Platinum and palladium IRA rules, eligible products, and the honest case against bothering.
A platinum and palladium IRA is the same account as a gold one, with the same trustee and the same vault, holding two metals the tax code allows and the retail industry barely stocks. Four things below are checkable and nobody else assembles them in one place: the statutory door each product walks through, where the .9995 figure genuinely comes from, which of the ten firms we cover will put either metal in an account, and what a thin dealer market does to your price on the way in and on the way out.
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- →Both metals are eligible, and eligibility was never the hard part. Congress put them in the same sentence as gold and silver. What is scarce is a dealer, not a legal permission.
- →The working number is 99.95 percent for both. The bullion exception itself prints no figure at all; it borrows one from the futures market, and 99.95 is what that market requires on delivery.
- →The two national coins qualify through different clauses. The platinum Eagle is named by statutory description. The palladium Eagle is not on that list and passes on purity, exactly like a bar.
- →One of the ten firms we cover publishes a four-metal lineup. Two say plainly that they stop at gold and silver. Seven say nothing at all, which is its own answer about demand.
- →Our verdict: this is the weakest diversification story we publish. Thin support means a wider round trip, and the demand behind both metals is industrial rather than monetary.
The .9995 test, and the sentence in the code that never prints it
Start with the ban, because the exception only makes sense against it. Section 408(m)(1) of the Internal Revenue Code treats a collectible acquired by an IRA as an amount distributed to you, and 408(m)(3) then carves out two narrow escapes from that treatment. We take that paragraph apart clause by clause on our page devoted to what IRC 408(m)(3) actually says, so the short version is all you need here: one escape is a list of named coins, the other is a purity test for bullion.
The purity test is the one that governs these two metals, and its wording surprises people. It exempts gold, silver, platinum, or palladium bullion of a fineness equal to or exceeding the minimum fineness that a contract market requires for metals which may be delivered in satisfaction of a regulated futures contract, and it applies only if that bullion is in the physical possession of the trustee. Read it again and notice what is missing. There is no number. Congress delegated the number to a commodity exchange, which means the purity threshold for your retirement account is set by whatever the futures market currently demands on delivery.
For platinum and palladium that borrowed figure has been stable and it is 99.95 percent, written as .9995 by everyone in the trade. The NYMEX platinum and palladium futures contracts require delivered metal to assay at least that. The London good delivery standard for both metals, administered under the London Platinum and Palladium Market rules, asks for at least 99.95 percent as well. And Congress used the same figure itself when it authorized the palladium coin, specifying a one ounce piece containing .9995 fine palladium. Three independent institutions, one number, which is why you will never see a legitimate .999 platinum bar marketed for retirement accounts.
One caution about what the clause does not import. It borrows the exchange's fineness and nothing else, so the brand approval that appears in the same futures delivery rules is not a statutory condition on your IRA. When a dealer tells you a bar must come from a named refiner to be legal, the claim is commercially reasonable and legally overstated. The brand list exists because depositories and buyers want metal they can resell without a fresh assay, which is a good reason to accept it and a bad reason to believe it is the law.
What a platinum and palladium IRA can actually hold
Every product below is traced to the clause that lets it in, because the clause changes what you should check. A coin admitted by name needs no purity argument. Everything else lives or dies on the assay and on the trustee holding it.
