Does Bank of America offer a Gold IRA?

Disclaimer: We are reader supported.  We may be compensated from the links in this post, if you use products or services based on our expert recommendations. Please read our Advertising Disclosure.

Bank of America does not offer a gold IRA. The bank and its investment arm, Merrill, sell traditional IRAs built around stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs and CDs, but neither one custodies physical gold, silver, platinum or palladium inside a retirement account.

If you want to hold actual metal in a tax-advantaged account, you'll need to open a self-directed IRA through a specialty custodian that works with an IRS-approved depository.

Below is what Bank of America actually sells, why big banks generally avoid this niche, and what the numbers say about gold in 2026 so far.

Key Takeaways

• Bank of America and Merrill do not custody physical precious metals in any IRA product they offer.
• Gold IRAs require a self-directed IRA custodian, an IRS-approved depository, and IRS-compliant coins or bars.
• Gold traded above $4,100 an ounce in mid-July 2026, up roughly $850 from a year earlier, which explains the renewed interest in metals-backed retirement accounts.

What Bank of America Actually Sells for Retirement

Bank of America's IRA lineup runs through two channels. The bank itself offers IRA savings accounts and IRA CDs, which are FDIC-insured cash products with fixed or variable interest.

Merrill, the brokerage side of the company, offers Traditional, Roth, and SEP IRAs that can hold stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, and cash. None of these accounts are built to hold coins or bullion.

A Merrill IRA can hold gold-related paper assets, such as a gold mining ETF or a fund that tracks gold prices, but that is not the same as owning physical metal.

This isn't an oversight. Large depository banks are chartered and regulated in a way that steers them toward securities, cash equivalents, and lending products.

 Custodying bullion means arranging IRS-approved storage, insurance, and third-party depository relationships that fall outside a standard brokerage model.

 Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citibank follow the same pattern. Search for "Chase gold IRA" or "Wells Fargo gold IRA" and you'll land on the same answer: no.

Here's a quick side-by-side so the difference is clear.

Why This Keeps Coming Up

People search for "Bank of America gold IRA" for a simple reason: it's the country's second-largest bank by assets, with roughly 4,300 branches, so it's a natural first stop when someone wants to move retirement money into something that feels more tangible than a stock ticker.

That instinct has gotten louder in 2026. Gold was trading at $4,137.97 per troy ounce as of the morning of July 12, according to JM Bullion's live spot pricing, and Fortune's daily tracker put the metal at $4,166 on July 7, an $858 gain compared to the same date a year earlier.

Renewed U.S.-Iran tensions and a run of geopolitical shocks earlier this year pushed gold through the $4,000 mark late last year and kept it elevated since.

Retirement accounts felt some of that volatility too. Fidelity reported that average 401(k) and IRA balances slipped about 4% quarter over quarter in early 2026 as tariff policy and overseas conflict rattled markets.

That kind of swing is exactly what drives people toward assets that don't move in lockstep with the S&P 500, and gold has historically filled that role. Whether it continues to is a separate question.

From 1971 through 2024, stocks returned an average of 10.7% annually while gold averaged 7.9%, so gold has lagged equities over the long run even with 2025 and 2026 being strong years for the metal.

Wall Street's forecasts for gold vary widely. J.P. Morgan has projected gold reaching $6,300 by year-end 2026. Wells Fargo's range sits between $6,100 and $6,300.

Bank of America's own analysts have been more conservative, projecting closer to $5,000, and Goldman Sachs has landed near $4,900. RBC Capital Markets has gone further out, forecasting $6,500 by 2027.

The spread says more about how hard gold is to forecast than it does about any one bank's competence.

How a Gold IRA Actually Works

Since Bank of America won't set one up, here's the mechanical version of how it's done elsewhere.

1. Open a self-directed IRA with a custodian that specifically handles alternative assets. This is a different type of account than a standard brokerage IRA.
2. Fund it through a rollover from an existing 401(k) or IRA, or through a direct contribution within annual IRS limits.
3. Choose IRS-approved gold products. Not all coins qualify. American Gold Eagles, Canadian Gold Maple Leafs, and gold bars from an approved refiner at .995 fineness or better are typical examples. Collectible or numismatic coins generally don't qualify.
4. The custodian arranges shipment of the metal to an IRS-approved depository. You cannot store the gold at home or in a personal safe deposit box and keep the IRA's tax-advantaged status. This has tripped up more than one investor who assumed "self-directed" meant "self-stored."
5. Pay ongoing custodian and storage fees, typically billed annually rather than as a percentage of assets, which is different from how most mutual funds charge.

That last point matters more than people expect. A flat annual fee of $250 is nothing on a $500,000 account but a real drag on a $10,000 one.

Run the math before committing, and ask any custodian for a full fee schedule in writing rather than a verbal estimate.

Tax treatment works the same as any other IRA. A Traditional gold IRA lets you contribute pre-tax dollars, and you owe income tax when you eventually take distributions.

A Roth gold IRA uses after-tax contributions, and qualified withdrawals in retirement come out tax free. The 2026 contribution limit is $7,000 for people under 50 and $8,000 for those 50 and older, the same limits that apply to any other IRA type, gold or otherwise.

Required minimum distributions on a Traditional gold IRA can get complicated, since the IRS wants cash or a distributable asset, and selling off a chunk of physical bullion to satisfy an RMD isn't always as simple as selling a few shares of a mutual fund.

Some investors solve this by keeping a small cash sleeve inside the same self-directed account specifically to cover RMDs without forcing a metal sale at an inconvenient price.

Fees and Fine Print Worth Checking

A few line items tend to get glossed over in sales conversations, so ask about each of these directly:

Scams are a real risk in this corner of the industry. Several precious metals firms, including Regal Assets, Safeguard Metals, and Red Rock Secured, have faced enforcement actions or lawsuits over deceptive sales practices tied to gold IRAs.

 That doesn't mean the whole industry is bad, but check a custodian's regulatory history, read the fee schedule line by line, and be skeptical of anyone pushing urgency ("prices are about to spike, lock in now") as a sales tactic.

What About Bank of America's Own Products, Then?

If you're already a Bank of America or Merrill client and want to stay in-house while getting some exposure to gold, your realistic options are paper assets: gold mining stocks, gold ETFs like those tracking spot bullion prices, or mutual funds with commodity exposure.

These can sit inside a standard Merrill IRA with no special custodian needed. The tradeoff is you don't own physical metal and your investment is tied to the performance of a fund or company rather than the metal itself.

For some investors that's a feature, not a bug, since it avoids storage fees and liquidity headaches. For others, particularly those specifically drawn to gold as a hedge against a banking or currency crisis, paper gold defeats the purpose.

Bank of America does offer standard IRA CDs through the bank side, with terms ranging from a few months to ten years and a $1,000 minimum deposit on most products.

Current standard CD rates run well below what many online banks pay, so they're not typically the product driving someone toward a gold IRA search in the first place.

If you're weighing a gold IRA against simply parking retirement cash, compare actual APYs before assuming metal is the better inflation hedge, since the answer depends heavily on your time horizon and how much volatility you can tolerate.

One more thing worth flagging. Some marketing sites use a Bank of America gold IRA search purely as bait to route traffic toward a specific precious metals dealer they get paid to promote.

That doesn't automatically make the recommendation bad, but verify claims independently rather than taking a single site's word for it.

Check a firm's registration with the SEC or state regulators, look up complaints with the Better Business Bureau, and ask for references from clients who've completed an RMD or a full liquidation, not just an initial purchase.