IRAs Hold $17 Trillion — and Offer Spouses Zero Federal Protection
The debate over spousal consent in 401(k) plans tends to overshadow a quieter but equally significant gap in the retirement protection system: Individual Retirement Accounts are entirely outside the federal spousal consent framework, and they’re bigger than the entire defined contribution plan market.
According to figures cited in a March 2026 GAO report on spousal retirement protections, IRAs held $17 trillion in assets at the end of 2024, compared to $12 trillion across all defined contribution plans. The Investment Company Institute found that as of mid-2024, 59 percent of traditional IRA-owning households said their accounts contained rollovers from employer-sponsored plans — meaning a large share of IRA wealth originated in workplace plans that may have had spousal protections, and then lost those protections the moment the funds were transferred.
The Rollover Loophole
This is perhaps the most structurally significant gap in the current system. Under federal law, when a participant rolls funds from a defined contribution plan into an IRA, all spousal consent protections that applied to those funds cease to apply. The REA “safe harbor” provisions — the carve-out that exempts most 401(k)s from spousal consent requirements — also specify that there is no spousal consent requirement for rollovers from REA safe harbor plans.
In practical terms: a participant whose 401(k) doesn’t require spousal consent can roll their balance into an IRA without restriction. Once in the IRA, the funds are governed only by the terms of the IRA itself and any applicable state law. Federal spousal consent protections do not follow the money.
For the relatively small number of plans that do require spousal consent — money purchase plans, target benefit plans, and the TSP — a participant who separates from their employer and rolls over to an IRA similarly exits the federal consent framework, though those rollovers may have their own procedural requirements.
How Often Does Fund Removal Happen with IRAs Included?
The GAO analyzed the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances data both with and without IRAs. The results illustrate the scale of the gap. Among married households with at least one 401(k)-type account, roughly 11 percent removed funds in 2021. When IRAs are included in the analysis, the proportion of married households with any retirement account rises to 69 percent (from 49 percent), and the share that removed funds jumps to 22 percent.
The demographic picture also shifts. Including IRAs, the husband was the sole account holder in about 34 percent of married households, compared to 49 percent for defined contribution accounts alone. Women are more likely to hold IRAs than workplace plans — suggesting IRAs make retirement savings somewhat more accessible to women — though women’s median balances remain lower than men’s even when IRAs are included ($70,000 versus $101,000).
State Law Fills Some Gaps, But Inconsistently
IRAs are not entirely unregulated at the state level. Community property states — Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin — apply marital property rules to IRA assets acquired during marriage, which can give a spouse legal claims to those funds. But community property protections are not the same as consent requirements, and enforcement typically requires court proceedings rather than administrative mechanisms built into the account itself.
The result is a patchwork. A married person in California whose spouse moves IRA funds has access to community property law. A married person in Florida has neither federal nor state-level consent mechanisms.
The Policy Implication
The GAO report does not specifically recommend extending spousal consent to IRAs — that would represent a far more sweeping intervention than the defined contribution plan reform currently under discussion. But the data on IRA size and the rollover mechanism make clear that any reform limited to 401(k)s would be at best partial. Funds can exit the scope of any new spousal consent requirement by moving into an IRA, which is not an obscure workaround — it’s the standard advice given to departing employees across the industry.
Based on GAO Report GAO-26-107536, March 2026. IRA ownership and withdrawal data are drawn from supplementary analysis included in the report’s text boxes on pages 21 and 28.