What Happens If You Exceed the Roth IRA Income Limit?

If you contribute to a Roth IRA when your income is over the IRS limit, the money you shouldn’t have put in becomes an excess contribution, and the IRS charges a 6% excise tax on it every year it stays in the account. You have three ways out: withdraw the excess plus its earnings before your tax deadline, recharacterize the contribution as a Traditional IRA contribution, or leave that year alone and use a backdoor Roth strategy going forward. This is what happens if you exceed the Roth IRA income limit, and how each fix works.

The 2026 Income Cutoffs

Whether you’ve actually exceeded the limit depends on your modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) and filing status. For 2026, the phase-out ranges are:¹

Single or head of household: $153,000 to $168,000. No contribution allowed above $168,000.
Married filing jointly: $242,000 to $252,000. No contribution allowed above $252,000.
Married filing separately, if you lived with your spouse at any point during the year: $0 to $10,000. No contribution allowed above $10,000.

Below the bottom of your range, you can contribute the full $7,500 (or $8,600 if you’re 50 or older). Inside the range, your allowed contribution is reduced on a sliding scale. Above the top, you can’t contribute directly at all, and anything you put in is an excess contribution.

The 6% Penalty and How Long It Lasts

The IRS charges a 6% excise tax each year on excess amounts still sitting in the account at year-end.² The penalty is capped at 6% of your total IRA value at year-end, but it repeats every year the excess remains.

Contribute the full $7,500 while ineligible and leave it there, and you owe $450 for that year, $450 the next year, and so on. You report and pay the tax on Form 5329, filed with your regular return.³ Skipping the excise tax can bring interest and late-payment penalties on top of the 6%.

The excess can also be absorbed later without a formal withdrawal. If you contribute less than the maximum in a future year, the unused room offsets the earlier excess. Once the excess no longer remains at year-end, the 6% stops running, but you still owe it for every year it was there.⁴

Fix 1: Withdraw the Excess Before Your Tax Deadline

The cleanest fix is to pull the excess contribution out of the account before your tax filing deadline, including extensions. Withdraw in time, and the IRS treats the contribution as if it never happened, and no 6% tax applies.³

You have to take out more than just the money you put in. Any investment gain or loss the excess generated while it sat in the account, called the net income attributable (NIA), comes out with it. Your brokerage runs the NIA calculation using an IRS formula that compares the account’s value before and after the contribution.⁴

The returned contribution itself is tax-free. The NIA is taxable as ordinary income in the year the original contribution was made. If you’re under 59½, the NIA also gets hit with the 10% early distribution penalty; the exception for returned contributions covers the contribution but not the earnings on it.⁵

Already filed on time without pulling the money out? You still have a window. You can make the withdrawal within six months of the original filing deadline (extensions don’t count for this) and file an amended return with “Filed pursuant to section 301.9100-2” written at the top. Include the NIA on the amended return along with an amended Form 5329 showing the excess is gone.³

Fix 2: Recharacterize to a Traditional IRA

Instead of withdrawing the money, you can tell your brokerage to recharacterize the contribution as a Traditional IRA contribution. The IRS then treats the deposit as if it had gone into the Traditional account from the start. Traditional IRAs have no income-based eligibility limit on contributions, so the excess problem disappears.⁶

The recharacterization has to be done by your tax filing deadline, including extensions. The original contribution plus all attributable earnings or losses moves to the Traditional IRA; your financial institution runs the math. You then report the recharacterization on your tax return.⁶

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 ended recharacterization of Roth conversions, but recharacterization of regular Roth contributions is still allowed. One reason to prefer this route over a straight withdrawal: your money stays inside a retirement account. The Traditional IRA contribution may even be deductible depending on income and workplace-plan coverage, and if it isn’t, it becomes the starting point for a backdoor Roth.

Fix 3: Use a Backdoor Roth Conversion Going Forward

If your income permanently keeps you out of a Roth IRA, the backdoor strategy is how high earners get money into one anyway. You contribute to a Traditional IRA on a nondeductible (after-tax) basis, then convert those funds to a Roth. Neither step has an income limit.

Step one: make a nondeductible Traditional IRA contribution, up to $7,500 for 2026, or $8,600 if you’re 50 or older.¹ Step two: once it settles, request a Roth conversion through your brokerage. Most complete the transfer online within a few business days.

You file Form 8606 with your tax return to track the nondeductible basis in your Traditional IRA and calculate how much of the conversion is taxable.⁷ If you contributed only nondeductible dollars and converted before any real growth, the taxable amount should be close to zero.

Watch the Pro-Rata Rule

The backdoor is clean only if the nondeductible contribution is the sole money in your Traditional IRA world. If you also hold pre-tax funds in any Traditional, SEP, or SIMPLE IRA, the IRS treats every one of those accounts as a single combined pool at conversion time. You can’t pick which dollars move.⁷

The pro-rata rule sets the taxable share of your conversion based on the ratio of nondeductible contributions to the total balance across all those IRAs. Say you have $90,000 of pre-tax money from old rollovers and add a $10,000 nondeductible contribution. The combined balance is $100,000, of which 10% is nondeductible. Convert $10,000, and only $1,000 comes over tax-free; the other $9,000 is taxable income.

Before running a backdoor conversion, pull statements for every Traditional, SEP, and SIMPLE IRA in your name and check the tax hit. If your employer’s 401(k) accepts incoming rollovers, one workaround is to move pre-tax IRA money into the 401(k) first, leaving only the nondeductible dollars behind for a clean conversion.

If You’re Permanently Over the Limit, Look at Your 401(k)

Employer plans don’t have income-based eligibility limits, and the numbers are much larger. The 2026 elective deferral limit for a 401(k) or 403(b) is $24,500, with an extra $8,000 catch-up at age 50 and older.¹ If your plan offers a Roth 401(k), you can make after-tax contributions that grow tax-free with no income cap on participation, which sidesteps the backdoor process entirely.

1
Internal Revenue Service. 401(k) Limit Increases to $24,500 for 2026, IRA Limit Increases to $7,500
2
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 U.S.C. 4973 – Tax on Excess Contributions to Certain Tax-Favored Accounts and Annuities
3
Internal Revenue Service. Instructions for Form 5329 (2025)
4
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 590-A (2025), Contributions to Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs)
5
Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Topics – Exceptions to Tax on Early Distributions
6
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 U.S.C. 408A – Roth IRAs
7
Internal Revenue Service. Instructions for Form 8606 (2025)