Precious metals IRA custodian roundup: the five firms behind most gold IRAs.

Three companies touch the account, and only one of them is the custodian

The confusion is not accidental. Dealers advertise as though they run the whole account, and most buyers finish a rollover without learning the name of the firm that legally holds their metal.

The dealer is the sales company: Goldco, Birch, American Hartford Gold and the rest of the field on our rankings page. It quotes a price, sets the spread over spot and earns on the trade. The custodian is a bank or an IRS-approved trust company that holds title inside the IRA, keeps the books and files the forms. The depository is the vault operator that stores the bars and insures the building. Three firms, three invoices, and only the middle one is bound by the account agreement you sign.

STRATA Trust states the boundary on its own metals page: it facilitates the purchase and storage process but does not select or endorse specific dealers, metals, or pricing. A custodian executes; it does not recommend. Any firm recommending a specific coin is acting as a dealer at that moment, and you should price the advice accordingly.

Five firms, and who sends business to each

Equity Trust. The one you are most likely to inherit, because all three dealers in our field that disclose partners name it. Its own site describes it as a regulated South Dakota trust company with a predecessor business founded in 1974. Its pricing is the outlier: administration scales with account value, so a rollover that doubles over a decade also doubles what you pay to have it recorded. Two schedules are in circulation, a current Universal IRA one and a legacy retail one for accounts opened before August 2024. Ask in writing which applies before you fund.

STRATA Trust. A Texas-chartered trust company regulated by the Texas Department of Banking, established in 2008, and built around tiers rather than balances. Its Precious Metals Tier assumes an account holding nothing but bullion and carries a flat annual fee, which beats a value-scaled schedule on any large balance. It names Delaware Depository and the Texas Precious Metals Depository. It also states that it maintains separate institutional schedules for large-volume business providers, the clearest published confirmation we found that a dealer's quote need not match the public page. Our sibling page on STRATA Trust gold IRAs goes deeper.

GoldStar Trust. The specialist, and a division of Centennial Bank in Amarillo, Texas, which puts the custodian inside a federally insured bank rather than beside one. The $90 maintenance line is the lowest published administration figure we found, and its segregated storage is the only one of the three that scales with value once holdings pass $125,000. It names four vaults: Delaware Depository, IDS in Delaware and Texas, Texas Precious Metals Depository in Shiner and A-Mark Global Logistics in Las Vegas. See our companion page on GoldStar Trust gold IRAs.

Kingdom Trust. The cautionary entry, and the reason this page checks regulators rather than testimonials. In April 2023 FinCEN assessed a $1.5 million civil money penalty against the South Dakota-chartered Kingdom Trust Company for willful violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, its first enforcement action against a trust company. FinCEN stated the firm processed over $4 billion in international wires with essentially no controls, and that Kingdom Trust admitted failing to report hundreds of suspicious transactions. None of the ten dealers we track names it, and we could not retrieve a current schedule from its own site.

Madison Trust. A generalist better known for real estate and private placements than bullion, and the firm we can say least about, because its site blocked automated retrieval of the fee schedule on the day we checked. The point to press with any generalist is structure: a value-linked storage line, of the type modelled on our large-balance fee page, behaves nothing like a flat one above six figures.

Two patterns fall out. The IRA precious metals custodians with the cheapest headline administration are specialists, not household names. And disclosure is thin at the dealer end: seven of the ten companies we track cite an unnamed third-party custodian, so most buyers agree to a schedule they have not read. Our gold IRA fee breakdown shows what those layers total.

Four checks that separate a real trust company from a marketing brand

Anyone can build a website that looks like a custodian. Very few entities are legally permitted to be one, and the difference is checkable in ten minutes without speaking to a salesperson.

• Confirm it can legally hold an IRA. Federal law requires an IRA trustee to be a bank or a nonbank entity the IRS has specifically approved, and the IRS publishes that list itself. If a firm is neither, it is not your custodian, whatever it calls itself.
• Look up the charter with the regulator, not the firm. STRATA claims a Texas charter and Texas Department of Banking supervision; Equity Trust and Kingdom Trust are described as South Dakota trust companies; GoldStar sits inside an FDIC-insured bank with a searchable certificate number.
• Read the insurance sentence literally. GoldStar's own site states that the uninvested cash, up to $250,000, is the only portion of your account insured by the FDIC. Bullion is covered by the depository's commercial policy, not any federal scheme, and the two are routinely conflated on sales calls.
• Prefer demonstrated metals specialisation. A custodian that processes bullion daily knows the fineness rules, the depository intake process and the reporting quirks. A generalist learning on your account is how a segregated request quietly becomes commingled.

What people want when they search for an approved gold silver IRA rollover custodian is exactly this: confirmation that the receiving institution may accept a trustee-to-trustee transfer without creating a taxable distribution. That comes from the IRS approval and the charter, never from a logo. The transfer mechanics sit on our rollover guide, the deadlines on the rollover rules page.