Augusta Precious Metals Product Catalog: The Whole Menu, Mapped

Augusta Precious Metals’ catalog holds about a dozen products across two metals, gold and silver, split into a bullion tier and a premium tier. Not four metals, not a graded back catalog, not a rotating series of exclusive mint releases. Just that short list, and the tier a product sits in matters more than which of the dozen you pick.

I spent years administering third party retirement plans, and the accounts that produced the fewest unpleasant surprises were the ones whose holdings could be listed on an index card. A narrow catalog is a feature for a retirement buyer, because it is auditable. You can hold the whole thing in your head, price every line of it in an afternoon, and detect the one decision inside it that actually moves money.

This file maps the catalog product by product, marks which tier each product sits in, and then spends most of its length on the part the map cannot show you: what the menu costs, what Augusta pointedly does not stock, and where the fork is.

The one decision inside the menu

Choosing between an American Gold Eagle and a Canadian Maple Leaf is a rounding decision. Both are one ounce of gold, both are IRA-eligible, both quote within a few premium points of each other on any given morning, and the cheaper one on the day is the right one.

Choosing between the bullion tier and the premium tier is the decision that determines your outcome. A standard bullion coin carries a thin, checkable spread over melt value. A premium product carries a markup priced on scarcity, packaging, or distribution, and a buyback desk will value it as metal on the way out. The premium coins file works that arithmetic in dollars. Read the tier column in the tables below as the only column that changes your result by more than a percent or two.

The gold menu

The American Gold Eagle is worth one line of explanation, because its purity looks wrong against the rule. Gold in an IRA must generally be .995 fine or better, and the Eagle is 22 karat at 91.67 percent. It qualifies anyway because Congress wrote it into the statute by name at 26 U.S.C. 408(m)(3). The alloy makes the coin harder and more durable than a .9999 piece, and it still contains a full troy ounce of gold. The full eligibility picture sits in the gold coins list.

The silver menu

Silver behaves differently from gold inside the same catalog, and the difference is physical rather than philosophical. Silver premiums run proportionally higher because minting, shipping, and storing a given dollar value of silver takes far more handling than the same dollar value of gold. A $50,000 silver position is a pallet problem; a $50,000 gold position fits in a shoebox. That drives the sensible product split on the silver side: bars for tonnage where premiums are thinnest, sovereign coins in the quantity you might want to distribute or sell in pieces.

What Augusta deliberately does not stock

Omissions tell you more about a dealer than the catalog does, because every category a dealer declines to carry is a category its sales floor cannot steer you into.

Platinum and palladium. Both are IRA-eligible at .9995 fineness under 26 U.S.C. 408(m)(3), and Augusta carries neither. If platinum-group exposure is part of your plan, this dealer cannot serve it.

Graded and slabbed numismatics as a business line. There is no back catalog of certified rarities here, which removes a category of documented abuse from the building. Enforcement in this sector runs overwhelmingly through graded coins sold on grade and story rather than metal. The lawsuit and enforcement file covers what that history looks like at other firms.

Junk silver and sub-purity classics. Pre-1965 U.S. 90 percent silver coinage, South African Krugerrands, pre-1933 U.S. gold. None clears the fineness floor for an IRA, and Augusta does not run them as a retail sideline either.

Fractional-heavy programs. Half-ounce, quarter-ounce, and tenth-ounce coins carry materially higher premiums per ounce. They exist in the market with legitimate uses, but a catalog built around them would cost a retirement buyer real money.

What remains after those exclusions is a list of about a dozen products. That is the point of it.

The same coin, two different sets of rules

Almost every product above can be bought two ways, and the two ways are not variations on one transaction. They are separate legal arrangements that happen to involve the same piece of metal.

The rule that catches people is possession. Metal inside an IRA has to stay with the trustee under 26 U.S.C. 408(m)(3); metal that arrives at your house from an IRA is a distribution valued at fair market value, taxed as ordinary income and carrying a 10 percent penalty before age 59½, per Publication 590-B. The arrangements that market a way around this are covered in the home storage file.

, Distributions from Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs) (irs.gov), captured September 6, 2026.”)

The practical failure mode is quieter than a rule violation: a rollover discussion drifts into a cash purchase of premium product without the buyer registering that the venue changed. Same representative, same company, different paperwork, no custodian screen. A second transaction gets decided on momentum borrowed from the first.

What holding any of it costs

Product choice does not move the running cost of the wrapper. Every line in both tables above sits inside the same fee structure:

That comes to $285 in the first year and $235 annually after, with waivers available on qualifying balances, itemized on the fees page. A 25 percent markup on a $50,000 premium order costs about $10,000, more than forty years of the annual fee buyers spend most of their research time comparing. The published costs are the ones everyone checks. The unpublished one decides the outcome.

The waiver, quoted by phone rather than published, decides which column below applies to a given $50,000 account:

Get the waiver terms in writing before funding; do not assume the favorable column applies.

