How to Fix an Excess Roth IRA Contribution Before the 6% Tax Stacks Up.
Contribute to a Roth IRA in a year your income ends up over the limit and a 6% excise tax runs every year the money stays put. Removed or recharacterized by October 15 of the following year, the mistake costs almost nothing.
An engineer sets up an automatic $625 monthly transfer to her Roth IRA in January 2026, because every personal finance article says to fund it early. In September a double RSU vest lands, her modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) clears $200,000, and the single-filer eligibility for 2026 ends at $168,000. Nothing flags it. The custodian does not check income; that is not its job. She now has an excess Roth IRA contribution, and the cost of doing nothing is 6% a year, every year, until someone fixes it. The fix itself is cheap, but only before a deadline most people learn about after it passes.
How careful savers end up over the limit.
Almost every excess contribution I see comes from timing, not carelessness. January front-loading plus a mid-year raise, bonus, or RSU vest is the classic. Marriage is another: two comfortably-eligible singles can combine into a couple over the $242,000 line. The nastiest version is married filing separately, where the phase-out runs from $0 to $10,000 of MAGI, effectively banning Roth contributions for separate filers who lived together, a detail that surprises couples filing separately for student loan reasons. Inside the phase-out band the limit prorates: a single filer with $160,500 of MAGI in 2026 is halfway through the $15,000 range, so her limit is $3,750, and anything above that is excess even though she is allowed to contribute something.
What the 6% excise actually costs.
IRC §4973 charges 6% of the excess, capped at 6% of the account's December 31 value, for every year the excess remains. On a full $7,500 excess that is $450 per year. It is reported on Form 5329, which is its own return for this purpose, and that detail has teeth: until a Form 5329 is filed, the statute of limitations on the excise never starts running, so a forgotten 2026 excess is still collectible, with interest, whenever the IRS matches the Form 5498 your custodian filed. This is not a penalty that expires if you wait it out.
- Excess Roth IRA contribution
- $7,500
- Excise per year it remains (6% under §4973)
- $450
- Earnings on the excess by the time it is fixed
- $900
- Cost if corrected by October 15, 2027
- Tax on $900 only
- 10% early-withdrawal penalty on those earnings
- $0 (SECURE 2.0)
- Excise if instead discovered in early 2029
- $1,350
Tax year 2026 limits per IRS Notice 2025-67. The timely fix assumes the 2026 return was filed on time, which preserves the automatic six-month correction window to October 15, 2027 under the Form 5329 instructions. The $1,350 is three years of $450 (2026, 2027, 2028), computed on the lesser of the excess or the year-end account value, and the excess still has to come out afterward.
Three ways to fix an excess Roth IRA contribution.
Fix one: withdraw it in time. Ask the custodian for a return of excess contribution, not a normal distribution; they will compute the net income attributable (NIA) and send back the excess plus its earnings under IRC §408(d)(4). Do it by the due date of that year's return, which stretches to October 15 of the following year for anyone who filed on time. The earnings are taxable in the year the contribution went in, so a correction made in 2027 for a 2026 contribution may mean amending the 2026 return. What no longer happens is the old insult: since section 333 of SECURE 2.0 in 2022, the 10% early-withdrawal penalty does not apply to those earnings. If the market fell, the NIA is negative and you get back less than you put in, with nothing to tax.
Fix two, and usually my pick: recharacterize instead of withdrawing. Recharacterization treats the contribution as if it had gone to a traditional IRA all along, earnings ride along, and the same October 15 deadline applies. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act killed recharacterizing conversions, not contributions, so this remains fully legal. At this income the traditional contribution is nondeductible, which tees up the obvious second step: convert it right back to Roth. That is just the backdoor Roth, and it keeps the money invested instead of bouncing it out of retirement accounts entirely. The one check before converting is the pro-rata rule; a large pretax IRA balance makes the conversion partly taxable and can change the answer.
Fix three, for deadlines already missed: stop the meter. After October 15 you withdraw just the excess amount, no earnings required, or absorb it against a future year in which your MAGI drops back under the limit, with Form 5329 doing the arithmetic. The 6% for each closed year is owed either way; the point is to stop it from repeating. Pay it with a properly filed Form 5329 for each open year rather than hoping the matching never happens.
Contribute in April, not January.
If your income is lumpy, equity-heavy, or anywhere near the phase-out band, fund the Roth after the year ends, when MAGI is a known number; the deadline for a 2026 contribution is April 15, 2027. The few months of lost market exposure are real but small against a recurring 6% excise plus cleanup paperwork. Households permanently over the limit should skip the front door entirely and run contributions through the backdoor from the start, and heavy savers with the right 401(k) features can go bigger through the mega backdoor.