Most people arrive at Augusta Precious Metals because somebody sensible recommended it, then discover an entry requirement of roughly $50,000 and get quietly filtered out of the conversation. This page picks that conversation back up. It is organized around the only fact you already know, which is how much you have to move, and it names one provider per bracket rather than handing you a list of ten and wishing you luck.
Advertising disclosure: Gold IRA Consulting is reader-supported. We may earn a commission when you open an account through some links on this page (marked sponsored). This never influences our editorial scores, which are based on independent research.
Augusta Precious Metals opens gold IRAs at approximately $50,000, verified Jun 2026, so an investor holding $18,000 or $35,000 is not being outbid, they are being excluded before pricing is even discussed. Under $10,000 the practical answer is Orion Metal Exchange, which our dataset carries at roughly $5,000. From $10,000 to $25,000 take American Hartford Gold at roughly $180 a year all-in, or Birch Gold Group if you would rather have a schedule you can read than a number you have to ask for. From $25,000 to $50,000, Goldco becomes available and the question stops being who will take you and starts being what you are paying for.
Every figure on this page comes from our own provider reviews and was verified Jun 2026. Entry thresholds and promotions in this industry change without notice, so treat all of it as the starting point for a conversation you have in writing.
Augusta sits at the top of our overall rankings, and none of what follows is an attempt to knock it down a peg. It earns that position on things that are genuinely rare in this category: flat published pricing, segregated storage at the Delaware Depository, a buyback record with no refusals on it, and a sales process that puts a one-on-one web conference with an on-staff economic analyst in front of you before anybody mentions a coin. Our full Augusta Precious Metals review lays out the case in detail.
The gate is roughly $50,000 to open, the highest of any provider we track, and it behaves differently from every other number in this business. A fee is a cost you weigh. A minimum is a binary. Below it, Augusta's roughly $50 setup charge, its roughly $100 annual custodian fee and its roughly $100 annual storage fee are all academic, and so is the headline promotion in which the company covers custodian and storage fees for up to ten years on qualifying accounts. That offer is probably the most valuable single thing on sale in this industry, and it is precisely the thing a smaller saver cannot buy at any price.
There is no IRS rule behind that figure. Nothing in IRS Publication 590-A sets a floor on what a self-directed IRA may hold. Each dealer picks its own number to cover the fixed economics of onboarding, custody and storage, and Augusta has chosen to build a high-touch, education-heavy process that only pays for itself on larger orders. That is a coherent business decision rather than a slight, and reading it as snobbery will lead you to the wrong replacement. The right way to read it is as a specification: this company optimized for a particular customer, and if you are not that customer today, you want the provider that optimized for you instead.
The useful thing about being turned away by the best-regarded name in a category is that it hands you a benchmark. Four of Augusta's habits are not expensive to copy, which means any provider that fails them is failing by choice rather than by budget. Carry these into whichever call you end up taking.
That last point deserves emphasis because it is where the real money sits, and it is invisible on every fee page in this industry including ours. You never buy IRA metal at the spot price. You pay spot plus a dealer premium, a few percent on liquid bullion and potentially several times that on proof or exclusive coins that are repurchased near melt value. The CFTC advisory on precious metals fraud exists largely because of that spread. A $100 difference in annual fees is worth $1,000 over a decade. A ten-point difference in markup on a $25,000 order is worth $2,500 the afternoon you buy.
This is the thinnest bracket on the page. Most of the majors set their floor at $10,000 or above, which leaves Orion Metal Exchange as the only provider in our coverage that will realistically open an account for a saver in four figures.
| PROVIDER | MINIMUM | FIRST-YEAR COST | CUSTODIAN | PROMOTION | BEST FOR | VISIT |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Orion Metal Exchange | ~$5,000 (dataset), ~$10,000 on promotional offers | ~$240: roughly $190 flat annual plus a roughly $50 custodian setup. Orion charges no setup or transfer fee of its own | NOT PUBLISHED, multiple third-party custodians used | Price matching against competitor quotes | The saver whose balance is genuinely below every other floor | Visit → |
Source: our Orion Metal Exchange review, figures verified Jun 2026, confirm current pricing. Orion did not publish a fee schedule or a minimum on its gold IRA pages when we checked in July 2026, so these are reported rather than published figures. Reputation record: BBB profile, A+ and accredited since 9 March 2021; Money reported in July 2026 that the company holds a weaker CCC grade from the Business Consumer Alliance, and we report both halves rather than the friendlier one. We searched the CFTC enforcement actions index and SEC litigation releases in July 2026 and found no enforcement action against Orion Metal Exchange or Orion Precious Metals, Inc.