Choose the bullion tier if you want the lowest checkable cost per ounce, plan to hold to distribution rather than trade, and are comfortable a buyback desk will price the metal near melt on the way out. Sovereign one-ounce coins and accredited bars both clear this bar; the cheaper quote on the day is the right pick.

Choose the premium tier if you have a specific reason to value scarcity or a particular issue over cost, and you have priced that reason against the premium coins markup in dollars rather than the story attached to the coin. For most retirement buyers this tier is a smaller allocation, if any, alongside a bullion core.

How the menu compares to the other majors

Two readings of that table are both fair. A buyer who wants four metals and a $10,000 entry point is not an Augusta buyer, and no amount of conduct quality changes that. A buyer who wants the shortest menu, the cleanest complaint record, and representatives who are not paid per sale is looking at the reason the $50,000 minimum survives. The complaint figures are verifiable at the BBB profile and cross-checked against Trustpilot and ConsumerAffairs; the detail sits in the complaints file.

What this page cannot tell you

It cannot tell you today’s premium on any product listed above. Premiums move with spot price, mint supply, and order size, and no dealer in this sector publishes a live premium schedule. The number arrives on your itemized quote, which is why the pricing file treats the quote as the real catalog.

It cannot confirm that every product named here is in stock this week; sovereign mint allocations run short periodically, and a coin available in January can be on backorder in March.

It cannot tell you whether a specific premium product is IRA-eligible. Eligibility turns on the exact issue, its fineness, and whether the pricing basis leans collectible, a facts-and-circumstances question for a tax professional reading the actual invoice.

It cannot tell you how much of any of this belongs in your retirement, a question answered, and deliberately refused, in the portfolio construction file.

Verifying the catalog yourself

1. Ask for the current product list in writing, with fineness and mint named for each line.
2. Ask for the quoted premium over spot as a percentage, not a dollar figure. Percentages stay comparable across days; dollar quotes go stale in an hour.
3. Ask which listed products are offered inside the IRA and which are cash purchases only, in writing.
4. Ask for the melt value of the exact metal weight in each quote at today’s spot.
5. Ask for the buyback estimate on each product, as a percentage of melt. The gap between the purchase premium and the buyback percentage is your round-trip cost.
6. Price one bullion product and one premium product on the same call, same dollar amount. Two quotes side by side make the tier fork visible.
7. Confirm the custodian and depository named for anything entering the account, then match the first statement line by line against the invoice.
8. Wait a day. Metal is not perishable, and urgency attached to a catalog item is sales technique rather than market condition.

Steps four and five take five minutes and settle questions that angry reviews written three years later cannot un-settle.

Failure modes

Treating catalog breadth as a quality signal. A longer menu is not a better dealer; it is more surface area for a sales conversation, and most of the extra surface sits in the premium tier.

Reading IRA-eligible as an endorsement of price. The statute sets a fineness floor and says nothing about markups. Eligible and expensive coexist comfortably.

Buying fractional coins for an IRA. Higher premium per ounce, no offsetting benefit inside a wrapper where the metal is held at a depository and never handled.

Letting the rollover call become a cash purchase. Different transaction, different protections, same friendly voice. Finish one before opening the other.

Choosing silver by dollar amount rather than handling cost. Silver’s premium and bulk scale with the position; a large silver allocation is a different logistics problem than the same dollars in gold.

Funding premium purchases with fresh contributions. Contributions are capped under the IRS contribution limits and Publication 590-A; rollovers and trustee-to-trustee transfers carry no dollar cap under the IRS rollovers guidance. Spending capped contribution room on markup is the most expensive money in the transaction.

Ignoring what distribution will look like. Required minimum distributions from traditional accounts begin at 73, per Publication 590-B. An account holding one large bar is harder to distribute in pieces than an account holding coins, a catalog decision made years earlier.

What to keep on file

The written product list you were quoted, with fineness and mint per line. The itemized quote showing spot reference, melt value, and premium per item. The buyback estimate given at purchase, as a percentage of melt. The invoice naming product, mint, mint year, fineness, and weight. The custodian statement for the first period, matched against the invoice. A note of which products were discussed as cash purchases rather than IRA holdings, and on what date.

Keep the melt figure at the top of that stack. Years from now it is the only document establishing what you actually bought, not what you were told you were buying.

Verdict

The catalog is short on purpose, and the shortness is the strongest thing about it. Two metals, roughly a dozen products, no graded back catalog, and a clean separation between the bullion tier and the premium tier. A buyer who stays inside the bullion tier is buying metal at a checkable spread from a dealer with no formal complaints on either bureau.

The menu’s limits are real and should be stated plainly: no platinum, no palladium, a $50,000 minimum that excludes most first-time buyers, and a premium tier that carries the same arithmetic handicap it carries everywhere else in this sector. Map the catalog, pick from the bullion rows, get the melt figure in writing, and the rest of the decision belongs to the portfolio construction file rather than to a product list.

Related files: pricing · fees · premium coins · gold eligibility list · silver eligibility list · account types · pros and cons