Taking money or metal out of a gold IRA

At a glance

Ways to withdraw	Cash from selling metal, or the metal itself (in kind)
Traditional IRA withdrawals	Taxed as ordinary income
Before age 59½	Usually a 10% additional tax, with some exceptions
Required minimum distributions	From age 73 for traditional IRAs
Roth IRAs	No required distributions for the owner
Missed distribution	25% excise tax, cut to 10% if fixed within two years

Cash or metal

You don’t handle the metal yourself while it’s in the IRA, so every withdrawal goes through your custodian.

• Cash. The custodian arranges a sale of some of your metal, usually to a dealer, and the money lands in your IRA’s cash account. The custodian then pays out what you ask for.
• In kind. The custodian tells the depository to ship coins or bars to you. You then own them outside the IRA, and keeping them safe and insured is up to you.

	Cash	In kind
What you get	Money	The coins or bars
What’s taxed	The cash paid out	The metal’s market value that day
Main costs	The dealer’s buying spread and any liquidation fee	Shipping, insurance and any custodian fee
Afterward	Nothing more to track	Your cost for the metal is its value that day, and later gains are taxed as a collectible

Either way, it costs money to get out. Our guide to gold IRA fees lists the charges to ask about, and how to store gold and silver covers what to do with metal you take home.

How withdrawals are taxed

From a traditional IRA, withdrawals are taxed as ordinary income in the year you take them. For metal, the amount is its fair market value on the day of the distribution, and your custodian reports it to you and the IRS on Form 1099-R. The 28% collectibles rate doesn’t apply to the withdrawal itself. It only comes into play later, if you sell the metal for more than its value when it left the account. Our guide to how gold and silver are taxed explains that rate.

From a Roth IRA, qualified withdrawals are tax-free, whether you take cash or metal. In general, that means you’re at least 59½ and it’s been at least five years since your first contribution to a Roth IRA.

Withdrawals before age 59½

Money taken from an IRA before age 59½ usually faces a 10% additional tax on top of any income tax. The IRS lists exceptions, including:

• total and permanent disability
• a series of substantially equal payments over your life expectancy
• unreimbursed medical costs above 7.5% of your adjusted gross income
• up to $10,000 toward a first home
• up to $5,000 per child for birth or adoption expenses
• one emergency personal expense withdrawal a year, up to $1,000

The rules on each exception are specific, so check the IRS list or ask a tax professional before relying on one.

Required minimum distributions

Once you reach 73, you have to take a minimum amount out of a traditional IRA each year. The first one can wait until April 1 of the following year, and each later one is due by December 31. If you put off the first until April, you’ll take two in that year.

The amount is last December 31’s account balance divided by a life expectancy factor from IRS tables. For a gold IRA, the balance includes your metal at its year-end value, which your custodian reports.

You can meet an RMD with cash or with metal, since an in-kind distribution counts at its market value. Coins don’t split neatly, so you may need to take a little more than the minimum, or combine metal with cash.

If you have more than one traditional IRA, there’s another option. You work out the RMD for each IRA separately, but you can take the total from any one or more of them. That lets you take the whole amount from another IRA and leave the gold untouched.

Missing an RMD is expensive. The amount you should have taken can face a 25% excise tax, reduced to 10% if you correct it within two years. RMDs also can’t be rolled over, which matters if you’re moving money into a gold IRA after 73; our gold IRA rollover guide explains the order to do things in. Roth IRAs don’t have RMDs while the owner is alive.

Planning ahead

• Keep some cash in the account. It covers fees and small withdrawals without forcing a sale.
• Start early. Selling metal or shipping it takes time, so don’t leave a December deadline to the last week.
• Ask your custodian how it values metal, what it charges to sell or ship, and whether it has a minimum for in-kind distributions.

Keeping IRA metal at home instead of taking a proper distribution doesn’t work. The tax code requires a trustee to hold it, and our guide to home storage gold IRAs explains what happened in the court case on this. For the basics of how these accounts work, see what is a gold IRA.

Frequently asked questions