Gold IRA rollover eligibility, one row for every account you might be holding.

Two gatekeepers stand between you and metal, and only one of them is the IRS

The federal question is settled and public. The IRS publishes a single-page grid, the rollover chart, showing which destinations are permitted for eight kinds of source account. Almost nobody selling gold points a customer at it.

The second gatekeeper is the one that stops people. Buried in the IRS rollover guidance is a sentence worth more than the rest of that page combined: to get a distribution from a retirement plan, you have to meet the plan's conditions for a distribution, such as termination of employment. Federal law grants permission. Your plan document grants access. A rollover needs both, and different parties decide them on different timetables.

That split explains the outcome we hear about most. Someone reads that a 401(k) can be rolled into an IRA, which is true, opens a self-directed account, then finds their plan will not release a dollar while they are on the payroll. They answered gatekeeper one and never asked gatekeeper two, so the matrix below carries a column for each.

Still on the payroll: the account you are funding is usually the one you cannot touch

This is the most searched cell in the matrix and the one with the least satisfying answer. The IRS sets out when a plan may distribute elective deferrals: you die, become disabled or otherwise have a severance from employment; the plan terminates and no successor defined contribution plan is established; or you reach age 59 and a half or experience a financial hardship. A plan may be more restrictive than that list. None may be more generous.

Two of those doors are useless here. Hardship distributions sit on the IRS list of payments that cannot be rolled over, so hardship money is spendable but not movable, and plan termination is not something you schedule. What remains is age 59 and a half, and only if your employer wrote that provision in.

A second door is worth checking. Plans often treat money sources differently, and older employer contributions or a balance you rolled in from a previous job are sometimes releasable on terms your own deferrals are not. Request the summary plan description and read its withdrawal section. If both doors are shut you are waiting for a date, not shopping for a provider, and our 401(k) page covers that wait.

The SIMPLE IRA two-year clock, and the 25 percent that enforces it

No other account on this page carries a penalty this steep for a mistimed move. The IRS is unambiguous: during the two-year period beginning when you first participated in your employer's SIMPLE IRA plan, you can only transfer money to another SIMPLE IRA. Send it to a self-directed IRA inside that window and you are considered to have withdrawn the amount transferred, with an additional tax of 25 percent rather than the usual 10 percent, unless you are at least 59 and a half or qualify for another exception.

Notice how the penalty is built. It is not a fine for a rollover done wrong; the transaction is recharacterised as a withdrawal, so the balance also becomes ordinary income that year.

The date that decides everything is your first participation date, and it lives in your employer's records rather than yours. It is not the date of your first contribution, not the plan anniversary, and not the day the account was opened at the bank. Ask the employer or plan trustee for it in writing, count two years forward, and put the result in a calendar. After that anniversary the restriction disappears entirely and a SIMPLE IRA behaves like any other non-Roth IRA, as the SIMPLE IRA page sets out.

Non-governmental 457(b) is the one account here that never gets there

Two plans share a section number and behave nothing alike. If your employer is a state, a county or a school district, your 457(b) is governmental, it holds its own row on the IRS rollover chart, and that row says yes across the IRA columns. If your employer is a hospital, a university foundation or a union, your 457(b) is a different animal.

The IRS settles it in one sentence: plan assets are not held in trust for employees but remain the property of the employer, available to its general creditors in the event of litigation or bankruptcy. Money that legally belongs to your employer cannot be rolled into an IRA that legally belongs to you, which is why this version does not appear on the rollover chart at all.

What you have instead is a promise to pay, distributable on a short list of events including severance, taxable as compensation when it arrives. To get that money into metal you take the distribution, pay the tax, and buy outside a retirement account, a different decision covered in gold IRA against physical gold. Our 457(b) page separates the two versions in full.

Roth money lands in Roth, and that splits one plan into two accounts

The IRS chart settles this in a row most readers skim past. The designated Roth account row, covering the Roth side of a 401(k), a 403(b) or a governmental 457(b), shows two permitted destinations: a Roth IRA and another designated Roth account. The traditional IRA column reads no. The Roth IRA row is narrower still, with one yes and no everywhere else.

So a plan holding both kinds of money does not produce one rollover. It produces two, into two self-directed IRAs, with two custodian agreements and, depending on the provider, two sets of account-level charges. The Thrift Savings Plan applies the same split to its traditional and Roth balances.

Two details catch people out. Any nontaxable amount leaving a designated Roth account must travel by direct trustee-to-trustee transfer, so a check made out to you is the wrong instrument. And a Roth IRA runs its own five-year clock for qualified distributions, counted from January 1 of the first year you contributed to any Roth IRA. It does not carry over, so a first Roth IRA opened to receive a long-held Roth 401(k) starts from zero.

The middle row holds the real decision, and it is not an eligibility decision. Once a lump sum is offered, moving it is permitted; whether it should be moved trades a guaranteed lifetime income against a balance you control. Our pension page takes that comparison on. What belongs here is the timing: the offer window is finite, and electing the annuity closes the third row's door permanently.

Inherited accounts: the spouse rolls, and everybody else transfers

Inheriting retirement money splits readers into two groups with almost nothing in common. A surviving spouse may treat the account as their own or roll it into their own IRA, after which every ordinary rule on this page applies.

Everyone else sits in a stricter regime. IRS Publication 590-B states that a beneficiary other than the deceased's spouse cannot treat the inherited IRA as their own, meaning no contributions and no rolling amounts into or out of it. What is permitted is a trustee-to-trustee transfer, provided the receiving IRA is set up and maintained in the name of the deceased owner for your benefit as beneficiary.

A non-spouse beneficiary can therefore hold metal, but only by moving the inherited IRA to a self-directed custodian that accepts inherited registrations, with the titling preserved exactly. The word rollover must not appear on the paperwork. A TSP balance left to a non-spouse faces a tighter version of the same rule: the plan's own booklet allows that death benefit into an inherited IRA and only by direct rollover, with 20 percent withheld from anything not moved that way.