| PRODUCT | METAL | STATED FINENESS | WHICH CLAUSE ADMITS IT | WHAT TO CHECK |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| American Platinum Eagle, bullion strikes | Platinum | Not the operative test | The coin list, 408(m)(3)(A)(iii), which points at platinum coins minted under 31 U.S.C. 5112(k) | Nothing about purity. This coin is admitted by statutory description, so your only question is the premium over spot. |
| American Palladium Eagle, 1 oz | Palladium | .9995, written into 31 U.S.C. 5112(a)(12) | The bullion test, 408(m)(3)(B) | No palladium coin appears on the coin list, so this one qualifies on assay like a bar. Nothing about that changes how it is held. |
| Platinum Maple Leaf, 1 oz | Platinum | 99.95%, per the Royal Canadian Mint | The bullion test, 408(m)(3)(B) | Purity is published by the issuing mint, which is the sourcing standard we apply to any foreign coin. |
| Palladium Maple Leaf, 1 oz | Palladium | 99.95%, per the Royal Canadian Mint | The bullion test, 408(m)(3)(B) | Struck in far smaller numbers than its platinum sibling, so ask about availability before you assume a fill. |
| Platinum and palladium bars and rounds | Both | Must assay 99.95% or better | The bullion test, 408(m)(3)(B) | Confirm the assay card and ask which brands your depository will take back. Wholesale good delivery plates start at 1 kilogram, so retail-size bars are made to a house standard, not to that one. |
| Proof and graded platinum coins | Platinum | Not the operative test | The coin list, same clause as the bullion strike | Legal and expensive. The collector premium is money the account pays that the metal does not carry, and it is the most common way a compliant purchase becomes a bad one. |
| Rhodium, iridium, ruthenium in any form | NOT ELIGIBLE | N/A | None. The exception names four metals and stops. | A purchase inside the account is treated as a distribution to you. There is no fineness that fixes this. |
Clause references are to 26 U.S.C. 408(m) and 31 U.S.C. 5112 as published by the Cornell Legal Information Institute; mint purities are as stated by the issuing mint. Product availability is a dealer question, not a statutory one, and changes without notice.
Eligible is easy. Finding a firm that stocks it is not
We went through our own reviews of the ten providers we cover and pulled only what each states in published material about the metals it handles. One says it handles all four. Two say they do not handle these two. Seven are silent, and we print silence as silence.
| PROVIDER | THESE TWO METALS? | WHAT OUR REVIEW RECORDS | MINIMUM | VISIT |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Birch Gold Group | Yes | The only firm on our list whose published material covers all four eligible metals. It also publishes a flat annual schedule near $265 rather than quoting one, which matters more when the metal itself is hard to price. | ~$10,000 | Visit → |
| Goldco | No, stated | Our review sends readers elsewhere on exactly this point: the lineup is gold and silver, so a buyer who wants a third or fourth metal is in the wrong place. | ~$25,000 | NOT APPLICABLE |
| Augusta Precious Metals | No, stated | Offers gold and silver only, which our review treats as a two-sided fact: a narrow shelf is also a shelf with fewer exotic products on it. | ~$50,000 | NOT APPLICABLE |
| American Hartford Gold, American Bullion, Advantage Gold, Noble Gold, Orion Metal Exchange, Lear Capital, Patriot Gold Group | NOT PUBLISHED | None of the seven addresses these two metals in the material our reviews cite. That is an absence of disclosure rather than a refusal, and the only way to resolve it is to ask for named products and both sides of the price in writing. | ~$5,000 to ~$25,000 | ASK FIRST |
Lineups, minimums and fees taken from our own company reviews and verified Jun 2026, confirm current pricing. Full figures sit in the comparison chart and the provider rankings.
A thin market shows up in the spread, not on the fee schedule
Here is the honest mechanic behind that table. Annual costs do not care which metal you hold: the custodian charges its administration fee and the depository charges for space and insurance whether the box contains gold Eagles or platinum bars, and our breakdown of gold IRA fees applies unchanged. The cost that does care is the one nobody prints, which is the gap between what a dealer will sell you a coin for and what the same dealer will pay to take it back the same afternoon.
That gap widens when inventory turns slowly, and inventory in these two metals turns slowly for a retail dealer. Fewer buyers, fewer products, longer holding periods on the shelf, and a hedge that is clumsier to run than a gold hedge. None of that is dishonest. It becomes dishonest only when a salesperson presents a platinum coin as an equivalent swap for a gold one without mentioning that the round trip costs more.
So price it as a round trip before you fund anything. Ask for the buy price on the exact product, the sell price the firm would pay you today on that same product, and the difference expressed as a percentage. Ask whether the firm will repurchase it at all, because a buyback program advertised for gold does not automatically extend to a palladium coin. If a firm will quote both sides on gold within a minute and starts hedging when you name a platinum product, you have priced the thinness of the market without needing anyone to admit to it.
