Augusta Precious Metals gold IRA fees, from Augusta's own fee sheet: a $50 custodian application fee, a $125 annual custodian fee and $100 a year for depository storage, shown for an Equity Trust account. The minimum is $50,000. Below, each charge is priced, projected over one, five and ten years, and set against Goldco, Birch and American Hartford Gold. We also cover the ten-year fee waiver that review sites describe but Augusta's own pages do not.
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Augusta's own fee sheet puts a gold IRA at $275 in the first year and $225 a year after. That is a $50 custodian application fee, a $125 annual custodian fee and a $100 sample depository storage fee, shown for an Equity Trust account. All three are flat. None is scaled to what your account is worth.
Augusta's FAQ sets a $50,000 minimum for both IRA and cash orders. It also says "no additional commission is added to prices listed by Augusta," and that Augusta has never declined a buyback, though the law bars it from guaranteeing one. Many review sites describe a waiver of up to ten years of fees on qualifying accounts. We could not find that offer on Augusta's own pages, so treat it as something to request in writing, not something to budget on. Verified Oct 2026.
Three rows carry a dollar figure from Augusta's fee sheet. The rest carry a condition, a quote from its FAQ, or the words NOT PUBLISHED. We print the blank rather than a guess, because a plausible-looking estimate is worse than an honest blank when you are about to sign something.
| LINE ITEM | AMOUNT | FREQUENCY | WHO BILLS IT | NOTES |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Custodian application | $50 | Once, at opening | Custodian | Shown in Augusta's Equity Trust example. No published waiver on it. |
| Annual custodian fee | $125 | Annual, first charge at opening | Custodian | Labeled "custodian maintenance fee" in the recurring section. Flat, not a percentage of assets. |
| Depository storage | $100 | Annual, first charge at opening | Depository, via custodian | Listed as a "sample non-government depository storage fee." Augusta's FAQ says metals are held "fully allocated" at a depository you select. |
| Year-one total | $275 | First year | Both | The fee sheet's "one-time setup fee total," which includes the first year of custodian and storage. |
| Recurring total | $225 | Each later year | Both | $125 custodian plus $100 storage. |
| Segregated vs commingled rates | NOT PUBLISHED | Annual | Depository | The fee sheet gives one sample figure. Ask which storage type it assumes. |
| Wire and transaction charges | NOT PUBLISHED | Per event | Custodian | Not on Augusta's sheet. Equity Trust's own schedule lists $30 per wire and a $250 full termination fee. |
| Commission on metals | "No additional commission" | Per order | Augusta | Augusta says its listed prices are what you pay and points to its transaction agreement for pricing detail. The margin is inside the price. |
| Minimum order | $50,000 | One-time gate | Augusta | Applies to "both cash (non-IRA) and IRA purchases," per its FAQ. No maximum. |
| Multi-year fee waiver | NOT ON AUGUSTA'S PAGES | Promotional | Augusta | Widely reported as up to 10 years on qualifying accounts. Not found on the fee sheet, FAQ or homepage we loaded. |
Sources: Augusta's "Fees: Gold and Silver IRA" sheet, captured by the Internet Archive in July 2025, and Augusta's FAQ, captured May 25, 2026. We used archived copies because Augusta's live site blocks automated access. Equity Trust figures from its published fee schedules. Verified Oct 2026. Confirm the live schedule with Augusta and the assigned custodian before funding.
Two of those three charges are not Augusta revenue at all, which is the first thing most buyers get wrong. The custodian fee pays a separate regulated trustee to hold the account, file the reporting and keep the arrangement inside the rules that let it stay tax-advantaged. The storage fee pays a vault operator to hold physical metal under insurance. Augusta's FAQ describes its own role in the same terms: you are "only responsible for modest custodian account setup and depository storage fees," with no management fee because the IRA is self-directed. Only the metals transaction itself is priced by the dealer.
That distinction matters when you go looking for savings. You cannot negotiate a depository into charging less for a vault. What you can do is understand which structure you have been placed into. Flat pricing of $125 for administration and $100 for storage behaves very differently over twenty years from a schedule that takes a fraction of a percent of assets, and Augusta sits on the flat side. A saver whose account triples in value still pays the same $225.
