These two are usually shelved side by side, but they fail different tests. Lear Capital opens an account at roughly $10,000 and tells you what the annual bill will be. Goldco will not look at you below roughly $25,000, and in exchange names who administers the account, where the metal is vaulted, and how you get out. This page puts both sets of published terms on one screen and runs the ten-year arithmetic on $50,000.
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.
If you can fund roughly $25,000, take Goldco. It names its custodians and its vaults before you sign, backs the account with a published buyback commitment, and carries an A+ Better Business Bureau profile with every one of its 48 recent complaints closed as resolved. If you are funding between roughly $10,000 and $25,000, take Lear Capital, because Goldco will not open the account at that size and the choice makes itself.
Now the part most comparisons skip. On cost, Lear wins the only calculation that can honestly be performed: roughly $280 in year one and roughly $200 a year afterwards totals about $2,080 over a decade, while Goldco publishes no annual figure at all. Set against that, Lear is the firm carrying a $6 million state consent order and a completed Chapter 11, and Goldco is not. That is the whole trade.
Minimums, schedules, promotions and records taken from our Lear Capital review and Goldco review. Verified Jun 2026, confirm current pricing.
Lear Capital has traded since 1997 out of Los Angeles; Goldco opened in 2006. Both sell gold and silver into self-directed IRAs, route custody to third parties, store in insured depositories, and will pick up the phone about a 401(k) rollover. That looks like a straight fight. It is not, because each has built its offer around a different anxiety.
Lear's answer is predictability of cost: a published flat amount, roughly $280 for a first year covering setup and initial maintenance and roughly $200 annually after that, on an account it will open at roughly $10,000. Goldco's answer is confidence about custody and the exit: named custodians, named vaults, a marketed buyback commitment and a free silver promotion, on an account it will not open below roughly $25,000.
Neither firm answers the other's question. Lear names no custodian in published material, so you agree to a fee schedule you have not read. Goldco publishes no annual amount, so you cannot compare it without a sales conversation. Each has a hole exactly where the other has a strength, so the honest recommendation depends on which hole you can live with.
Where a company publishes nothing on a line, we print NOT PUBLISHED rather than an estimate. An absence of disclosure is a fact about the firm, and pretending otherwise is how comparison pages end up quoting numbers nobody can trace.
| LINE ITEM | LEAR CAPITAL | GOLDCO |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum investment | ~$10,000 | ~$25,000 working figure. Reported minimums vary between sources and some cite less, so confirm before planning a rollover. |
| Setup fee | Bundled. Roughly $280 covers setup plus initial maintenance in year one. | A one-time setup charge applies. Amount NOT PUBLISHED. |
| Annual custodian plus storage | ~$200 flat per year after year one. Waivers possible depending on funding level, with no threshold published. | Flat annual structure covering custodian and depository, described as a low-hundreds figure. Exact amount NOT PUBLISHED. |
| Custodian you inherit | NOT PUBLISHED. Third-party IRS-approved custodians, none named. | Equity Trust and STRATA Trust among those named. Pairings vary by account. |
| Depository | Insured IRS-approved depositories, segregated and non-segregated both generally available. Specific vaults NOT PUBLISHED. | Delaware Depository and Brink's Global Services among those named. Segregated and commingled both offered. |
| Buyback program | Operates a buyback program and will quote to repurchase. A commercial practice, not a documented guarantee. | Markets a buyback commitment. The highest-price guarantee applies after three years from the initial purchase. |
| Current promotion | No size-linked offer published. Fee waivers referenced as possible, terms not stated. | Up to 10 percent back in free silver on qualifying purchases, tiered by order size. Qualifying products are premium coins. |
| BBB profile | Our review cites no Lear profile URL and no grade, so we print none. Check the live BBB directory yourself. | A+ rating, accredited since 2011, 48 complaints closed over three years, all resolved. Goldco BBB profile. |
| Regulatory history | $6 million New York consent order, January 2022, no admission of liability. Chapter 11 completed 2024. Sources below. | No comparable enforcement matter. A 2023 telemarketing claim circulates online that we could not verify against a primary court source. |
| Best for | A $10,000 to $25,000 rollover that needs a flat annual number it can plan around. | A rollover above $25,000 where named custody and a documented exit matter more than the fee line. |
Source: figures taken directly from our Lear Capital review and Goldco review, both verified Jun 2026. Nothing in this table is estimated, inferred from a competitor, or carried over from another site. Providers change minimums, schedules and promotions without notice, so confirm every cell in writing before you fund an account. See also our gold IRA comparison chart for the full field.
