An executive order signed April 30, 2026, sets a fixed ceiling on what a private company can charge to run a retirement account listed on a new federal comparison site: 0.15 percent of assets, covering every operating cost, management fee, and administrative expense combined. The site, TrumpIRA.gov, is due from the Treasury Department by January 1, 2027, meant to steer workers with no employer plan toward accounts that clear that bar. Roughly 41 million workers between ages 18 and 65 currently have no employer retirement plan, and the same order ties a separate $1,000 annual match to accounts meeting the identical fee standard.
The 0.15 Percent Net-Expense Ceiling, Defined
The cap covers one combined figure rather than a set of separate line items. The executive order directs that any IRA listed on TrumpIRA.gov maintain an overall net-expense ratio — operating costs, management fees, and administrative expenses added together — no higher than .15 percent of assets. That structure closes an obvious workaround: a provider cannot keep its stated management fee low while burying the real cost in a separate administrative charge, because both count against the same ceiling. The requirement applies to the listing standard itself, not to IRAs generally, so accounts that exceed the threshold remain legal; they simply will not appear on the federal comparison site.
Cost is only one of three qualifying tests. To be listed, an account must also offer an investment menu built around target-date, life-cycle, or balanced fund options, or funds designed to protect principal on an ongoing basis, and cannot carry a minimum-contribution or minimum-balance requirement, a provision aimed squarely at part-time and lower-income workers who might otherwise be priced out of an account entirely. Treasury, not Congress, is left to determine which institutions meet all three tests before the January 1, 2027 deadline arrives.
The design has a practical effect on which providers show up. A .15 percent net-expense ratio is a compressed number for a full-service IRA — one that has to cover fund management, account administration, and any platform costs inside a single combined line — so the criterion functions as a screen as much as a disclosure requirement. Providers willing to operate at that rate gain access to a federally run comparison list and, by extension, to the pool of workers eligible for the Saver’s Match; providers unwilling to meet it will not appear on TrumpIRA.gov, regardless of the IRA business they already run elsewhere.
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The Federal Saver’s Match Rides on the Same Standard
The fee cap is wired directly into who receives a separate federal subsidy. Under the order, any individual who contributes to a qualifying IRA — one listed on TrumpIRA.gov because it meets the fee, menu, and minimum-balance tests — is entitled to a Federal Saver’s Match contribution of up to $1,000 a year, authorized under 26 U.S.C. 6433 as part of the bipartisan SECURE 2.0 Act. Treasury is directed to take the steps necessary to ensure eligible contributors actually receive that match and to encourage financial institutions to accept the payments on savers’ behalf.
The administration’s own modeling shows why the combination is built to compound rather than simply subsidize a single year of saving. A 25-year-old low-income worker contributing roughly $165 a month, who also qualifies for the full annual match, could accumulate close to $465,000 by age 65 at a 6 percent rate of return, with close to $155,000 of that total traceable to the match contributions rather than the worker’s own savings. That is a projection built into the announcement, not a guarantee tied to any individual account, and it assumes uninterrupted contributions and a steady return over four decades.
The match program predates this order by several years — SECURE 2.0 created it in 2022 — but the administration argues it has gone underused because too few eligible savers know it exists or have an easy way to open a qualifying account. Roughly 49 million full-time workers and 14 million part-time workers currently receive no employer match of any kind on their retirement contributions, a gap the order frames as the core problem TrumpIRA.gov is meant to close.
What the Executive Order Leaves for Treasury to Settle
Two pieces of the framework exist only as instructions to write rules later, not as rules already in force. Section 5 of the order tells the Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of Labor to issue regulations, exemptions, or guidance keeping listed IRAs from engaging in prohibited transactions under federal tax law, and Section 4 tells Treasury and the IRS to clarify how charitable organizations can contribute to a worker’s IRA without losing their own tax-exempt status. Neither piece of guidance had been published as of this writing, meaning the worker-protection backbone of the platform is still being written even as the January 1 launch date approaches.
The order also does not, by itself, make TrumpIRA.gov permanent. Section 6 directs the Treasury Secretary to prepare legislative recommendations that would codify the framework into statute, an acknowledgment that, absent an act of Congress, the platform exists only as long as the current administration chooses to maintain it. The order is equally silent on which financial institutions currently satisfy the .15 percent ceiling, leaving Treasury to identify and publish that list before the comparison function the site is built around can work at all.
That leaves a four-month gap between now and the deadline in which the single number defining the entire initiative, .15 percent, has to move from a legal ceiling written into an executive order to a working filter applied against real financial institutions’ fee disclosures. Whether TrumpIRA.gov opens on schedule with a working list of qualifying accounts, or opens later than planned while Treasury finishes the underlying rulemaking, is the open question the order itself does not answer.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by The Money Overview editorial team.
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