The fee sheet uses Equity Trust as its example custodian, which means you can check the custodian side against Equity's own published schedule rather than relying on the dealer's summary. Equity's retail schedule tiers its annual fee by account value and starts higher than $125, so the $125 on Augusta's sheet is a precious-metals rate for dealer-referred accounts. Ask Augusta to confirm that rate applies to you.
Augusta's FAQ says your metals are stored "fully allocated and off-balance-sheet," so they stay outside the depository's own assets and liabilities if it ever fails. Allocated is not the same as segregated. Segregated storage keeps your exact pieces apart. Commingled storage pools identical products and returns equivalents, and usually costs less. Augusta's sheet gives one sample figure without saying which type it assumes. For scale: at Equity Trust, non-segregated storage is $110 and segregated is $160. Ask Augusta which you are getting at $100. Our segregated vs commingled guide covers the trade-off.
Augusta's sheet covers opening the account and keeping it open. It says nothing about moving money or metal out, because those charges belong to the custodian. Since the sheet uses Equity Trust as its example, Equity's own published schedules are the place to look. Its two current versions, a newer Universal IRA schedule and an older retail schedule for accounts opened before August 2024, list these precious-metals lines:
| EQUITY TRUST CHARGE | UNIVERSAL IRA (REV. 110625) | RETAIL (REV. 081726) | WHEN YOU MEET IT |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wire | $30 | $30 | Rollover funding, cash distributions |
| Precious metals liquidation | $10 per asset, $30 maximum | $30 per transaction | Each sale, including RMD sales |
| In-kind distribution or transfer out | $50 per transaction | $125 per transaction | Taking coins home, moving to another custodian |
| Coin shipping and handling | Cost plus $10, $50 minimum | Cost plus $10, $50 minimum | Any in-kind distribution |
| Full termination | $250 | $250 | Closing the account |
Source: Equity Trust Company fee schedules, loaded Oct 5, 2026. Which schedule applies depends on when and how your account was opened. Ask Augusta which one it will be.
None of these is large on its own. Together they set the cost of leaving. Closing an Equity account after selling all the metal costs $250 plus liquidation and wire charges. Taking the metal home as a distribution adds the in-kind fee and shipping. Our guide to closing a gold IRA runs through the order these charges arrive in.
If you buy Augusta metal outside a retirement account, the custodian and storage lines disappear, because there is no IRA to administer. The $50,000 minimum stays the same, since Augusta's FAQ applies it to "both cash (non-IRA) and IRA purchases." Augusta says it covers shipping and insurance to your storage location on a qualifying purchase. What you give up is the tax treatment. The dealer spread applies either way.
Everything above adds up to a number in the low hundreds. The cost that decides whether an account was a good deal usually arrives on day one and never gets itemized: the dealer spread, the gap between the live spot price of the metal and the price you are billed for it. Augusta's FAQ says no commission is added on top of its listed prices. That is accurate as far as it goes. The dealer's margin is built into the listed price, as it is at every dealer, so "no added commission" does not mean "no markup."
We are not going to invent a percentage for Augusta. It publishes no spread figure, and a made-up number on a page like this would be worse than useless, because you would carry it into a negotiation as if it were verified. Augusta sells both common bullion and premium coins, and across this category common bullion carries the tighter premiums while premium and numismatic product carries the wider ones. Our category fee breakdown puts the ordinary bullion band in the low to high single digits and the collectible band far above it.
Scale that against the schedule. A ten-year run of Augusta's published fees totals $2,300. On a $50,000 purchase, a spread five percentage points wider than it needed to be costs you $2,500 before the first statement arrives. One conversation about product selection is worth more than a decade of arguing about the annual fee, and that is true at every provider we cover, not just this one.
Ask for two figures, by email, before you authorize a purchase. First: the buy price expressed as a percentage over spot on the day of the order, for the exact products being proposed. Second: the price the firm would pay to repurchase those same products, expressed the same way. The difference between the two is your round-trip cost, and it is the only fee comparison that survives contact with reality. Augusta locks prices on a recorded confirmation call, so ask for both figures before that call. Our gold IRA fee calculator lets you drop those two numbers alongside the annual lines and see the combined drag, and the provider comparison chart shows how the published parts of the schedule stack against the rest of the field.
