 2026, and the markup on the metal is charged once at purchase and again as a spread when you sell.

On a $100,000 rollover the difference between a low-premium bar and a high-premium fractional coin runs to several thousand dollars, which is more than a decade of the recurring charges, so the order of operations above matters more than the choice of custodian.