You are buying an industrial input, and its buyer is the car industry
The United States Geological Survey records the leading domestic use of platinum-group metals as catalytic converters that cut vehicle emissions, and it also records that the two metals substitute for each other inside those converters, with palladium routinely replacing about a quarter of the platinum in diesel applications and more in some designs. That is the whole story in two sentences, and it is a very different story from the one gold tells, because it makes vehicle production and engineering substitution the dominant demand signal rather than currency anxiety.
What that demand profile has done to price is a matter of record rather than opinion. We publish no forecasts, so here is the observed range from the same federal source.
| METAL | 2021 AVERAGE | 2024 AVERAGE | 2025 ESTIMATE | US NET IMPORT RELIANCE, 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Palladium | $2,419.18/oz | $994.90/oz | $1,100/oz | 57% |
| Platinum | $1,094.31/oz | $960.70/oz | $1,200/oz | 89% |
| Rhodium, for scale | $20,254.10/oz | $4,660.44/oz | $5,800/oz | NOT ELIGIBLE ANYWAY |
Annual average prices and net import reliance from the USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026, platinum-group metals chapter. Historical figures, not projections. Nothing on this page predicts a future price.
Palladium losing roughly 59 percent of its average price between 2021 and 2024 is not an argument against owning it, and the partial recovery estimated for 2025 is not an argument for it. Both are an argument about position sizing and about honesty in the sales call. A metal that halves because engines changed is behaving normally for an industrial commodity. If your reason for holding metal is the monetary one that most of our readers arrive with, that behaviour is not what you were shopping for. Supply concentration adds a second consideration worth naming: the USGS puts United States net import reliance for platinum at 89 percent in 2025, with South Africa the leading global producer and Russia the leading producer of mined palladium.
The account machinery does not change at all
Custody and storage work exactly as they do for gold: a self-directed IRA custodian administers the account, an approved depository holds the metal, and 408(m)(3)(B) requires that bullion stay in the trustee's physical possession, so taking a platinum coin home is a distribution for the same reason taking a gold one home is. Nothing in the funding path changes either, which means the mechanics on our storage and depository page and the boundaries in our gold IRA rules guide cover this account type without amendment.
The diversification argument is weaker here than anywhere else we cover
The pitch for a third and fourth metal is that four is more diversified than two. Examine what you are actually buying. The metals sleeve is already a minority slice of a retirement account. Splitting that slice again gives each piece a ticket size small enough that a wider spread eats a meaningful share of it, and the two additions share a demand driver with each other, which is the definition of correlated risk rather than diversified risk.
Our view, stated plainly: if you want physical metal in a retirement account, the case usually starts and ends with gold and silver. That is where the dealer competition is, where both sides of a price are easy to obtain, and where a buyback is a routine transaction rather than a favour. The choice between those two is a real decision with real trade-offs, and we work it through separately in gold versus silver in an IRA and in our guide to a silver IRA.
When does the answer flip? Three conditions together, not one of them alone. You hold a specific view about industrial supply that you can state without using the word inflation. Your account is large enough that a modest allocation is still a normal-sized order. And you have a written two-sided quote from a firm that will repurchase the exact product. Miss any of the three and you are paying a liquidity premium for a story you have not actually decided you believe.
Questions readers send us about the white metals
Can I hold rhodium in an IRA?
No. IRC 408(m)(3)(B) names four metals and rhodium is not among them: gold, silver, platinum and palladium bullion get the exception, and every other element stays inside the collectibles ban at 408(m)(1). Rhodium is a platinum-group metal, it is refined by the same companies and it trades in the same industrial supply chain, which is why the question comes up so often, but family resemblance is not a statutory category. The consequence is not that the purchase is blocked at the counter. It is that an IRA buying a rhodium bar is treated as having distributed to you an amount equal to what it spent, with the tax and any penalty that follows. If a dealer offers rhodium inside a retirement account, that single offer tells you what you need to know about the rest of the pitch.
Is a platinum and palladium IRA different from a gold IRA?