Both firms charge a flat dollar amount rather than a percentage, so the balance does not change the fee, only how much it matters. We hold the account at $50,000 throughout. Only one of these columns can be filled in from published material, and that is itself the finding.
| PERIOD | LEAR CAPITAL | GOLDCO | WHAT THE ROW TELLS YOU |
|---|---|---|---|
| First year | ~$280 | Setup charge plus one year of the flat annual. Neither amount published. | Lear can be budgeted from a web page. Goldco cannot be budgeted without a phone call. |
| Five years | ~$1,080 | Cheaper than Lear only if setup plus five annual payments come in under $1,080. | That is an average ceiling of about $216 a year for Goldco to stay ahead. |
| Ten years | ~$2,080 | Cheaper than Lear only if setup plus ten annual payments come in under $2,080. | An average ceiling of about $208 a year. This is the number to take into the call. |
| Cost as a share of the balance | About 0.42 percent a year averaged over ten years | Not computable from published material | Either way, both figures are dwarfed by the dealer markup on the metal itself. |
Illustrative. The Lear column is computed from the published schedule in our Lear Capital review: roughly $280 in year one, roughly $200 in each of years two onward, so ten years equals $280 plus nine payments of $200. The Goldco column is deliberately blank on totals because our Goldco review records a flat annual structure without a published amount. Fees verified Jun 2026, confirm current pricing. Run your own quotes through the gold IRA fee calculator.
Rather than invent a Goldco number, here is the test in reverse. Lear's ten-year total is roughly $2,080. Put whatever Goldco quotes into this shape and you will know in seconds which account is cheaper to hold.
| IF GOLDCO QUOTES | TEN-YEAR TOTAL | AGAINST LEAR'S ~$2,080 |
|---|---|---|
| $50 setup, $150 a year | $1,550 | Goldco cheaper by about $530 |
| $75 setup, $200 a year | $2,075 | Level, within a rounding error |
| $100 setup, $250 a year | $2,600 | Lear cheaper by about $520 |
| $125 setup, $300 a year | $3,125 | Lear cheaper by about $1,045 |
The left column contains hypothetical quotes for the purpose of the arithmetic. Goldco publishes none of these figures and we are not attributing them to it. Use the row that matches the quote you are given.
Before concluding that a few hundred dollars decides this, weigh the offer on the other side. Goldco's free silver promotion reaches up to 10 percent back at its highest tier, and on a large qualifying order that bonus can be worth several times a decade of account fees, making the fee comparison a rounding error.
Two conditions stop that being a slam dunk. The tier thresholds are not published, so nobody can tell you in advance whether an order reaches the top rate. And the qualifying products are Goldco premium coins, which carry a wider markup over spot than plain bullion, so part of the bonus is funded by the spread you pay going in. Settle it by asking for the same dollar amount priced twice, once in standard bullion with no promotion and once in premium coins with the silver included, then compare the metal value you end up holding. Our breakdown of gold IRA fees shows why the markup, not the annual charge, decides your return.
The gate is fifteen thousand dollars lower. This is not a tiebreaker, it is a wall. A saver with $14,000 in an old 401(k) can open a Lear account and cannot open a Goldco one, and no amount of buyback language changes that. Our note on the gold IRA minimum investment explains why these floors exist and how firmly they are enforced.
You can compute the cost without talking to anybody. Roughly $280, then roughly $200 a year, is a figure you can drop into a spreadsheet next to an index fund. Goldco's flat structure is probably competitive, but it is not published, and a number you have to earn through a sales call is not the same as one you can check. On the arithmetic we can actually perform, Lear is the cheaper and more predictable account, and we will not bury that under a preference for the higher-scoring firm.
Flat pricing protects a growing balance. At $200 a year, a $10,000 Lear account pays 2 percent annually and a $100,000 account pays 0.2 percent, so the structure quietly rewards funding it properly rather than minimally.
Twenty-nine years of continuous trading. Firms in this category appear and vanish inside a decade. Lear has sold metals since 1997, through several full cycles in the gold price, and that counts for something even after you account for what happened between 2021 and 2024.
It now operates under enforceable fee-disclosure commitments. Resolving the New York matter required Lear to give clear and conspicuous fee disclosure and a 24-hour cancellation period on retirement transactions, and its reorganization plan added commitments not to misrepresent fees. Goldco operates under no such external constraint. That does not erase the history, but it does mean a buyer asking direct pricing questions has leverage here that they do not have elsewhere.
You know who will be holding the account. Goldco names Equity Trust and STRATA Trust among its custodian partners and the Delaware Depository and Brink's Global Services among its vaults. Lear names nobody. That matters, because the custodian sets the schedule your account is billed on for as long as it exists, while a dealer promotion covers a single year. A firm that will not name that custodian has asked you to accept unseen terms.