Search for Augusta Precious Metals gold IRA fees and most results mention a waiver of custodian and storage fees for up to ten years on qualifying accounts. We looked for it on Augusta's fee sheet, FAQ and homepage and did not find it. That does not mean the offer is fake. Promotions are often explained on the phone rather than printed. It does mean no page from Augusta that we could check says what qualifies, how long the waiver lasts, or what happens when it ends.
So price it as a possibility rather than a promise. If Augusta grants the full ten years, the waiver removes $2,250 of custodian and storage fees, leaving the $50 application fee as the whole cost of a decade of account administration. A three-year grant removes $675. Both are good outcomes, and they are far enough apart that you should not commit on the headline. Ask for your waiver term, in years, in writing, alongside the fee sheet.
The waiver, like everything else here, only applies above the $50,000 minimum. A saver with $40,000 in an old plan is not offered a smaller version of this deal. They are not offered it at all. Our Augusta alternatives under $50,000 page covers that case.
Because the schedule is flat, the dollar totals below do not change when the balance does. What changes is what those dollars represent as a share of the money at work. This is the clearest argument for flat pricing, and the clearest argument against opening this particular account small, if the minimum permitted it, which it does not.
| ACCOUNT SIZE | YEAR 1 AT LIST | 5 YEARS AT LIST | 10 YEARS AT LIST | 10-YEAR TOTAL AS SHARE OF OPENING BALANCE | 10 YEARS IF A FULL WAIVER IS GRANTED |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $25,000 | $275 | $1,175 | $2,300 | 9.2% | BELOW MINIMUM |
| $50,000 | $275 | $1,175 | $2,300 | 4.6% | $50 |
| $100,000 | $275 | $1,175 | $2,300 | 2.3% | $50 |
Illustrative only, not a quote. Built from Augusta's fee sheet: $275 in year one ($50 application, $125 custodian, $100 storage) and $225 a year after, held constant. Excludes wire and termination charges, which Augusta's sheet does not list (Equity Trust publishes $30 per wire and $250 to terminate), and excludes the dealer spread. The waiver column assumes a full ten-year waiver, which Augusta's own pages do not state. The $25,000 row is for comparison with lower-entry providers only, since Augusta's minimum is $50,000. Verified Oct 2026.
Read the fifth column rather than the fourth. $2,300 over a decade is either a rounding error or a real bite depending entirely on what it is charged against, and Augusta's minimum guarantees you land on the gentler end. At $100,000 the account costs about a quarter of one percent a year to administer before any waiver. That is the quiet advantage of a flat schedule attached to a high gate.
The figures on this page come from Augusta's own fee sheet and FAQ, checked in October 2026, and pricing in this industry moves. Three pieces of paper let you confirm the whole schedule independently, and all three exist before you commit to anything. Collect them in this order.
Put the three side by side and the total is arithmetic rather than trust. If any figure on this page disagrees with what you receive, the documents win and we would like to hear about it. Our category fee breakdown explains what each of these charges is for in more depth, and the full provider rankings show where this schedule sits against the field.
Every figure below comes from the company's own site, checked in October 2026. The minimum sits alongside, because a cheaper schedule you can reach beats a comparable schedule you cannot.
| PROVIDER | PUBLISHED ANNUAL COST | SETUP | MINIMUM | FEE RELIEF ON ITS OWN SITE |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Augusta Precious Metals | $225 ($125 custodian, $100 storage) | $50 | $50,000 | None stated; a multi-year waiver is widely reported |
| Birch Gold Group | $235 ($125 management, $110 storage and insurance) | $50, plus $30 wire | $5,000 | First year's fees paid on transfers over $50,000 |
| Goldco | NOT PUBLISHED (flat yearly fee) | NOT PUBLISHED | NOT STATED | "May reimburse" annual fees; silver bonus up to 10% |
| American Hartford Gold | NOT PUBLISHED | NOT PUBLISHED | $10,000 | Storage "might be free" depending on account size |
Sources, loaded Oct 5, 2026: Augusta fee sheet and FAQ (archived copies linked above); Birch Gold Group's precious metals IRA page and FAQ; Goldco's FAQ and promotion terms; American Hartford Gold's FAQ. NOT PUBLISHED means no figure in company material, not a zero charge.