Only in what sits on the shelf. There is no separate account type, no separate application and no separate custodian category: a platinum and palladium IRA is a self-directed IRA whose trustee happens to be holding those two metals rather than gold or silver. The paperwork, the transfer and rollover mechanics, the annual custodian and storage fees and the rule that the metal must stay in the trustee's physical possession are all identical. What changes is the inventory available to you, the number of dealers who will quote both sides of a trade, and the width of the spread you pay to get in and out. Treat the account as settled and spend your attention on the product and the price.
Which gold IRA companies offer platinum and palladium?
Of the ten providers we cover, one states in published material that it handles all four eligible metals: Birch Gold Group. Two state the opposite in plain terms, Goldco and Augusta Precious Metals, both of which describe lineups that stop at gold and silver. The remaining seven, American Hartford Gold, American Bullion, Advantage Gold, Noble Gold Investments, Orion Metal Exchange, Lear Capital and Patriot Gold Group, publish nothing we could verify either way, so we record that absence rather than assume a yes or a no. Ask any of the seven directly and ask for the answer in an email that also names the specific products and the buy and sell price on each. Lineups and minimums verified Jun 2026, confirm current pricing.
Does the American Palladium Eagle qualify for an IRA?
Yes, but not for the reason most people assume, and the distinction is worth understanding. The coin list at 408(m)(3)(A) reaches certain gold coins, silver coins minted under 31 U.S.C. 5112(e), platinum coins minted under 5112(k), and coins issued under state law. No palladium coin appears anywhere in it. The American Palladium Eagle is authorized separately, at 31 U.S.C. 5112(a)(12), where Congress specified a one troy ounce coin containing .9995 fine palladium. That statutory purity is exactly what the bullion exception at 408(m)(3)(B) asks for, so the coin qualifies on fineness in the same way a plain bar does, and it must sit in the physical possession of the trustee like everything else in the account.
Are platinum and palladium bars IRA approved?
Bars assaying at least 99.95 percent pass the statutory test, and the phrase IRA approved is doing more work than the code does. Section 408(m)(3)(B) asks two things of a bar: that its fineness meets or exceeds the minimum a contract market requires for delivery against a regulated futures contract, which for these two metals is 99.95 percent, and that the bar sits in the physical possession of the trustee. It says nothing about refiner brands. The brand list you will be handed is a commercial standard imposed by depositories and dealers who want assayable, resaleable inventory, and it is a sensible standard to accept, but do not let anyone tell you a specific brand is a legal requirement. The practical point is narrower: ask which brands your depository will accept back, because that is the list your future buyer is limited to.
Related reading: the purity rules on the gold side, the coins against bars question, the sales tactics worth recognising, and our provider rankings.
Eligibility comes from the statute and from the mints that issue the coins. Prices and demand come from federal minerals data. Company lineups, minimums and fees come from our own reviews of published company material and were verified Jun 2026; confirm current terms with any provider before you fund an account.
- 26 U.S.C. 408(m): the collectibles rule at (m)(1), the coin list at (m)(3)(A), and the bullion exception at (m)(3)(B) with its contract-market fineness test and its physical-possession condition.
- 31 U.S.C. 5112: subsection (k) authorising platinum bullion coins, and subsection (a)(12) specifying the one troy ounce palladium coin containing .9995 fine palladium.
- IRS, Retirement Plan Investments FAQs: IRAs may not invest in collectibles, and certain precious metals are permitted only where they meet the statutory requirements.
- LBMA, Good Delivery for platinum and palladium: at least 99.95 percent assay for both metals, with plates and ingots running from 1 kilogram to 6 kilograms. The NYMEX futures delivery specification for both metals sits at the same 99.95 percent purity (rulebook chapter 105, platinum, and chapter 106, palladium).
- Royal Canadian Mint, platinum bullion coins and palladium Maple Leaf: both stated at 99.95 percent purity by the issuing mint.
- USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026, platinum-group metals: catalytic converters as the leading domestic use, palladium substitution inside diesel converters, annual average prices for 2021 through the 2025 estimate, and net import reliance.
- Provider lineups, minimums and fee positions as recorded in our reviews of Birch Gold Group, Goldco and Augusta Precious Metals, plus the remaining seven companies in our comparison chart.
Where a company publishes nothing about these two metals, this page records the silence rather than inferring an answer. Nothing here is investment advice or a price forecast.
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