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 advertising leans hard on 1933, and the pitch usually ends with a recommendation to buy specific coins said to be safe from confiscation. The history is real. The protection being sold is not. Here is what Executive Order 6102 did, when it stopped existing, and what the exemption story is actually selling.
Read guidePrecious metals dealers are ordinary companies, and ordinary companies sometimes fail. The good news is structural: IRS rules force your metal to live with a custodian and depository, not the dealer, so a dealer failure does not reach it. Here is what actually breaks when a dealer goes under, and what to do about it.
Read guideA gold IRA does not get its own set of withdrawal rules. It follows the same required minimum distribution rules as any traditional IRA. What is different is mechanical: you cannot wire a fraction of a coin. Here is how the required amount is figured on metal, your two ways to satisfy it, and the aggregation rule that quietly solves the hardest part.
Read guideThe largest gold buyers in the world kept buying through 2026, and in the second quarter they bought a record amount for that quarter, even as the price fell from its January peak. That sounds like a signal. Before you treat it as one, it is worth understanding who these buyers are, why they buy, and how little of it applies to a retirement account.
Read guideFor decades most states treated bullion as money rather than merchandise. Two states just moved the other way. Here is who taxes gold and silver in 2026, what the tax does to a purchase, and why buying inside a retirement account raises a separate question you should ask before you wire anything.
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. Our withdrawal rules guide covers the mechanics, and the taxes on selling gold guide compares the 28 percent collectibles rate outside an IRA with distribution taxation inside one.
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.
The age 59 1/2 line, RMDs when the account holds only bars and coins, and how in-kind distributions are valued.
The 28 percent collectibles ceiling, why IRA distributions follow different rules, and what dealers actually report.
Minimums, normal markups over spot, buyback terms in writing, and the answers that separate a fair dealer from a sales floor.
Why the buyback price is lower than what you paid, the exit process step by step, and what stays tax-deferred inside the account.
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.