Dozens of products are eligible. Six coins and five refiners account for almost everything worth owning. Here is what each one costs, how easily a dealer bids on it, and which specific pieces belong in a $25,000, $100,000 or $500,000 account.
Once a product clears the tax code, the law stops helping you. Every item below is equally legal to hold, so the question shifts from what is allowed to what is worth owning, and that turns on three measurable things.
What you pay above the metal. The premium is a fixed, known cost charged at the moment you buy, and it varies by roughly six percentage points across the eligible menu. How quickly a dealer will bid on it. Some pieces are recognised instantly by any dealer in the country; others need checking, and the quote widens to cover that. Whether the unit size fits your balance. An indivisible object worth more than a fifth of your account is a constraint you will feel later.
Two questions sit next to this one and are answered elsewhere on this site, so they are not relitigated here. If you are still working out what the IRS permits at all, read our guide to IRA-approved gold and the fineness rules. If you want the full cost argument for choosing bars over coins as a category, including the exit spread and the distribution mechanics, that is set out in gold coins versus bars in an IRA. This page assumes both are settled and gets to the order form.
Every dollar figure below is modelled at a gold price of $4,077 per troy ounce, quoted 28 July 2026 against a 27 July close near $4,090. Premium ranges are structural market observations rather than quotes, and they move with dealer inventory, mint allocation and demand. Ask for your own numbers in writing before you fund anything.
Six coins account for nearly every gold coin sold into a US retirement account. They are separated by about four percentage points of premium and by how fast a domestic dealer turns them over.
The default. It is 22 karat, alloyed with copper and silver, so it holds a full troy ounce of gold while weighing about 1.09 troy ounces gross and shrugging off handling marks that mark a pure coin. Its real advantage is distribution: every custodian's product menu carries it, every dealer in the country stocks it, and buyback quotes typically land 1% to 2% under spot. You are paying the top of the coin band for an exit that never requires a phone call to a second dealer.
The US Mint's 24 karat coin, .9999 fine, usually a touch cheaper than the Eagle with essentially the same domestic recognition. Pure gold is soft, which matters for a coin passed hand to hand and does not matter at all here: IRA metal travels sealed from dealer to depository and is never handled by you. That makes the Buffalo a slightly better-value version of the same idea.
The value pick among sovereign coins. It is .9999 fine and carries the Royal Canadian Mint's Bullion DNA package on strikes dated 2014 and later: radial machined lines that diffract light in a pattern unique to the coin, plus a laser micro-engraved maple leaf, both verifiable on the spot by an authorised dealer. That verification speed is worth real money on the bid side.
One known quirk: Maples are prone to milk spotting, a surface haze that can develop over time. It has no effect on a bullion bid, which is priced on metal, but it is a reason never to pay extra for a Maple described as gem or flawless.
Usually the cheapest of the four major sovereigns, .9999 fine, struck by the Austrian Mint and denominated in euro. US dealers stock and bid on it routinely, though it turns over less often here than the Eagle or the Maple, which occasionally shows up as a marginally wider quote at a smaller shop. Inside an IRA that matters less than it would at a coin counter, because your custodian sells to a wholesale desk rather than walking in off the street.
Perth Mint, .9999 fine, and the only coin here whose reverse design is reissued annually. As bullion that is a neutral fact. As a sales hook it is not: the changing design is the peg for date-set, complete-series and first-year-of-issue pitches that add premium no buyback bid will return. Buy it as an ounce of gold and decline the set.
Specify the year. Britannias struck from 2013 onward are .9999 fine; earlier ones are 22 karat and do not clear the bullion purity test, so a generic order can land you an ineligible coin.
The more useful thing to know is why Britannias sometimes carry a firmer price than their metal justifies. In Britain they are exempt from capital gains tax because they are legal tender, and UK buyers pay up for that. The exemption is worth precisely nothing to a US retirement account, which is already tax-advantaged. Inside your IRA a Britannia is an ounce of gold like any other, so refuse any premium argued from a tax break you cannot use.
| COIN | FINE | PREMIUM | US DEALER BID DEPTH | VERDICT |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| American Gold Eagle | .9167 | 4% to 7% | Deepest, universal | Pay up only for the exit |
| American Gold Buffalo | .9999 | 4% to 6% | Very deep | Better value than the Eagle |
| Canadian Maple Leaf | .9999 | 3% to 6% | Very deep, verifiable on site | Best all-round coin pick |
| Austrian Philharmonic | .9999 | 3% to 5% | Good, slightly thinner in the US | Cheapest sovereign coin |
| Australian Kangaroo | .9999 | Sovereign mid-band | Good | Fine as bullion, refuse the set pitch |
| British Britannia | .9999 (2013+) | Sovereign mid-band | Good, deepest in the UK | Check the year, ignore the UK tax story |
Bars are separated by two variables rather than one. Size sets the premium. Refiner sets the bid.