Now the warning, because access is not the same as sense. Roughly $190 a year is about 3.8 percent of a $5,000 balance. Gold has to appreciate almost four percent annually just to leave you level before you have earned a cent, and it pays no dividend or interest while you wait. Flat fees are structurally regressive: the provider with the friendliest floor is the one most likely to be opened by the investors those fixed costs punish hardest. If four figures is a slice of a larger retirement picture, the arithmetic can work. If four figures is your retirement picture, a gold IRA is the wrong container for it, and a provider that tells you so on the first call has just done you a bigger favor than any promotion. Our page on gold IRA minimum investment works the sizing question through properly.
Clear $10,000 and the field opens sharply. Three providers we rate highly are available here, and because all three will happily take your call, the decision moves off availability and onto cost and disclosure. Read the two numbers in the first-year column against each other, because they are the whole argument.
| PROVIDER | MINIMUM | FIRST-YEAR COST | CUSTODIAN | PROMOTION | BEST FOR | VISIT |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| American Hartford Gold | ~$10,000 | ~$180 all-in, covering roughly $75 of management under $100,000 plus storage and insurance. No liquidation fee on exit | Equity Trust named most often | Free silver on qualifying purchases | Lowest verified running cost in the bracket | Visit → |
| Birch Gold Group | ~$10,000 | ~$315: $50 setup once, then $110 storage and insurance, $125 account management and a $30 wire fee, about $265 a year | Equity Trust, STRATA Trust, GoldStar Trust | First year waived, but only on qualifying rollovers of $50,000 or more | Reading the schedule before you sign, and all four metals | Visit → |
| Noble Gold Investments | ~$20,000 in our dataset; published sources also cite $2,000 and $10,000 | Flat annual amounts, SCHEDULE NOT PUBLISHED | NOT PUBLISHED, third-party custodians used | NOT PUBLISHED | Choosing your vault: Texas or Delaware | Visit → |
Source: our American Hartford Gold review, Birch Gold Group review and Noble Gold review. Fees, minimums and promotions verified Jun 2026, confirm current pricing. BBB profiles: American Hartford Gold and Birch Gold Group. Where a company publishes nothing, this table records the absence instead of substituting an estimate.
About $180 a year against about $265 is an $85 annual gap, roughly $850 across a decade, and on a $15,000 account that difference is meaningful rather than trivial. American Hartford Gold also charges no liquidation fee, which matters more than it sounds: a liquidation fee lands at the exact moment you are converting an asset back into cash, which is the least flexible transaction you will ever make with this account. Removing it is structural, not promotional.
Birch publishes its schedule as line items on a public page. Almost nobody else in this category does, and the difference between a published number and a quoted one is the difference between a firm you can hold to something and a firm you cannot. Birch also covers all four IRA-eligible metals rather than gold and silver only, so a platinum or palladium sleeve is possible here and is not at Augusta or Goldco. Notice the trap in the promotion column, though: the first-year waiver needs a qualifying rollover of $50,000 or more, which is five times the entry minimum and exactly the sum that would have made you an Augusta customer in the first place. Inside this bracket the waiver is worth nothing, so compare the flat numbers and ignore the offer.
Noble Gold is the one entry here we cannot price for you, and we would rather say so than pretend. Our dataset carries the minimum at roughly $20,000, but published figures across the web range from $2,000 to $20,000, partly because the company sells both IRA accounts and direct cash purchases with different thresholds. Its distinguishing feature is real: a genuine choice of depository between Texas and Delaware, which almost no competitor offers. Treat it as a candidate you shortlist only after a representative has confirmed the current IRA minimum and the full annual schedule to you in writing.
