Lear Capital Review (2026)

Who Lear Capital is best for

Lear Capital is a Los Angeles based precious-metals dealer founded in 1997, selling gold and silver for direct delivery and for self-directed IRAs. Longevity is its central claim, and in a category where new brands appear and vanish inside a decade, nearly thirty years of continuous trading is a real thing to weigh.

It suits a mainstream saver rolling over a 401(k) or IRA who wants an accessible entry point of roughly $10,000, a flat annual fee instead of a percentage-of-assets charge, and a firm with a long operating history. It is a weaker fit for someone who wants a provider with no regulatory history at all, because Lear has one, and we are going to set it out in full rather than bury it.

We rank Lear ninth of ten in our 2026 rankings. The score reflects a company with sound mechanics and a genuinely accessible product, marked down on the reputation pillar for events that are documented in the public record.

Fees and minimums

Lear Capital is commonly reported to charge approximately $280 in the first year, covering account setup and initial maintenance, and approximately $200 per year thereafter for a self-directed precious-metals IRA. Waivers are sometimes available depending on how much you fund the account with. The minimum to open is approximately $10,000.

A flat annual figure is the right structure for this product. Percentage-based fees quietly punish you for the account growing, which is the whole point of holding the asset. At $200 a year, a $10,000 account is paying 2 percent annually, while a $100,000 account is paying 0.2 percent. That arithmetic is worth doing before you decide how much to move; our fee calculator will do it for you, and our gold IRA fees guide explains each line.

Ask about the markup, and ask in writing

The dealer markup over the live spot price is the largest cost in almost every precious-metals purchase, and it appears on no fee schedule anywhere. Standard bullion carries a modest premium. Proof and collectible coins can carry very large ones, and that premium is unrecoverable the moment the transaction closes.

This point carries extra weight at Lear specifically, because commissions and coin pricing are precisely what the New York Attorney General's 2021 action was about, and because Lear made binding commitments on fee disclosure as part of resolving it. That history gives you leverage. Ask for the total cost as a percentage over spot, ask for it in writing, and ask what the buyback spread would be if you sold the same items back tomorrow. A firm operating under a disclosure commitment should answer all three without friction.

The legal history, stated precisely

This is the section most readers came for, so we are going to be careful with it. Every claim below is sourced to a primary document, linked at the foot of the page. Where something is an allegation rather than a finding, we say so.

What New York alleged in June 2021

On 17 June 2021, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil action against Lear Capital, Inc. and its founder, Kevin DeMeritt. The office's press release stated that Lear had persuaded investors, largely through television and radio advertising, to move retirement savings into precious metals, and alleged that the company fraudulently failed to disclose commissions of up to 33 percent. It also alleged that Lear operated while not registered as a commodity broker-dealer, a commodity investment advisor, or a telemarketer.

On the numbers: the Attorney General's office stated that nearly 1,000 New Yorkers were affected and put the sum at issue at approximately $10 million in undisclosed commissions. Those same consumers had invested roughly $43 million in gold and silver. Both figures circulate online, often interchangeably, and they mean different things. The $43 million is what was invested; the $10 million is what the state alleged was improperly taken out of it.

The word doing the work in that paragraph is alleged. A complaint filed by a regulator is an accusation. It is the state's version of events, tested by nothing at the point of filing.

How it was resolved in January 2022

On 3 January 2022, the Attorney General announced that Lear would pay $6 million under a consent order resolving the matter, with funds distributed to eligible New York customers. Under the order Lear agreed to provide New Yorkers with clear and conspicuous disclosure of its fees, to offer a 24-hour cancellation period on retirement and certain higher-fee transactions, to improve complaint tracking, and to train its personnel.

A consent order is a negotiated civil settlement. The press release contains no admission of liability by Lear, and this was a civil enforcement matter, not a criminal prosecution. We found no criminal charges against the company in the public record we reviewed. So the accurate description of what happened is this: a state regulator alleged deceptive fee-disclosure and advertising practices, and the company paid to resolve those civil allegations and changed how it discloses fees. It is not accurate to describe it as a fraud conviction, and we will not.

Chapter 11 and the multistate recovery

In March 2022 Lear Capital filed for Chapter 11 reorganization under Subchapter V. Chapter 11 is a restructuring process, not a liquidation and not a closure. The company continued trading throughout.

Other states had been investigating in parallel. On 2 August 2023 the Texas State Securities Board announced that Texas had joined a multistate group of securities regulators that recouped $5.5 million for investors nationwide through the bankruptcy. Under the reorganization plan, Lear agreed to a set of forward-looking commitments: not to misrepresent its fees, not to offer portfolio assessments of securities holdings, not to hold itself out as an investment adviser in any way, not to provide investment advice, and not to commit securities or commodities fraud.

Lear states that it completed its reorganization in 2024, and the company is still operating in 2026. That last point matters because a good deal of published content about Lear implies it disappeared. It did not.

How to weigh this if you are deciding today

Reasonable people land in different places on this, and we are not going to pretend there is one right answer.

The case against using Lear is simple: several competitors have no comparable regulatory history, so if a clean record is a threshold requirement for you, this is disqualifying and you should stop here. That is a legitimate position.

