Who Can Invest in a Roth IRA: Income Limits and Age Rules

Roth IRA eligibility rules come down to two tests: you need earned income from work, and your modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) must fall below IRS thresholds that depend on your filing status. For 2026, a single filer can make a full contribution with MAGI under $153,000, and a married couple filing jointly can make a full contribution with combined MAGI under $242,000. Meet both tests and you can put in up to $7,500 for the year, or $8,600 if you are 50 or older.

You Need Earned Income From Work

The first requirement is compensation from actual work. The IRS counts wages, salaries, tips, commissions, professional fees, and net self-employment earnings after deducting one-half of self-employment tax.¹ Taxable alimony under a divorce decree executed before 2019 also counts; alimony under agreements signed after that is no longer taxable and does not qualify.

Plenty of income does not count. Interest, dividends, capital gains, rental income, pension payments, annuity distributions, Social Security benefits, unemployment compensation, and deferred compensation all fail the test.² If every dollar you receive is from investments or retirement benefits, you cannot contribute to a Roth IRA no matter how large that income is. Early retirees living off a portfolio run into this often.

2026 Income Limits by Filing Status

Even with earned income, your MAGI decides whether you can make a full contribution, a partial one, or none. The IRS adjusts these thresholds each year for inflation. For the 2026 tax year:³

Single or head of household: full contribution below $153,000, reduced between $153,000 and $168,000, none at $168,000 or above.
Married filing jointly: full contribution below $242,000, reduced between $242,000 and $252,000, none at $252,000 or above.
Married filing separately (if you lived with your spouse at any time during the year): reduced between $0 and $10,000, none at $10,000 or above.

Inside a phase-out range, your allowed contribution shrinks proportionally. Take the amount your MAGI exceeds the lower threshold, divide by the width of the range ($15,000 for single filers, $10,000 for joint filers and those married filing separately), and that fraction reduces your maximum contribution.⁴ The married-filing-separately rule is unusually harsh and catches couples off guard, since even modest income eliminates eligibility.

How To Calculate Your MAGI

For most people, MAGI equals the adjusted gross income (AGI) on line 11 of Form 1040. The distinction only matters if you claimed certain deductions or exclusions the IRS wants added back. Those include any traditional IRA deduction, student loan interest deduction, excluded foreign earned income, excluded savings bond interest, employer-provided adoption benefits, and any foreign housing deduction or exclusion.⁵ You subtract any income from converting a traditional IRA to a Roth or rolling a qualified plan into one, so a conversion itself will not push you over the limit.

How Much You Can Contribute in 2026

If you are under 50, the ceiling is $7,500. If you are 50 or older by the end of the year, a $1,100 catch-up raises it to $8,600.⁶ Both figures are up from the 2025 limits of $7,000 and $8,000.

Two other caps apply. Your contribution can never exceed your actual earned income for the year, so a $4,000 earner is capped at $4,000 even though the IRS limit is higher.² And the annual limit applies across all your traditional and Roth IRAs combined; you cannot put $7,500 into each.

Spousal Contributions for a Non-Working Spouse

A non-working spouse can still contribute based on their partner’s earnings, provided the couple files a joint return. Each spouse can contribute up to the full annual limit, but total combined contributions cannot exceed joint taxable compensation.² The account belongs to the non-working spouse individually; there is no joint IRA.

If one spouse earns $80,000 and the other earns nothing, both can put in up to $7,500 each in 2026 (assuming both are under 50), for $15,000 in household retirement savings. The couple’s combined MAGI still has to sit inside the married-filing-jointly range.

Roth IRAs for Minors With Earned Income

Children of any age can have a Roth IRA if they have their own earned income. A summer job, babysitting money, or freelance work all qualify. The account is opened as a custodial Roth IRA, with a parent or guardian managing it until the minor reaches adulthood (age 18 or 21, depending on the state).

The contribution limit is the lesser of the child’s earned income or the standard annual cap. A 16-year-old who earned $3,200 babysitting is capped at $3,200, not $7,500.² The money going in does not have to be the exact dollars the child earned. A parent can fund the account with their own money up to the amount the child earned.

Age and Residency

There is no maximum age for Roth IRA contributions. The SECURE Act removed the old age-70½ cutoff that applied to traditional IRAs, so an 85-year-old with consulting income can still contribute.²

You generally need to be a U.S. citizen or resident alien with a Social Security number or Individual Taxpayer Identification Number. If you work abroad and use the foreign earned income exclusion, you must add the excluded amount back when measuring your compensation for IRA purposes.⁷ In practice, excluding all your foreign earnings can leave you with zero qualifying compensation for a Roth even though you earned plenty overseas.

Backdoor Roth IRA When Your Income Is Too High

If your MAGI exceeds the phase-out, you cannot contribute directly, but conversions have no income limit. A backdoor Roth is a two-step move: contribute to a traditional IRA (nondeductible contributions have no income cap), then convert those funds to a Roth.⁴

The trap is the pro-rata rule. The IRS treats all your traditional, SEP, and SIMPLE IRA balances as a single pool when calculating the taxable portion of a conversion. With $95,000 in pretax traditional IRA money and a $5,000 nondeductible contribution, converting that $5,000 makes 95% of the conversion ($4,750) taxable. The strategy is cleanest when your pretax IRA balance is zero. Rolling existing traditional IRA funds into a workplace 401(k), if your plan accepts them, can clear that obstacle.

File IRS Form 8606 for each year you make nondeductible contributions or convert funds, so your cost basis is on record.⁸ Skipping it does not change what you owe, but it makes it harder to prove what you already paid tax on.

Contribution Deadlines

You can make a contribution for a given tax year anytime between January 1 of that year and the tax filing deadline the following April, typically April 15. A 2026 contribution can go in as late as April 15, 2027. Filing an extension does not extend the IRA deadline. When you contribute between January and April, confirm your broker recorded it for the correct tax year, since deposits during that window could apply to either.

Penalties for Excess Contributions

Contributing more than allowed, whether because your income was too high or you exceeded the dollar cap, triggers a 6% excise tax on the excess amount for every year it stays in the account.⁹ The penalty compounds until you fix it. A $7,500 excess costs $450 per year in penalties alone.

Two ways to correct it:

Withdraw the excess and any earnings it generated by the due date of your return, including extensions. The IRS then treats the contribution as though it never happened. You owe income tax on the earnings, plus a 10% early withdrawal penalty on those earnings if you are under 59½.¹⁰
Apply the excess to a future year if you will be eligible to contribute then. You still owe the 6% penalty for the year of the excess, but the meter stops after that.

Missed the original deadline but caught it within six months? You can still withdraw the excess and file an amended return with “Filed pursuant to section 301.9100-2” written at the top.¹⁰

1
eCFR. 26 CFR 1.408A-3 – Contributions to Roth IRAs
2
Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Topics – IRA Contribution Limits
3
Internal Revenue Service. 401(k) Limit Increases to $24,500 for 2026, IRA Limit Increases to $7,500
4
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 408A – Roth IRAs
5
Internal Revenue Service. Modified Adjusted Gross Income
6
Internal Revenue Service. 2026 Amounts Relating to Retirement Plans and IRAs, as Adjusted for Changes in Cost-of-Living (Notice 2025-67)
7
Internal Revenue Service. Individual Retirement Arrangements
8
Internal Revenue Service. 2025 Instructions for Form 8606
9
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 4973 – Tax on Excess Contributions to Certain Tax-Favored Accounts and Annuities
10
Internal Revenue Service. Instructions for Form 5329 (2025)