Search “Schwab gold IRA” and most of what comes back is selling you something Schwab does not sell. So here is the position, taken from both firms' own sites in August 2026. A Schwab retirement account will hold gold futures, gold miners, gold funds and physically backed gold trusts. A Vanguard one will hold the trusts too, though Vanguard issues no gold product of its own. Neither will put a bar in a vault with your account number attached to it. That is not a scandal, it is a design choice, and on plenty of balances it is the correct one.
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Schwab publishes two lists that between them settle the question, and neither of them requires a phone call to interpret. The first is on its retirement account page, where the firm describes what an IRA there is: brokerage accounts that hold investments like stocks, ETFs and mutual funds. When the same page returns to the topic under investing your funds, the menu reads stocks, bonds, CDs, ETFs and mutual funds. Bullion appears nowhere on either version.
The second list is on Schwab's gold page, and it is the more useful one because it is written for exactly the person reading this. Schwab says it offers a variety of ways to gain exposure to gold, then names them: gold futures across several contract sizes, gold futures options, gold stocks, gold ETFs, gold exchange-traded products and mutual funds. Read the verb. Exposure, not ownership. Two sentences later the page makes the boundary explicit, and it does so as a selling point rather than an apology: since you are not buying or selling the actual physical metal, there are no storage, security or insurance hassles to deal with.
If you want the point nailed shut, the small print under the futures section does it. Schwab's futures arm states that it does not allow physical delivery of the underlying commodities. So the one route at Schwab that theoretically ends in a warehouse receipt is closed off by contract before it gets there.
Quite a lot, actually. Schwab's education pages explain how a physically backed fund works with unusual candour: a grantor trust invests in physical commodities, typically gold or silver bars, stored in secure vaults. The metal is real and the vault is real. The trust owns both, and you own a share of the trust. Schwab's asset-allocation caution on the same page is worth repeating, because no dealer will say it to you: allocating more than 5% to 10% of a portfolio to commodities may reduce the diversification benefits.
On price, Schwab publishes $0 opening fees, $0 maintenance fees and $0 commission on online stock and ETF trades in its IRAs. Which means the all-in annual cost of gold exposure in a Schwab IRA is essentially just the fund's own fee, and nothing else.
Vanguard's investment products page opens by telling you to choose from a wide range of investments for your brokerage account, then organises the entire range into six tabs: mutual funds, ETFs, money market, stocks, CDs and bonds. There is no commodities tab. There is no metals tab. Whatever else can be said about Vanguard, it does not tease.
This matters more than the equivalent gap at Schwab, because Vanguard is a manufacturer as well as a broker, and it manufactures nothing in this asset class. The fund people reach for from memory is VGPMX, which today is the Vanguard Global Capital Cycles Fund. Vanguard's own materials give it a 0.42% expense ratio as of 28 May 2026, an active management style and a benchmark built from a global metals and mining equity index, with a stated objective of long-term capital appreciation. It buys the companies that dig metal out of the ground. Mining shares carry operating, jurisdiction and management risk that a bar in a vault does not, and in any given year they can move a long way from the metal price in either direction. Treating that fund as a gold holding is a category error, and a lot of retirement portfolios have made it.
What Vanguard does do is carry other issuers' products. Its own fee disclosures refer to non-Vanguard ETFs and mutual funds offered through Vanguard Brokerage Services, which is how the large gold trusts get into a Vanguard IRA. The same disclosures note that all stock and ETF sales are subject to a securities transaction fee, a small regulatory charge that is easy to miss and worth knowing about before you model anything. Confirm the current online commission on Vanguard's own fee schedule rather than assuming it matches a competitor's.
So a Vanguard gold IRA, if you insist on the phrase, means a Vanguard retirement account holding a gold trust that Vanguard did not build and does not manage.