The smallest unit that belongs in a retirement account. It arrives sealed in an assay card carrying the serial number and the refiner's certification, and the card should stay sealed for as long as you hold it. A bar removed from its packaging contains identical metal and is worth the same, but it takes a dealer longer to accept, and time on the desk is charged back to you in the quote.
The workhorse of a mid-sized account. One bar carries about $40,800 of metal at $4,077 an ounce, which is also the smallest amount of gold you can sell if that is all you hold. Comfortable in a six-figure account, awkward below that.
At 32.151 troy ounces, roughly $131,000 of metal in a single object. This is the cheapest gold on the menu and the least flexible thing in the account. Below the mid six figures it is not a serious option, because one bar would dominate the entire balance.
Bar brands are not interchangeable in practice, even though the tax code treats them as if they were. These five are the names a US dealer expects to see.
| REFINER | BASE | WHAT DISTINGUISHES IT |
|---|---|---|
| PAMP Suisse | Switzerland | The strongest brand recognition in retail bullion worldwide. Its Veriscan system, launched in 2015, scans each bar's microscopic surface topography before it leaves the refinery, so a dealer can match the physical bar against PAMP's own record instead of assaying it. Usually a small premium over the cheapest accredited names. |
| Valcambi | Switzerland | One of the largest gold refiners in the world by capacity and LBMA good delivery accredited. Bid as tightly as PAMP. It also makes the segmented CombiBar, which is the one Valcambi format to avoid in an IRA, for the reason given below. |
| Perth Mint | Australia | Trades as Gold Corporation, a Western Australian government statutory body under the Gold Corporation Act 1987. Under that Act the Treasurer of Western Australia guarantees the cash equivalent of metal owed by the Mint, the only sovereign guarantee of its kind attaching to a bullion producer. Bars ship in tamper-evident cards. |
| Credit Suisse | Switzerland (legacy) | For decades the default one-ounce bar on the US market, manufactured by Valcambi. UBS acquired Credit Suisse in 2023 and the brand is no longer in active production, so what you see now is secondary-market stock. Dealers still bid it normally, on metal. Refuse any scarcity or vintage markup attached to the discontinuation. |
| Asahi Refining | USA and Canada | Bought Johnson Matthey's North American gold and silver refining business in 2015, taking on the Salt Lake City and Brampton refineries along with their good delivery accreditation. LBMA and COMEX accredited and US-domiciled, so it is frequently the cheapest accredited brand on a domestic dealer's shelf with no penalty on the bid. |
This distinction gets blurred constantly, usually by someone with an interest in blurring it. Any bar meeting the minimum fineness from an accredited refiner is eligible, full stop. A PAMP kilo bar and a kilo bar from a refinery you have never heard of are treated identically by the statute, and if a salesperson implies that a brand name is what makes a bar allowed, they are either confused or selling you something. The eligibility test is set out in full on our IRA-approved gold page and brand appears nowhere in it.
What brand actually buys you is speed of certainty at the exit. A dealer quoting a buyback is pricing three things: the metal, their margin, and the risk and time cost of establishing that the object in front of them is what it claims to be. A PAMP bar with a Veriscan record, a Perth Mint bar in an intact tamper-evident card, or an Asahi bar the desk handles weekly all collapse that third item to near zero. An unfamiliar mark does not. The bar may be perfectly good, fully eligible, and still draw a wider quote, because the dealer is charging for the uncertainty rather than doubting the metal.
This is why the useful question to a dealer is not is this IRA approved, which everything on their menu will be. It is which specific brands will you quote me a buyback on, and at what spread. Providers differ sharply here, which is why buyback policy carries weight in our scored comparison of gold IRA companies. Get the answer in writing, before you fund.
Here is the part almost no product list attempts. The right holding is not one answer, because the constraint changes as the balance changes. At the small end you physically cannot use the cheap units. At the large end coin premiums stop being a rounding error and start costing five figures.