The honest reading is that Augusta's standing schedule is competitive rather than category-leading. At $225 a year it is $10 below Birch's published $235, and Birch opens at a tenth of the balance. Goldco and American Hartford Gold do not print an annual amount, so they cannot be ranked on this measure. What could separate Augusta on cost is a multi-year waiver, if you secure one in writing, and the fact that its flat structure spreads across the larger balances its minimum selects for. For a head-to-head, see Augusta vs Goldco or Augusta vs American Hartford Gold.
Augusta's own fee sheet shows $225 a year after the first year: a $125 annual custodian fee and a $100 sample depository storage fee, using Equity Trust as the example custodian. The first year is $275 because it adds the $50 application fee. All three charges are flat rather than scaled to your balance. Review sites often describe a waiver of up to ten years on qualifying accounts, but Augusta's own pages we checked do not state one, so get any waiver in writing. Verified Oct 2026.
Augusta's fee sheet lists three: a $50 custodian application fee, a $125 annual custodian fee and a $100 annual depository storage fee, in an Equity Trust example. That is $275 in the first year and $225 a year after. The minimum order is $50,000 for IRA and cash purchases. Wire and termination charges come from the custodian. Equity Trust publishes $30 per wire and $250 to terminate.
Yes. Augusta's fee sheet lists a $50 custodian application fee, charged once when the self-directed IRA is opened, in its Equity Trust example. The sheet's year-one total of $275 also includes the first annual custodian fee of $125 and $100 of storage. We found no published waiver on the application fee.
Augusta's FAQ states a minimum order of $50,000 for both cash (non-IRA) and IRA purchases, which can be met with any combination of products, and no maximum. That is the highest minimum among the major providers we track.
No, and we could not confirm it on Augusta's own pages. Many review sites say Augusta covers custodian and storage fees for up to ten years on qualifying accounts. Augusta's fee sheet, FAQ and homepage we checked in October 2026 do not mention it, its qualifying amount or its length. If you are offered a waiver, ask for the term in years and the qualifying order size in writing before you fund the account. At the published $225 a year, a full ten-year waiver is worth $2,250.
Augusta does not publish a spread figure and we will not estimate one for it. Its FAQ says no additional commission is added to its listed prices, and that the order desk price is the price you pay, locked on a recorded confirmation call. The dealer margin is built into that price. Ask for the buy price as a percentage over spot on the day you order, and the same figure on the buyback side, before the confirmation call.
Augusta's FAQ says it has historically bought back customers' gold and silver and had never declined a buyback at the time of writing, but that the law prohibits it from guaranteeing to repurchase what it sells, and its buyback policy can change without notice. It does not publish a buyback fee or pricing method. Ask for today's buyback price on your exact products before you buy.
On published numbers, Augusta's $225 a year is one of only a few figures to compare. Goldco and American Hartford Gold do not print an annual amount, so they cannot be ranked on this measure. Birch Gold Group publishes $235 a year with a $5,000 minimum. Augusta's $50,000 minimum is the highest of the four. A multi-year waiver, if granted in writing, would make Augusta among the cheapest accounts to hold. Verified Oct 2026.
Related reading: the full Augusta Precious Metals review, our category-wide fee breakdown, the side-by-side provider chart, and the fee calculator for running your own totals.
Augusta figures come from its "Fees: Gold and Silver IRA" sheet (Internet Archive capture, July 2025) and its FAQ (capture, May 25, 2026), read Oct 5, 2026. Custodian figures come from Equity Trust's fee schedules. Tax and conduct material comes from federal primary sources, listed below.
This is not financial advice and no figure here is a quote. Pricing and promotional terms change without notice; confirm the current schedule with the provider, the custodian and the depository before you authorize a transfer.
Our free kit includes the verified fee and minimum comparison behind this page, plus the five-item list to send a provider before you commit. Request Augusta's own kit if you want its current pricing direct from the source.