How to Fund a Roth IRA: Limits, Deadlines, and the Backdoor Route

To fund a Roth IRA in 2026, you need earned income, a modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) inside the IRS limits, and an account at a brokerage, bank, or credit union that you deposit into before the April 15 deadline. The standard contribution cap is $7,500, rising to $8,600 if you’re 50 or older.¹ Contributions for the 2025 tax year are due by April 15, 2026, and 2026 contributions by April 15, 2027. Below is what you need to check, in the order it matters.

Do You Qualify to Contribute?

Two things gate every Roth IRA contribution: earned income and MAGI.

Earned income means wages, salary, tips, self-employment income, or similar compensation from work. Investment income, rental income, and pension payments don’t qualify. Two less obvious sources do count: nontaxable combat pay for military members, and taxable alimony received under divorce agreements finalized before 2019.² Your contribution can’t exceed your earned income for the year, so someone who earned $3,000 can contribute $3,000, no more.

MAGI decides whether you get the full contribution, a reduced one, or none. The 2026 phase-out ranges:

Single or head of household: full contribution below $153,000 MAGI, reduced from $153,000 to $168,000, none at $168,000 or above.
Married filing jointly: full contribution below $242,000, reduced from $242,000 to $252,000, none at $252,000 or above.
Married filing separately: the phase-out runs from $0 to $10,000, which shuts out most filers in this status.³

These are higher than 2025, when the single phase-out started at $150,000 and the joint phase-out at $236,000.¹ If your income lands inside the phase-out band, use the worksheet in IRS Publication 590-A to calculate the reduced amount.

One useful exception: if you’re married filing jointly and one spouse has little or no earned income, the working spouse’s compensation can fund a Roth IRA for both of you. Each account still gets its own limit, so a couple where both are 50 or older could contribute up to $17,200 combined for 2026.⁴

How Much You Can Put In for 2026

The IRS raised the standard IRA contribution limit to $7,500 for 2026, up from $7,000 in 2024 and 2025. If you’re 50 or older at any point in the year, you can add a $1,100 catch-up contribution, for a total of $8,600.¹ SECURE 2.0’s enhanced catch-up for ages 60 through 63 applies to employer plans like 401(k)s, not to IRAs.

The cap is per person, not per account, and it covers your traditional and Roth IRAs combined. If you contribute $4,000 to a traditional IRA, you have $3,500 of Roth room left for the year.⁴ Going over triggers a 6% excise tax on the excess for every year it stays in the account.⁵

Opening the Account and Moving Money In

Most brokerages, banks, and credit unions offer Roth IRAs. The application asks for your Social Security number, government-issued ID, and employment information, and it usually takes under 15 minutes online. You’ll name beneficiaries during setup.

Once the account exists, you have a few ways to fund it:

Electronic transfer from a linked checking or savings account, typically settling in two to three business days.
A check payable to the custodian with your account number on the memo line.
A direct rollover from an employer plan like a 401(k). Rolling pre-tax money into a Roth creates taxable income for that year, so plan for the tax hit before initiating.

Here is where a lot of savers stall: the money lands in a settlement or money market fund that earns almost nothing. You have to actively invest it in the stocks, bonds, funds, or other options your custodian offers. A deposit is not an investment.

Assets You Can’t Hold Inside an IRA

Federal law bans life insurance contracts inside any IRA.⁶ Collectibles are also prohibited: artwork, antiques, rugs, gems, stamps, most coins (narrow exceptions exist for certain government-minted coins), and alcoholic beverages. Buying a prohibited collectible through your IRA gets treated as a distribution of the purchase price, with the associated tax and possible penalty.⁷

The Deadlines That Actually Matter

You have until the tax filing deadline to make a contribution for the prior year. For the 2025 tax year, that means April 15, 2026. For 2026, it’s April 15, 2027.⁸ April 15, 2026 is a Wednesday, so no weekend shift applies.

Filing a tax extension does not extend the IRA contribution deadline. Even if you push your return to October, your contribution cutoff stays at April 15.⁸ Miss it and that year’s contribution room is gone for good.

From January 1 through April 15, you can make contributions for either the current year, the prior year, or both, up to each year’s separate limit. When you deposit during that window, your custodian will ask which tax year the contribution applies to. If you don’t specify, most default to the current year. Answer the question deliberately.

If Your Income Is Too High: The Backdoor Route

Earning above the phase-out doesn’t lock you out of a Roth entirely. The backdoor strategy is a two-step move that high earners have used for years:

Make a nondeductible contribution of up to $7,500 (or $8,600 if 50 or older) to a traditional IRA, which has no income limit. You get no deduction on the way in.
Convert that traditional IRA balance to your Roth IRA. Do it promptly, because any investment gains between the contribution and the conversion become taxable.
File Form 8606 with your tax return to report both the nondeductible contribution and the conversion. Skipping this form costs $50 and makes it harder to prove your basis later.⁹

Watch the Pro-Rata Rule

The backdoor works cleanly only if you have no other traditional IRA money. If you already hold pre-tax or deductible balances in any traditional IRA, the IRS won’t let you convert only the after-tax dollars. Every converted dollar is treated as a proportional mix of pre-tax and after-tax money across all your traditional IRAs combined.¹⁰

Say you have $80,000 of pre-tax traditional IRA money and add a $7,500 nondeductible contribution. Your combined traditional IRA balance is $87,500, of which only about 8.6% is after-tax. Convert $7,500 and roughly $6,857 of it is taxable. The common workaround is to roll existing pre-tax IRA balances into an employer 401(k) first, if the plan accepts them, which leaves only the nondeductible contribution behind for a clean conversion.¹¹

Fixing an Overcontribution

Overcontributions happen when income fluctuates through the year and pushes you into or past the phase-out band after you’ve already deposited money. You have until the tax filing deadline, including extensions, to pull the excess out and avoid the 6% penalty. For a 2026 excess, that means roughly mid-October 2027 with an extension.¹²

When you withdraw an excess on time, you also have to remove the earnings attributable to it. Your custodian calculates that figure based on the account’s performance while the excess was there. If the account lost money, the amount coming out may be less than you put in. The earnings portion counts as taxable income for the year you made the excess contribution. Under SECURE 2.0, the 10% early withdrawal penalty no longer applies to those earnings even if you’re under 59½.

Miss the correction window and the 6% excise tax hits for every year the excess stays in the account.⁵ You can still stop the bleeding by withdrawing the excess without the earnings calculation, or by contributing less than the maximum the following year and letting the unused room absorb the overage. The second approach is easier when the excess is small.

1
Internal Revenue Service. 401(k) Limit Increases to $24,500 for 2026, IRA Limit Increases to $7,500
2
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 590-A (2025), Contributions to Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs)
3
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 408A – Roth IRAs
4
Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Topics – IRA Contribution Limits
5
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 590-A (2025), Contributions to Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs) – Section: Excess Contributions
6
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 408 – Individual Retirement Accounts
7
Internal Revenue Service. Investments in Collectibles in Individually Directed Qualified Plan Accounts
8
Internal Revenue Service. Traditional and Roth IRAs
9
Internal Revenue Service. Instructions for Form 8606
10
Internal Revenue Service. Rollovers of After-Tax Contributions in Retirement Plans
11
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 590-A (2025), Contributions to Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs)
12
Internal Revenue Service. IRA Year-End Reminders