Inside a traditional IRA the answer collapses to one rule: IRS Publication 590-B states that distributions from traditional IRAs that you include in income are taxed as ordinary income, and that in figuring your tax you cannot use capital gain treatment. That means the 28% ceiling on collectibles gains described in IRS Topic no. 409, the rule that makes people nervous about holding metal funds in a taxable brokerage account, simply never reaches inside the retirement wrapper. Whether the account held a gold trust, a miner or a coin, what comes out is ordinary income.
The rule that does bite is a custody rule, not a tax-rate rule. Publication 590-B treats an IRA's purchase of collectibles as a distribution in the year invested, then carves out an exception for certain gold coins and for certain gold, silver, palladium and platinum bullion. The exception comes with a caution attached: the coins must be in the possession of the custodian or trustee of the IRA, and if the owner or beneficiary of the IRA takes possession, the coins will be treated as distributed. That sentence is the whole reason a separate industry exists. A discount brokerage is not set up to hold and insure a bar on your behalf, so the moment you want one, you need somebody who is. Our page on home storage arrangements covers what happens to people who ignore the possession clause, and how a gold IRA is taxed covers the distribution side in full.
Most comparisons of a gold IRA vs gold ETF are written by somebody selling one of them, so the losing column gets described unfairly. Here is the same comparison with both columns written by people who would rather you understood the trade than made a particular decision.
| WHAT YOU ARE COMPARING | GOLD TRUST IN A SCHWAB OR VANGUARD IRA | METAL IN A SELF-DIRECTED IRA |
|---|---|---|
| What you own | A share of a trust that owns bullion in a vault. Your claim is on the trust, not on identified metal. | Specific coins or bars held by a depository for your IRA, segregated or commingled depending on what you paid for. |
| Recurring annual cost | A percentage of value, forever. 0.40% for SPDR Gold Shares and 0.25% for iShares Gold Trust, per each sponsor's own site, August 2026. | A flat schedule. Roughly $180 all-in at American Hartford Gold, roughly $265 at Birch Gold Group, verified Jun 2026. |
| Cost to get in | The bid-ask spread on a liquid listed fund, plus whatever the broker charges. Schwab publishes $0 commission on online ETF trades. | A dealer markup over spot, charged once and rarely published. On any realistic balance this dwarfs the annual fee. |
| Custody chain | Two parties: your broker and the trust's custodian bank. | Three parties: dealer, IRA custodian, depository. More paperwork, more named counterparties, more to verify. |
| Counterparty exposure | The trust structure, its sponsor and its vaulting bank. Small, but not nil, and you cannot inspect it. | The depository and custodian, both nameable. Ask which vault and which trust company before you sign anything. |
| Selling | Seconds, at a screen price, on any trading day. | Days, at a dealer's buy price. The buy-sell spread is the real exit cost, not the transaction fee. |
| Entry threshold | The price of one share. | A dealer minimum. Roughly $5,000 at the lowest we track, roughly $50,000 at the highest. |
| Who moves your old 401(k) | You do, through the brokerage's rollover process. | The dealer's rollover desk, which is a genuine part of what the markup pays for. |
ETF charges taken from each fund sponsor's own site in August 2026. Dealer minimums and annual schedules taken from published provider material and verified Jun 2026; confirm current pricing. Markups and buy-sell spreads are not published by any provider we track, which is why they carry no figure here.
Percentage fees and flat fees cross somewhere, and where they cross is the single most useful figure in this whole debate. Nobody prints it, because the answer embarrasses one side at small balances and the other side at large ones. Below is the arithmetic on our two most transparent published schedules against the two gold trusts with published charges.
| BALANCE HELD | ISHARES GOLD TRUST AT 0.25% | SPDR GOLD SHARES AT 0.40% | AMERICAN HARTFORD GOLD, ~$180 FLAT | BIRCH GOLD GROUP, ~$265 FLAT |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $10,000 | $25 | $40 | $180, or 1.80% | $265, or 2.65% |
| $25,000 | $63 | $100 | $180, or 0.72% | $265, or 1.06% |
| $50,000 | $125 | $200 | $180, or 0.36% | $265, or 0.53% |
| $72,000 | $180 | $288 | $180, dead level here | $265, or 0.37% |
| $106,000 | $265 | $424 | $180, or 0.17% | $265, dead level here |
| $250,000 | $625 | $1,000 | $180, or 0.07% | $265, or 0.11% |
Recurring holding cost only. Excludes the dealer's one-time markup on the metal, the fund's bid-ask spread, and any promotional first-year waiver. Birch Gold Group waives the first year on qualifying rollovers of $50,000 or more, which changes year one but not the years after it. ETF charges from each sponsor's site, August 2026; dealer schedules verified Jun 2026, confirm current pricing.