The table models the markup you pay at purchase, using the midpoints of the premium bands above, at $4,077 an ounce on 28 July 2026. It is buy-side only; the sell-side spread is a separate cost, examined in our coins versus bars cost analysis. Treat the figures as illustrative arithmetic, not as a quote.
| ACCOUNT | GOLD | SUGGESTED HOLDING | MARKUP PAID | ALL-EAGLE ALTERNATIVE |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $25,000 | 6.1 oz | Six one-ounce pieces. Split them, roughly half one-ounce sovereign coins and half one-ounce bars. | about $940 | $1,375 |
| $100,000 | 24.5 oz | Two 10 oz bars for the core, about 20 ounces, plus four or five one-ounce pieces. | about $2,400 | $5,500 |
| $500,000 | 122.6 oz | Three kilo bars, two 10 oz bars, and roughly six one-ounce pieces. | about $8,500 | $27,500 |
Six ounces of gold is the whole account. A single 10 oz bar is worth more than the balance, and a kilo bar is over five times it, so the entire discount ladder is out of reach on arithmetic alone. The only decision left is coins or bars in one-ounce form, and here the honest answer is that it barely matters: the gap between an all-Eagle position and an all-bar one is around $625, which is a real number but a small one against the account's other frictions. If the deeper bid on an Eagle or a Maple gives you confidence, this is the balance at which paying for it is defensible.
What does matter at this size is fees, which land as a flat annual charge on a small base and consume a much larger share of the balance than they would at $500,000. Run those through our gold IRA fees breakdown before you worry further about product selection.
At 24.5 ounces you can finally use a discounted unit without letting it swallow the account. Two 10 oz bars are about 82% of the balance in two objects, with the remaining four or five ounces held as one-ounce pieces so you always have something small to sell. Filling the same account entirely with Gold Eagles costs roughly $5,500 in markup against about $2,400 for that structure, a difference of some $3,100, which is more than a decade of custody and storage on an account this size.
A kilo bar is still off the table. One is worth about $131,000, more than the account holds.
At 122.6 ounces the kilo bar becomes usable, and the arithmetic turns decisive. Three kilo bars carry about 96 ounces at the cheapest premium available, two 10 oz bars carry another 20, and half a dozen one-ounce pieces leave you a small, saleable unit at the bottom of the stack. That structure costs roughly $8,500 in markup. The same $500,000 filled with one-ounce American Gold Eagles costs about $27,500.
That $19,000 gap is the single largest controllable cost in a gold IRA of this size, and it is decided in one conversation about a product menu. It is worth noting that the direction of travel is the opposite of what most buyers assume: the larger the account, the less sense it makes to hold coins, because the premium is charged as a percentage while the benefit coins provide, a slightly faster exit, does not scale with the balance.
Half-ounce, quarter-ounce and tenth-ounce coins are the most reliably mis-sold items on an IRA menu, because the pitch is intuitive. Smaller pieces sound like flexibility, and flexibility sounds prudent.
The pricing tells a different story. Fractional coins run 5% to 10% over spot and frequently more, with tenth-ounce pieces at the worst end, because striking, packaging and handling are billed per object, and a tenth-ounce coin is very nearly as much work to produce as a full one. Assembling a single ounce out of ten tenth-ounce coins can cost around $326 in premium at a $4,077 gold price, against roughly $224 for one one-ounce Eagle and a small fraction of that for a bar. You are paying a large multiple for granularity.
And granularity is the thing you are least likely to need. Distributions from an IRA are processed by a custodian as transactions, not handed across a counter piece by piece, and the smallest useful physical unit in practice is one ounce. The mechanics of how distributions are actually priced and executed are covered in the coins versus bars page; the short version is that nothing about the process rewards holding ten small coins instead of one larger piece. If you want a divisible sleeve in your account, buy one-ounce units and stop there.
A short list, because most of what goes wrong in this market is a purchase that should never have been made rather than a rule that was broken.
| PRODUCT | WHY IT DOES NOT BELONG IN THE ACCOUNT |
|---|---|
| Proof and burnished issues | Commonly 15% to 100% and up over melt. The finish is not something a buyback bid pays for, so the premium is spent, not invested. |
| Graded or slabbed coins | An MS-70 or PR-70 label, and the plastic around it, add cost a bullion desk will not return. Encapsulation also pushes a coin toward the collectible category the tax code excludes. |
| "Limited mintage", "exclusive", "special edition" | Priced on a scarcity claim you cannot verify and no dealer quotes against. If the pitch moves from ounces to rarity, the conversation has left bullion. |
| "First strike" and "early release" labels | A packaging distinction applied at the point of sale. It changes the price you pay and nothing about the metal you own. |
| Fractional coins bought for flexibility | 5% to 10% and up for divisibility below one ounce that an IRA distribution process does not need. |
| Segmented or breakaway "combi" bars | A one-ounce bar scored into detachable one-gram tabs prices closer to fractional coins than to bars, and solves a problem the one-ounce unit has already solved. |
| Bars from refiners your dealer will not quote | Very possibly eligible, and still a wider spread at the exit, because the desk prices the time it takes to be sure. |
| Pre-1933 US gold and South African Krugerrands | Not eligible at all, for two different reasons set out on our approved metals page. If either is offered to you for an IRA, that tells you something about the seller. |
One question defends against all eight rows, and it should be asked before you agree to anything: what will you bid for this exact item today? Subtract that from the asking price and you have the true cost of the product, stripped of every adjective attached to it. A pitch built on scarcity is a pitch built to stop you asking. More of these patterns are documented in our guide to recognising gold IRA scams.