The exit is documented rather than assumed. Goldco markets a buyback commitment and states it will repurchase metals it sold you, with the highest-price guarantee applying after three years. Lear runs a buyback too, but as a commercial practice rather than a stated commitment. Neither is a promise about price, since no dealer can promise a price on an asset that trades. The difference is whether the willingness to repurchase is written down anywhere you can point to.
The reputation record is cleaner and auditable. An A+ Better Business Bureau grade, accreditation back to 2011, and 48 complaints closed over three years with all resolved is a specific, checkable position. Trustpilot places Goldco at roughly 4.4 out of 5. Lear's recent customer sentiment is actually higher, in the high fours across several thousand reviews, but that measures buyers rather than the regulatory layer underneath.
Rollover execution is a practiced routine. Moving a 401(k), 403(b) or TSP into a self-directed account has several handoffs, and firms doing it constantly do it faster. Speed carries a cost here, because the metal price is set on the day cash settles, not the day you applied.
Our own scoring puts a wide gap between them. Goldco scores 9.4 out of 10 in our 2026 rankings, near the top of the field. Lear scores 8.2, ninth of the ten providers we track. That gap comes from disclosure and reputation rather than the fee line, which is exactly why this page exists. See how we rank for the weighting.
Lear Capital has a documented enforcement history and Goldco does not. That sentence does a lot of work here, so it needs facts rather than insinuation, with allegation, finding and settlement-without-admission held firmly apart.
On 17 June 2021 the New York Attorney General filed a civil action against Lear Capital, Inc. and its founder Kevin DeMeritt. The office alleged undisclosed commissions of up to 33 percent and operation without registration as a commodity broker-dealer, commodity investment advisor or telemarketer, and stated that nearly 1,000 New Yorkers were affected. Those are the state's allegations at the point of filing, tested by nothing. On 3 January 2022 the office announced a $6 million consent order resolving the matter, under which Lear agreed to clear fee disclosure and a 24-hour cancellation period. A consent order is a negotiated civil settlement; the release records no admission of liability, and this was never a criminal prosecution.
In March 2022 Lear filed for Chapter 11 reorganization under Subchapter V, a restructuring rather than a closure, and kept trading throughout. On 2 August 2023 the Texas State Securities Board announced that a multistate group of regulators had recouped $5.5 million for investors nationwide through that bankruptcy. Lear states it completed the reorganization in 2024 and is operating in 2026. Each of those claims links to a primary document in the sources box below, and the fuller treatment lives in our Lear Capital review rather than being re-argued here.
Goldco's side of the ledger is shorter and deserves the same care. We found no comparable state enforcement action. A 2023 claim under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act circulates widely across affiliate sites; we could not verify it against a primary court source and report it as unverified rather than fact. The TCPA governs how companies contact people by phone and text, so even a verified claim under it would say nothing about how a firm handles money.
None of it settles the price you will be quoted next Tuesday, at either firm. Regulators are consistent about where the damage happens here: coin markups and sales pressure, not account fees. The CFTC precious metals advisory is the clearest short read on it.
| IF THIS DESCRIBES YOU | CHOOSE | WHY |
|---|---|---|
| You are funding $10,000 to $24,999 | Lear Capital | Goldco will not open the account. There is no second candidate at this size, though you should also price the other roughly $10,000 entrants in our rankings before settling. |
| You are rolling over $25,000 to $250,000 and want the safest structure | Goldco | Named custodian, named depository, published buyback commitment, A+ BBB profile, no enforcement history. You pay for that with a fee you have to ask for. |
| Lowest verifiable ten-year holding cost is your priority | Lear Capital, unless Goldco quotes under $208 a year | Roughly $2,080 over ten years is the only total either firm publishes enough information to support. Make Goldco beat it in writing. |
| A clean regulatory record is non-negotiable | Goldco | Lear settled a state action for $6 million and completed a Chapter 11. Resolved, disclosed, and still disqualifying for some readers. That is a legitimate position. |
| Being able to sell later without friction is your main worry | Goldco | A documented buyback commitment beats an undocumented buyback practice, with the caveat that the highest-price guarantee waits three years. |
| You want platinum or palladium in the account | Neither, as described | Goldco covers gold and silver only. Confirm scope with Lear directly before assuming otherwise. |
| You will not press for the markup over spot in writing | Neither | The spread on the metal is larger than a decade of fees at either firm. If you skip that question, the company you picked stops mattering. |
Recommendations reflect published terms verified Jun 2026 and our own scoring methodology. Confirm minimums, schedules and promotions with each provider before funding. For the wider field, see the gold IRA comparison chart and the closest adjacent matchup, Augusta vs Goldco.