Read down the two flat columns and the crossovers fall out. Against a 0.25% trust, roughly $180 a year breaks even at about $72,000 and roughly $265 at about $106,000. Against a 0.40% trust the same schedules break even far earlier, at about $45,000 and about $66,250, because you are paying a bigger percentage for the same job. Under those thresholds the fund is genuinely cheaper to hold and pretending otherwise is dishonest. Over them, the flat schedule wins by a widening margin every year the balance grows, which is the argument nobody on the fund side makes for you.
One honest caveat, and it is a big one. This table covers what you pay every year to keep the thing, not what you paid to acquire it. A dealer's markup over spot is a one-time charge on the way in, it is larger than several years of either fee, and no provider we track publishes it. That number, not this table, is where most of the real cost of a physical position sits. Our fee breakdown and the side-by-side comparison chart lay out everything providers do disclose.
Stay where you are if your holding is under roughly $25,000, if what you actually want is price exposure rather than title, if you may want out within a couple of years, or if adding two more counterparties to your retirement plan sounds like a chore rather than a safeguard. At $10,000 a flat schedule of roughly $265 is 2.65% a year in standing costs before a single dollar of markup, against $25 for the same exposure through a 0.25% trust. No amount of narrative fixes that ratio. It is the clearest case on this page and it applies to more readers than the industry likes to admit.
Move if the specific thing you want is a claim on identified metal held outside the banking and brokerage system, and you are funding it at a size where the flat fee lands under about half a percent. That is roughly $50,000 and up, held for long enough that a one-time markup amortises into something reasonable. If that describes you, the fund does not substitute, at any fee, because the entire point of the position is the part a fund cannot deliver.
At that point the gates become the constraint rather than the fees. Orion Metal Exchange sets the lowest entry point we track at roughly $5,000, Birch Gold Group and American Hartford Gold sit near $10,000, Goldco near $25,000 and Augusta Precious Metals near $50,000. Balance-by-balance detail is on our minimum investment guide, and the full ranked field with scores is on the best gold IRA companies page.
One brokerage does break the pattern. Fidelity will hold a short list of bullion products in a retirement account at published commission and percentage storage rates, which makes it the only mainstream discount broker where buying physical gold with IRA dollars is possible without leaving. We price that route line by line on our Fidelity gold IRA page, currently in draft, so treat this as a pointer rather than a summary. Nothing in this section changes for Schwab or Vanguard, where the answer stays no.
Be clear about which question you are answering. A physical gold backed IRA and a brokerage account holding a gold trust do not compete on returns, since both track the same metal price. They compete on cost shape and on how many parties stand between you and the bar. Our page on holding metal inside an IRA against holding it outright takes the same fork from the other end.
You can open a Schwab IRA and fill it with gold exposure, but not with metal you own directly. Schwab's own IRA page describes its retirement accounts as brokerage accounts that hold investments like stocks, ETFs and mutual funds, and its investment menu for those accounts lists stocks, bonds, CDs, ETFs and mutual funds. Its gold page lists the routes it does offer: gold futures in several contract sizes, gold futures options, gold stocks, gold ETFs, gold exchange-traded products and mutual funds. The same page states that since you are not buying or selling the actual physical metal there are no storage, security or insurance hassles to deal with, which is Schwab describing the boundary itself. Schwab's futures disclosures add that its futures arm does not allow physical delivery of the underlying commodities. Verified on schwab.com in August 2026.