This is the frustrating bracket. You have enough to be taken seriously by everyone except the one company you were originally sent to look at, and you are close enough to the Augusta gate to feel it. Everything in the two brackets above remains available. The new name is Goldco.
| PROVIDER | MINIMUM | FIRST-YEAR COST | CUSTODIAN | PROMOTION | BEST FOR | VISIT |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Goldco | ~$25,000 | Flat annual in the low hundreds covering administration, storage and insurance. FULL SCHEDULE NOT PUBLISHED | Equity Trust, STRATA Trust | Up to 10 percent back in free silver on qualifying purchases | Buyback confidence and the strongest sign-up offer in the bracket | Visit → |
| Augusta Precious Metals | ~$50,000 | Not available at this balance | NOT PUBLISHED, Delaware Depository for storage | Custodian and storage fees covered up to 10 years on qualifying accounts | Shown for reference only: still closed to you below $50,000 | Review → |
Source: our Goldco review and Augusta Precious Metals review. Fees, minimums and promotions verified Jun 2026, confirm current pricing. BBB profile: Goldco Direct LLC. Reported Goldco minimums vary between sources; $25,000 is the figure our own verification supports.
Goldco is the closest thing to an Augusta substitute available below the gate, and its case rests on the exit rather than the entry. Its highest-price buyback guarantee applies after three years from the initial purchase, which is a real commitment with a real condition on it, and before that window you sell back at prevailing market rates like anywhere else. The bonus silver offer reaching up to 10 percent on qualifying orders is genuine metal, and it is also funded somewhere. The qualifying products are premium coins, which carry wider spreads than plain bullion, so the only honest test is to ask what the identical dollar amount buys in standard bullion with no promotion attached and compare the total metal value you end up holding. A representative who will price both is worth keeping. One who changes the subject has answered a different question.
What Goldco gives up against Birch is disclosure. It does not publish its full annual schedule, so a reader comparing the two from public pages alone simply cannot. That is not an accusation of hidden charges. It is a statement that you have to ask, and that you should not fund anything until the answer is in an email. Run whatever you are quoted through our gold IRA fee calculator before you decide, and read the line-by-line breakdown on our gold IRA fees page so you know what a fair quote even looks like.
One balance, five providers, first year only. We chose $25,000 because it is the midpoint of the shut-out zone and because it is the level at which every non-Augusta option on this page is simultaneously available.
| PROVIDER | ACCEPTS $25,000 | FIRST-YEAR CASH COST | AS A SHARE OF BALANCE | WHAT DRIVES THE NUMBER |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| American Hartford Gold | Yes | ~$180 | ~0.72% | Roughly $75 management for balances under $100,000 plus storage and insurance. No liquidation fee later. |
| Orion Metal Exchange | Yes | ~$240 | ~0.96% | Roughly $190 flat annual to about $500,000 plus a roughly $50 custodian setup. Reported, not published. |
| Birch Gold Group | Yes | ~$315 | ~1.26% | $50 setup plus about $265 a year. The waiver needs a $50,000 rollover, so it does not trigger here. |
| Goldco | Yes | NOT PUBLISHED | NOT PUBLISHED | Flat annual in the low hundreds, quoted rather than published. Up to 10 percent back in free silver on qualifying orders. |
| Noble Gold Investments | Yes | NOT PUBLISHED | NOT PUBLISHED | Flat annual amounts confirmed, no single schedule we could verify from a published document. |
| Augusta Precious Metals | No | Unavailable | Unavailable | Roughly $50,000 minimum. The ten-year fee coverage cannot be purchased below the gate. |
Source: our provider reviews, fees verified Jun 2026, confirm current pricing. First-year figures include one-time setup charges where we could verify them. They exclude the dealer markup over spot, which is unpublished everywhere and is usually the largest cost of the transaction. Percentages are our arithmetic on the verified figures, not quotes.
Two things fall out of that table. The first is that the spread between the cheapest and dearest verified option is about $135 in year one, which is real but is not the difference between a good decision and a bad one. The second is that two of the five cannot be priced from public information at all, and that gap is larger than the gap between the three that can. If a provider will not put its annual schedule in an email before you fund, you are being asked to accept an unpriced recurring cost for as long as you hold the account. That is a reasonable thing to decline.
An alternatives page has an obvious incentive to tell you that waiting is foolish. Sometimes it is not, and the test is distance rather than principle.
If you are close and you want to hear Augusta's own numbers before deciding, its kit and web conference are free and carry no obligation.
Visit Augusta Precious Metals →Dropping below Augusta's gate does not mean dropping into the shallow end of the industry. The custody layer is largely shared: Equity Trust and STRATA Trust administer accounts across several of these brands, and the Delaware Depository and Brink's Global Services hold metal for most of them. What changes as you move down the price list is disclosure and sales conduct, and those are the two things you can test yourself on a first call.