| IF THIS IS YOU | HOLD |
|---|---|
| You want the shortest possible exit and will pay for it | One-ounce American Gold Eagles, accepting 4% to 7% |
| You want a sovereign coin without the Eagle's markup | Canadian Maple Leaf, or Philharmonic if it prices lower that week |
| You are optimising purely on cost and hold six figures | 10 oz and kilo bars from PAMP, Valcambi, Perth Mint or Asahi |
| Your balance is under $50,000 | One-ounce units only, coin or bar, whichever prices better |
| You want a small saleable slice inside a large position | Four to six one-ounce bars, which cost less than coins for the same divisibility |
| A dealer is steering you toward anything graded or limited | Nothing. Ask for the buyback bid and reconsider the dealer |
None of this is investment advice, and no product here is better than another as an investment; they are the same metal in different wrappers. What differs is what each wrapper costs and how quickly it converts back to cash, which is a suitability question you can answer from your own balance and timeline. If you are still comparing providers rather than products, start with our gold IRA company rankings and model the running costs with the fee calculator.
Among the four sovereign coins US dealers stock in volume, the Austrian Gold Philharmonic is usually the cheapest, typically 3 to 5 percent over spot, with the Canadian Gold Maple Leaf close behind at 3 to 6 percent. The American Gold Eagle sits at the top of the band at 4 to 7 percent, and you are paying that extra for the deepest domestic bid rather than for more metal. If premium is the only thing you are optimising, no coin competes with a bar: a one-ounce bar from an accredited refiner runs 2 to 4 percent. Ranges observed late July 2026 and they move with dealer inventory.
Not for eligibility, but yes for what you get back when you sell. Any bar meeting the fineness minimum from an accredited refiner qualifies, so a PAMP Suisse bar and an unfamiliar brand's bar are treated identically by the tax code. Dealers do not treat them identically. PAMP, Valcambi, Perth Mint and Asahi are recognised on sight and often carry an authentication feature a dealer can check in seconds, so the bid comes back fast and tight. A bar from a name the dealer does not stock may still be bought, but the quote widens to price the time and risk of verifying it. Ask which specific brands a dealer will quote a buyback on before you order.
At a gold price near $4,077 an ounce on 28 July 2026, $100,000 buys roughly 24.5 troy ounces. A sensible structure is two 10 oz bars for the bulk of it, about 20 ounces, plus four or five one-ounce pieces for flexibility. A kilo bar is not an option at this size because one bar is worth roughly $131,000, more than the entire account. Bought at mid-range premiums that structure costs about $2,400 in markup, against roughly $5,500 if the same account were filled entirely with one-ounce American Gold Eagles. Figures are illustrative and buy-side only.
Rarely. Half-ounce, quarter-ounce and tenth-ounce coins carry 5 to 10 percent over spot and often more, because most of the minting and handling cost attaches to the piece rather than to the gold in it. Building one ounce of gold out of ten tenth-ounce coins can cost around $326 in premium at a $4,077 gold price, against roughly $224 for a single one-ounce Eagle. What you buy for that is divisibility you almost never use inside an IRA, where distributions are processed per transaction by a custodian rather than handed over coin by coin. The one-ounce piece is the smallest unit worth owning.
The metal is unaffected. Credit Suisse-branded bars were manufactured by Valcambi, an LBMA-accredited Swiss refiner, and the one-ounce version was for decades the default bar on the US market. UBS acquired Credit Suisse in 2023 and the brand is no longer in active production, so what you are offered today is secondary-market stock. Dealers still recognise and bid on these bars normally, on metal content. The thing to refuse is a scarcity or vintage markup: a discontinued brand is not a collectible, and no buyback bid will pay you for the story.
The fineness thresholds that decide what may be held at all.
Round-trip spreads, storage myths and the divisibility question.
What the account costs to run, line by line, on a small balance and a large one.
The premium bands on this page describe how products are priced relative to one another rather than what any single dealer will quote you on a given morning; they shift with stock levels, mint allocation and retail demand. All arithmetic uses a gold price of $4,077 per troy ounce as quoted on 28 July 2026, with the previous session closing near $4,090. Allocation totals are worked at the midpoint of each band and cover the purchase side only.
This page is educational and is suitability guidance, not tax or investment advice, and nothing here recommends any product as an investment. Confirm current premiums, product specifications and buyback terms directly with your dealer and custodian before funding an account.
Every product on this page is legal to hold. Only some of them come back to you at close to spot. Compare providers on pricing transparency and buyback terms before you pick a single coin.