Plan comparison

2026 Retirement Contribution Limits

Three plan types, three different ceilings, and an age band that changes all of them. The 2026 limits are $24,500 for a 401(k)-style plan, $7,500 for an IRA and $17,000 for a SIMPLE plan, before any catch-up is added.

The catch-up structure is where the rules stop being intuitive. A saver aged 60 to 63 gets a larger catch-up than someone aged 50 to 59, a provision that expires once they reach 64. This tool reports the total allowed in each age band rather than the catch-up alone.

Official 2026 figures used here

How to read the result

The 60-to-63 band is the newest wrinkle and the one most savers have not heard about. For 401(k)-style plans the catch-up rises from $8,000 to $11,250 inside that window, which adds $3,250 of tax-advantaged space for four years and then disappears entirely at 64. On a SIMPLE plan the same band allows $5,250 instead of $4,000.

An IRA has no equivalent step-up. Its catch-up is $1,100 from age 50 onward, so the IRA column in the table is flat above 50. That is one reason the gap between workplace plans and individual accounts widens sharply for older savers.

These are employee deferral limits, not total plan limits. An employer match or profit-sharing contribution sits outside the figures above and is governed by a separate overall ceiling, so a generous match can push total annual additions well past the deferral number without breaching any rule.

The limits are per person rather than per household, and they do not offset each other. Maxing a 401(k) does not reduce the IRA allowance, so a household with two earners and two workplace plans can shelter far more than the headline figures imply. A saver who changes jobs mid-year must also aggregate deferrals across both employers, because the limit follows the individual and not the payroll system.

A practical sequencing point: payroll systems enforce these limits automatically for a single employer, but they cannot see a second job. Someone with two employers in the same year can exceed the deferral limit without any single payroll department noticing, and the excess has to be corrected by the taxpayer rather than the employer. The same blindness applies at the age boundaries, where the applicable catch-up changes in the year a saver turns 50 or 60.

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