Two red lines end the call regardless of price. Any dealer suggesting you can keep IRA metal at home is describing a structure the United States Tax Court rejected in McNulty v. Commissioner, and eligible metals are separately restricted by statute under the collectibles rule at IRC 408(m). Any dealer steering you toward rare, proof or exclusive coins on the argument that they are better for an IRA is describing a markup, not a benefit. Our ranking methodology explains how we treat unpublished claims, and the warning signs of a bad actor covers the harder end of the same problem. The SEC Office of Investor Education and Advocacy has repeatedly warned against treating celebrity endorsement as due diligence, which is worth remembering given how much of this category advertises that way.
Approximately $50,000 to open a gold IRA, which is the highest entry point among the providers we track. That figure was verified Jun 2026 and it is a firm gate rather than a suggestion: below it you are not a customer, so none of Augusta's pricing or its multi-year fee promotion is available to you at any price. Augusta's own published terms put setup at roughly $50, the custodian fee at roughly $100 a year and storage at roughly $100 a year, all flat rather than scaled to your balance, and on qualifying accounts it covers the custodian and storage fees for up to ten years. Confirm the current minimum directly with the company before you plan around it, because entry thresholds in this industry move with promotions.
American Hartford Gold on cost and Birch Gold Group on disclosure. American Hartford Gold opens at roughly $10,000 and runs about $180 a year all-in, which includes roughly $75 of management for accounts under $100,000, and it charges no liquidation fee when you eventually sell. Birch Gold Group also opens at roughly $10,000 and publishes its schedule line by line: $50 setup once, $110 a year for storage and insurance, $125 a year for account management and a $30 wire fee, totalling about $265 a year. Birch waives the first year only on qualifying rollovers of $50,000 or more, so under $25,000 that waiver does nothing for you and you are comparing $180 against $265. Fees verified Jun 2026, confirm current pricing.
Among the providers we track, Orion Metal Exchange is the only realistic door at that level. Our dataset carries its minimum at roughly $5,000, though a higher threshold near $10,000 is commonly attached to promotional offers and Money reported a $10,000 minimum in July 2026. Orion charges no setup or transfer fee of its own, with a custodian setup charge of roughly $50 and a flat annual cost of roughly $190 that covers balances up to about $500,000. Two cautions belong with that. Orion did not publish a fee schedule or a minimum on its gold IRA pages when we checked, so those are reported figures rather than published ones, and $190 a year is close to four percent of a $5,000 balance, which is a heavy drag on a small account.
Sometimes, and the deciding factor is how close you already are. If you are within a year of clearing roughly $50,000, waiting is defensible, because Augusta's promotion covers custodian and storage fees for up to ten years on qualifying accounts, which is worth more than a year of delay costs you in fees at any competitor. If you are two or three years away, waiting is usually the wrong call: you would be sitting out of the allocation you decided you wanted in order to chase a fee benefit worth a few hundred dollars a year. Waiting also assumes the offer and the threshold survive unchanged, and neither is contractual.
Frequently yes, which is the most useful thing to know before you assume a lower minimum means a lower grade of custody. Augusta stores primarily at the Delaware Depository and offers segregated storage. Birch Gold Group names Equity Trust, STRATA Trust and GoldStar Trust as custodians and lists depositories including Delaware, Brink's Global Services, International Depository Services and the Texas Precious Metals Depository. Goldco names Equity Trust and STRATA Trust with storage at Delaware and Brink's, and American Hartford Gold names Equity Trust most often with the same two vault operators. The custody layer is largely shared infrastructure across the industry. What differs between these companies is the fee schedule you inherit, the disclosure you get before signing and the sales process, not the safety of the vault.
Related reading: our full rankings of every provider we cover, the gold IRA fees breakdown, the fee calculator, and how much you really need to start.
Minimums, fee schedules, custodian partners and promotional terms are taken from published company material and reproduced from our own provider reviews. All were verified Jun 2026 and should be reconfirmed directly with each company before you authorize a transfer. Legal and regulatory statements link the primary document rather than a secondary write-up.
Where a company publishes nothing on a fee, a custodian or a promotion, this page prints that absence instead of an estimate. This is not financial advice; consult a licensed advisor before acting.
Our free kit includes the minimum and fee comparison behind these brackets plus a printable list of what to ask on the first call. Or read the full field in our rankings of the best gold IRA companies.