Vanguard offers IRAs and will hold gold trusts issued by other firms inside them, but it issues no gold product of its own. Vanguard's investment products page groups everything a brokerage account can hold into mutual funds, ETFs, money market funds, stocks, CDs and bonds, with no commodity or metals category. The fund people remember is VGPMX, now the Vanguard Global Capital Cycles Fund, an actively managed equity fund carrying a 0.42% expense ratio as of 28 May 2026 and benchmarked to a global metals and mining index. It buys shares in companies that dig metal out of the ground, which behave like equities and not like bullion. Vanguard Brokerage Services does carry non-Vanguard ETFs, so the gold trusts are available to you there. Verified on vanguard.com in August 2026.
Any exchange-listed gold trust either brokerage carries, and the three most widely held are SPDR Gold Shares, iShares Gold Trust and abrdn Physical Gold Shares. Two of the three publish their annual charge plainly: SPDR Gold Shares shows a 0.40% expense ratio on its sponsor's site and iShares Gold Trust shows a 0.25% sponsor fee on its own, both checked in August 2026. Confirm the abrdn fund's sponsor fee in its own materials rather than taking a number from an aggregator. A gold ETF in an IRA is a security like any other, so it settles in the account, needs no custodian beyond the brokerage itself and carries no minimum beyond the price of one share. What you are buying is the trust's exposure, not a specific bar.
It depends entirely on your balance, because the two charge in different shapes. An ETF bills a percentage forever, so 0.25% is $25 a year on $10,000 and $625 a year on $250,000. A specialist dealer IRA bills a flat schedule, so American Hartford Gold's roughly $180 all-in and Birch Gold Group's roughly $265 flat cost the same whether you hold $10,000 or $250,000. Against a 0.25% fund the flat schedules break even at about $72,000 and about $106,000; against a 0.40% fund, at about $45,000 and about $66,250. Below those figures the fund is cheaper to hold, above them the flat schedule is. This arithmetic covers recurring cost only and excludes the dealer's one-time markup on the metal, which is usually the larger number. Fees verified Jun 2026, confirm current pricing.
A self-directed IRA custodian, a dealer to source the metal and an approved depository to store it, which is three relationships instead of one brokerage login. IRS Publication 590-B explains why: an IRA may invest in certain gold coins and in certain gold, silver, palladium and platinum bullion, but the publication cautions that the coins must be in the possession of the custodian or trustee of the IRA, and that if the owner or beneficiary takes possession the coins are treated as distributed. That single sentence is the reason no mainstream discount broker can hand you the metal and the reason a separate industry exists to do it. Our rankings page sets out which providers accept which balances.
Usually not, and the arithmetic is blunt about it. A roughly $265 flat annual schedule is about 2.65% a year on a $10,000 account and about 0.53% on a $50,000 one, before any markup on the metal is counted. The same $10,000 in a 0.25% gold trust costs $25 a year. Orion Metal Exchange sets the lowest entry point we track at roughly $5,000, but a low gate is not the same thing as a sensible fit, because the flat fee lands hardest exactly where the balance is smallest. If your reason for wanting metal is price exposure, a fund does that job at a fraction of the cost. If your reason is title to identified metal held outside the banking system, no fund substitutes for it at any balance. Fees verified Jun 2026, confirm current pricing.
Related reading: which coins and bars an IRA may hold, how depository storage works, the rollover process step by step, and how we score providers.
Everything said here about Schwab and Vanguard comes from those firms' own published pages, read in August 2026. We hold no commercial relationship with either. Tax points come from IRS material. Dealer figures come from published provider material verified Jun 2026; confirm current terms before you fund anything.
Where a figure could not be verified on a primary source, this page leaves it out rather than estimating. That is why the abrdn fund carries no fee figure and why no markup appears in either table.
Our free kit includes the fee and minimum comparison behind the tables above, plus the questions to ask a dealer about markup and spread before you move a dollar out of a brokerage account. Or start with the ranked provider list.