For most savers who can fund roughly $25,000 or more, Goldco. It names its custodians (Equity Trust and STRATA Trust) and its depositories (the Delaware Depository and Brink's Global Services), publishes a buyback commitment, and holds an A+ Better Business Bureau rating, accredited since 2011, with 48 complaints closed over three years, all resolved. Lear Capital wins in two situations: funding between roughly $10,000 and $25,000, where Goldco will not open the account, or wanting an annual fee you can write down today rather than extract from a sales call. Verified Jun 2026, confirm current pricing.
Lear Capital opens accounts from approximately $10,000. Goldco's working minimum is approximately $25,000, although reported figures vary between sources and some publications cite a lower number, so confirm the current threshold with a representative before planning a rollover. That $15,000 gap is the most decisive fact on this page: below Goldco's floor the comparison does not exist, because only one of the two firms will take the account. Minimums verified Jun 2026.
On published material, Lear Capital, and we will not dress that up. Its schedule is approximately $280 in the first year and approximately $200 a year after, totalling roughly $2,080 over ten years, about 0.42 percent a year on a $50,000 account. Goldco uses a flat annual structure covering custodian and depository plus a one-time setup charge, but does not publish the amount, so no honest ten-year total can be printed for it. The test is simple: get setup plus annual in writing, and if setup plus ten annual payments land under $2,080, Goldco is cheaper. Above it, Lear is. Illustrative arithmetic, fees verified Jun 2026.
Goldco, if the roughly $25,000 minimum is comfortable. A first-time buyer benefits most from what Goldco discloses rather than what it charges: a named custodian and depository let you look up who holds the account and where the metal sits before signing, and a published buyback commitment means the exit was considered in advance. A beginner funding $12,000 has no choice to make, since Goldco's minimum rules it out and Lear's does not. Either way the number deciding your outcome is the dealer markup over spot, so ask for the price as a percentage over spot and the same-day repurchase quote.
That is a judgment call, and the facts are these. On 17 June 2021 the New York Attorney General filed a civil action against Lear Capital, Inc. and its founder alleging undisclosed commissions of up to 33 percent and operating without required registrations. On 3 January 2022 the office announced a $6 million consent order resolving it, a civil settlement carrying no admission of liability rather than a criminal conviction. Lear filed Chapter 11 in March 2022, a multistate group of regulators recouped $5.5 million for investors through that process, and the company states it completed reorganization in 2024. Goldco carries no comparable history. If a clean record is a threshold requirement, choose Goldco. If remediation and binding fee-disclosure commitments count, Lear stays on the list, provided every number arrives in writing.
Keep reading: the full Lear Capital review, the full Goldco review, every line item explained in gold IRA fees, and the whole field side by side in our comparison chart.
New York action against Lear Capital (allegations): New York Attorney General, press release of 17 June 2021 and the petition filed the same day. Statements in a regulator's filing are allegations, not findings.
Resolution of that action: New York Attorney General, announcement of the $6 million consent order, 3 January 2022. Civil settlement; the release records no admission of liability.
Multistate recovery through the bankruptcy: Texas State Securities Board, notice of the $5.5 million multistate recovery, 2 August 2023.
Chapter 11 plan document: In re Lear Capital, Inc., Subchapter V Chapter 11 plan, hosted by the Vermont Department of Financial Regulation. Completion of the reorganization is the company's own statement, published on its bankruptcy page and labeled here as such.
Goldco reputation record: Goldco BBB business profile for the rating, accreditation date and complaints closed in the last three years, plus the Goldco Trustpilot profile. Lear customer sentiment: Lear Capital Trustpilot profile. We cite no BBB grade for Lear because our review records none. Ratings move, so check the live profiles.
Coin markups, sales pressure and endorsements: CFTC precious metals fraud advisory and the SEC Office of Investor Education and Advocacy.
Tax and product rules: IRS Publication 590-A, IRS Publication 590-B, and the collectibles rule at IRC 408(m)(3). Home-storage precedent: McNulty v. Commissioner, 157 T.C. No. 10 (U.S. Tax Court, 2021).
Company terms: minimums, fee schedules, custodian and depository names, buyback conditions and promotions are drawn from our own Lear Capital review and Goldco review and were verified Jun 2026. No figure on this page is taken from another comparison site. Providers change pricing without notice; confirm everything in writing. This is education, not financial advice. See our editorial policy.
Our free kit carries the fee and minimum comparison behind this page, plus the pricing questions that separate a firm quoting you fairly from one quoting you a promotion. Then read the full field before you commit to two decades with anybody.