Gold IRA

A gold IRA is a self-directed individual retirement account that holds physical metal instead of funds or shares. It works like any other IRA for tax purposes, and the difference that matters is structural, because three separate companies are involved rather than one and each of them charges you separately, which across the 12 custodians in our fee database means an annual load of $125 to $495 before any metal is bought.

What a gold IRA actually is

A custodian administers the account and files with the IRS, a dealer sells you the metal, and an approved depository stores it. No single company does all three, and the total you pay is the sum of what each charges, which is why a quote from a dealer alone never tells you what the account costs to run.

You cannot keep the metal at home. The coins sit in a depository under the custodian's control, and taking delivery is a distribution with the tax consequences that implies.

What it costs

Across the 12 custodians in our fee database, checked on April 17, 2026, the published charges land in these ranges.

Those are the charges that appear on a schedule. The cost that does not is the dealer's markup over the spot price, which across the 14 IRA-approved coins and bars we track runs from about 3% on large bars to 18% on fractional coins. On a $50,000 purchase the difference between those two ends is larger than a decade of administration fees, and it is settled in the same phone call that never mentions it.

The fee calculator adds these together for a specific transfer amount, and the premium calculator checks a coin quote against spot.

Which metals qualify

The IRS sets a minimum fineness rather than approving brands, and for gold that threshold is 0.995, with a statutory exception for the American Gold Eagle, which is 0.9167 fine and qualifies anyway. Collectible and numismatic coins do not qualify, which matters because graded and proof coins carry the widest markups in the business and are the most common upsell on a sales call.

We track 14 approved products with their typical and high premiums in the premium calculator.

Getting money in

• Direct transfer. Custodian to custodian, the money never touches your hands, and there is no limit on how many you do in a year.
• Rollover. The funds are paid to you and you have 60 days to redeposit them, with one permitted per 12 months across all your IRAs, and a missed deadline turns the whole amount into a taxable distribution.
• Annual contribution. Subject to the same limits as any IRA, which makes it impractical as a way to build a metals position at any size.

A 401k with a former employer can usually move, while one with your current employer usually cannot until you separate or reach the plan's in-service age, and the eligibility checker works through which applies. The full process for every account type is on the rollover page, and the questions index answers the specific ones that come up most.

The rules that catch people

Home storage is the big one. Arrangements marketed as a "home storage IRA" or a "checkbook LLC" holding coins in your own safe have been treated by the courts as a distribution of the full account value, and the tax and penalties fall in the year the metal came home rather than when anyone notices.

Required minimum distributions start at 73 for most people and at 75 for anyone born in 1960 or later. Metal is not divisible the way a fund balance is, so meeting an RMD from an account holding only coins means selling some or taking an in-kind distribution, and both cost more than transferring cash would.

Who it suits, and who it does not

The structure makes sense for someone moving a sum large enough that a flat annual fee is small against the balance, who wants a metals position inside a tax-advantaged wrapper, and who is content that the holding produces no income while it sits there. Below roughly the smallest dealer minimum in our set, $2,000, most companies will not open an account at all.

It suits nobody who needs the money inside a few years, because the markup going in and the spread coming out have to be recovered before the position breaks even. If the goal is exposure to the gold price rather than possession of metal, an ETF inside an existing IRA does that at a fraction of the cost, and saying so is not an argument against gold.