Roth IRA Calculator

A Roth IRA is funded with money you have already paid tax on, and qualified withdrawals come out entirely tax free — no tax on the contributions, and none on decades of growth. The price of that deal is an income test, and this calculator runs the exact test the IRS publishes in Publication 590-A, Worksheet 2-2. Start with the nominal limit. For 2026 it is $7,500, plus a $1,100 catch-up if you are 50 or older at the end of the tax year, giving $8,600. For 2025 the figures are $7,000 and $1,000. That nominal limit is then cut to your taxable compensation if you earned less — you cannot contribute more than you were paid for working, and investment income does not count as compensation. Next comes modified adjusted gross income, and the band you land in depends entirely on filing status. For 2026, a single filer (or head of household) contributes in full below $153,000, contributes a reduced amount between $153,000 and $168,000, and is shut out at $168,000 or above. Married filing jointly, the band runs from $242,000 to $252,000. For 2025 the corresponding bands are $150,000–$165,000 single and $236,000–$246,000 joint. The third status is the one that catches people: married filing separately while living with your spouse at any point in the year. That band is $0 to $10,000 and it has never been indexed for inflation. It means essentially any earned income at all puts you inside the phase-out, and $10,000 of MAGI ends eligibility outright. If you filed separately but lived apart from your spouse for the entire year, you use the single band instead. Inside a band, the arithmetic is not a smooth straight line. The worksheet computes how far through the band your MAGI sits, rounds that fraction to three decimal places, applies the remainder to your compensation-adjusted limit, and then rounds the resulting dollar figure UP to the next $10. There is also a $200 floor: as long as your MAGI is below the top of the band, you may contribute at least $200 no matter how close to the ceiling you are. So a taxpayer $50 under the upper boundary is not entitled to some trivial $20 — they are entitled to $200, and then to nothing at all one dollar later. That step-down is the non-obvious part, and it is deliberate in the regulation rather than a rounding artefact. Finally, the limit is shared. Anything you have already put into a traditional IRA for the same tax year is subtracted, because the dollar limit is an aggregate across all your IRAs, not per account. Two accounts do not buy you two limits. The projection side is simpler. It takes your allowed annual contribution, spreads it across twelve equal end-of-month deposits, and compounds your starting balance at one-twelfth of the nominal annual return you enter, using the closed-form future-value expression rather than looping — the same model behind the SEC’s Investor.gov compound-interest tool. It assumes you contribute the same amount every year, which is conservative if the limits keep rising and optimistic if your income later pushes you out of the band. If your income does exceed the ceiling, deductibility rules and the traditional-versus-Roth trade-off are handled by the IRA calculator; to see the same growth mechanics without the eligibility test, use the compound interest calculator.