Ranked & Reviewed
Compare precious metals IRA companies on what they actually publish: minimums, fees, and named custodians. And read the IRS rules first, because most of the marketing counts on you not knowing them.
Gold IRA marketing is a genre with recurring characters: the home storage loophole, the exclusive coin, the collapse countdown, the celebrity endorsement. Each tactic exists because it hides a specific number or rule. Here are the seven to know, decoded, with the questions that defuse them.
Read guideMost gold IRAs are funded by moving money out of an existing 401(k) or IRA, and the moving part is where people get hurt. The IRS gives you two lanes: one is boring and safe, the other has a 60-day fuse and a once-per-year limit. Here is how the rules actually work.
Read guideLive data and reference tools, updated automatically.
Today's price per troy ounce, updated daily, with an interactive chart back to 2000 and an honest explanation of why dealer quotes always sit above it.
See the chart → DataEvery year since 2000 in one table: high, low, close, average, and change, updated daily. What gold cost in any year you care about.
See the table → AnswersCan I store it at home, what does it cost, is a rollover taxable, what happens at 73: the questions people actually ask, answered from the rules.
Get answers →A gold IRA is an ordinary self-directed IRA that holds physical metal, and three separate companies touch it. The dealer sells you coins or bars and quotes the buyback price when you sell. The custodian, which must be a bank or an IRS-approved nonbank trustee, administers the account and reports to the IRS. The depository stores the metal in a vault under the custodian's control. When you compare gold IRA companies, you are mostly comparing dealers; the other two roles pass through as fees.
The tax code treats metals in an IRA as prohibited collectibles by default: buy the wrong coin and the purchase is taxed as a distribution. The exception in IRC 408(m)(3) covers certain government coins, including American Eagles, and bullion meeting the minimum fineness a futures exchange requires for contract delivery, held in the physical possession of the trustee. The commonly quoted purity numbers, like .995 for gold, come from exchange contract specs rather than IRS text. Our rules decoder covers the full rulebook with sources.
Four layers: a one-time setup fee, an annual custodian fee, an annual storage fee, and the dealer's spread between buy and sell prices. Among companies that publish figures, setup runs about $50, custodian fees $75 to $150 per year, and storage $100 to $150 per year. The spread is usually the largest cost and the least visible; companies that disclose it in writing before a transaction make comparison possible.
Most accounts are funded from an existing IRA or 401(k). A trustee-to-trustee transfer is the safe lane: unlimited, nothing withheld, no deadlines. An indirect rollover gives you 60 days to redeposit and is limited to one IRA-to-IRA rollover per 12 months. Fresh contributions follow the ordinary IRA limits, $7,500 plus a $1,100 catch-up for 2026.
Traditional IRAs require minimum distributions starting at age 73, and physical metal does not pause that: the account owes RMDs in dollars, which can mean selling metal or distributing coins in kind. Distributions are ordinary income, like any traditional IRA. Roth accounts have no lifetime RMDs. Once you are 59 and a half, taking coins in kind is the lawful way to end up holding your metal.
Home storage or checkbook control pitches (the Tax Court has already ruled, see the McNulty case), "IRS approved" dealer claims (the IRS approves custodians, never dealers), fear-based pitches about currency collapse, celebrity endorsements, and pressure to move fast. None of these are illegal to say; all of them tell you something about the seller.
The three-party mechanics, the costs, and the honest tradeoffs, without the sales pitch.
Setup, custodian, storage, and the spread nobody advertises, with the published figures compared.
The safe lane, the risky lane, and the tripwires, step by step from the IRS rules.
Which coins and bullion qualify, the custodian requirement, contribution limits, RMDs, and the collectibles rule, sourced from the statute and IRS pages.
The checkbook IRA pitch, McNulty v. Commissioner, and the quarter-million-dollar outcome.
Transfers versus rollovers, the 60-day fuse, and the once-per-year trap.
Custodian: the bank or IRS-approved trustee that administers the IRA and must hold its assets.
Depository: the commercial vault where IRA metals are stored.
Spread: the gap between a dealer's sell price and its buyback price, the dealer's real margin.
Spot price: the market price of the raw metal; coins and bars sell at a premium above it.
Self-directed IRA: an IRA whose custodian permits alternative assets such as metals.
Prohibited transaction: self-dealing between the IRA and its owner under IRC 4975; can disqualify the entire account.
We evaluate precious metals IRA companies on fee transparency (are setup, custodian, and storage costs published?), disclosed minimum investment, custodian and depository disclosure, buyback policy clarity, and complaint history. We do not evaluate metals as investments, and we do not make return projections.
Editor's scores weight fee and minimum disclosure most heavily, because they are what a buyer needs first and what this industry publishes least. Facts shown are drawn from each company's own published materials and are noted where a company does not disclose a figure.