A traditional or Roth IRA typically holds stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and ETFs through a brokerage account. A Gold IRA is a self-directed IRA that instead holds physical precious metals, and that single difference changes most of how the account works day to day.

Under IRC Section 408(m), the metals in a Gold IRA must meet minimum purity standards (99.5% for gold, with a statutory exception carved out for American Gold Eagle coins) and must be held by an IRS-approved custodian in an approved depository. The account owner cannot take personal possession of the metal while it stays inside the IRA – a regular brokerage IRA has no equivalent storage requirement because there is no physical asset to store.

That custodial structure also changes the cost picture. Alongside any account fees, a Gold IRA typically carries a one-time setup fee, an annual custodian fee, and a separate storage fee paid to the depository – costs a stock-and-bond IRA simply doesn’t have.

The tax treatment, though, is identical to any other IRA of the same type. A Traditional Gold IRA follows the same pre-tax contribution and required-minimum-distribution rules as a standard Traditional IRA, and a Roth Gold IRA follows the same after-tax, tax-free-qualified-withdrawal rules as a standard Roth IRA. The metal changes what’s inside the account, not which tax rules apply to it.