The case for keeping Lear on your list is also simple, and worth stating fairly. The conduct at issue was fee disclosure and advertising, resolved civilly and paid for. Money was returned to affected investors, $6 million in New York and $5.5 million nationally. The company now operates under explicit, enforceable commitments about exactly the behavior that was challenged, which is a stronger constraint than most of its competitors operate under. And a firm that has been through this level of regulatory attention is not the one most likely to try it again.

What none of this tells you is what price you will be quoted next Tuesday. That is still on you to check, at Lear and everywhere else. Our guide to gold IRA scams and red flags is the checklist we would use.

Storage and custodians

Lear does not hold client IRA metals itself. Accounts are administered by third-party, IRS-approved custodians and metal is held in insured, IRS-approved depositories, which is the only compliant structure for this product. Both segregated and non-segregated storage are generally available, with segregated costing more because your specific items are held apart rather than pooled.

Home storage is not on offer and should never be. The IRS treats taking personal possession of IRA metals as a distribution, with tax and potential penalty consequences, and the United States Tax Court closed off the checkbook-control workaround in McNulty v. Commissioner in 2021. See gold IRA storage and the home storage myth for the mechanics, and IRA approved gold for which products actually qualify.

Reputation and third-party ratings

Lear's reputation picture has two layers, and reading only one of them gives you a false impression.

The current customer layer is strong. As of July 2026, Trustpilot rates Lear in the high fours out of five, with published figures ranging from roughly 4.7 to 4.9 across several thousand reviews depending on when the snapshot was taken. That is a large sample and a good score, and it reflects people who dealt with the company recently.

The regulatory layer is the one set out above. Our methodology weighs regulatory and enforcement history directly into the reputation pillar, which is why Lear scores 7.7 there while scoring in the mid eights everywhere else. We are not double-counting it or letting it swamp the rest of the assessment, but we are not ignoring it either. Ratings and profiles change, so check the live Trustpilot and Better Business Bureau pages before you decide, and treat every figure here as a July 2026 snapshot.

What you actually buy, and how the account opens

Lear sells gold and silver in bullion and coin form, for direct delivery and inside a self-directed IRA. The mechanics of opening are the same at every provider we cover, and they are worth knowing before a salesperson walks you through them, because knowing the sequence is what stops you being hurried through it.

You open a self-directed IRA with a third-party custodian, fund it by transferring from an existing IRA or rolling over from a 401(k), 403(b) or TSP, then instruct the purchase of metals meeting the IRS fineness standards. The metal ships from the dealer to the depository and never passes through your hands. A trustee-to-trustee transfer avoids the 60-day deadline and the once-per-year limit that apply to indirect rollovers, which is why it is almost always the right mechanism. Our gold IRA rollover guide and how a gold IRA works walk through each step.

The decision that costs or saves you the most happens at the purchase step, not the account-opening step. A common bullion coin at a modest premium and a proof coin at a large one both satisfy the IRS equally well. Only one of them leaves your balance intact.

Buyback and service

Lear operates a buyback program and will quote to repurchase metals it sold you. As with every dealer we cover, that is a commercial practice rather than a contractual guarantee of price, and what you receive depends on the spread quoted on the day. The strongest documented buyback commitment in our rankings belongs to Augusta Precious Metals, and Lear does not match it. Ask what the typical repurchase spread has been in percentage terms, and get the answer before you buy rather than years later when you need the money.

The honest cons

The regulatory history is the headline con and there is no way to soften it. Between 2021 and 2024 this company was sued by a state attorney general, settled for $6 million, entered Chapter 11, and returned a further $5.5 million to investors through a multistate process. That is a lot of adverse history for a firm you might hold an account with for twenty years, and it belongs in your decision even though every piece of it has been resolved.

Beyond that: the buyback is less documented than the category leaders, the published fee detail is thinner than Birch Gold Group's, and the historical complaint themes, commissions and coin pricing, are the exact areas where a buyer has to be most alert. None of that makes Lear unusable. It makes it a firm you deal with attentively and in writing.

And the product itself is not for everyone. Metals pay no dividend or interest, returns depend entirely on price, and the sensible allocation for most people is a slice of a diversified plan rather than the plan itself. Read the pros and cons before you choose any provider.

How Lear compares

PROVIDER	BEST FOR	MIN. INVEST	SCORE
Lear Capital	Track record	~$10,000	8.2 / 10
Augusta Precious Metals	Education / high-net-worth	~$50,000	9.6 / 10
American Hartford Gold	Low fees / low minimum	~$10,000	9.2 / 10
Birch Gold Group	Fee transparency	~$10,000	9.0 / 10
Orion Metal Exchange	Small balances	~$5,000	8.4 / 10

At the same roughly $10,000 entry point, American Hartford Gold and Birch Gold Group both score higher and neither carries comparable regulatory history, so if the $10,000 minimum is what drew you to Lear, compare those two first. If you want a lower entry still, see our Orion Metal Exchange review. For the full field and the weighting behind every score, see how we rank and our library of gold IRA reviews. (Fees and ratings verified Jul 2026, confirm current terms.)