I turned 64 this year. Nothing at the bank changed. One line in the tax code stopped applying to me. No letter arrived.
The line covers savers who reach 60, 61, 62 or 63 during the year. They may put more into a workplace plan than anyone else at the company.
A workplace plan is the 401(k) or the 403(b) at your job. The ceiling for 2026 is $24,500. At 50 you may add $8,000 on top. Inside that four-year band you add $11,250 instead.
So the band is worth $3,250 a year over the ordinary catch-up. Four years of it comes to $13,000.
That is the whole famous window. Then you turn 64 and the ceiling drops back. The birthday files the paperwork.
Vanguard keeps the count of what savers do with the extra room.
$3,250
Extra room a year for ages 60 to 63, over the ordinary catch-up, in 2026
17%
Savers 50 and over who used any catch-up in 2025, where the plan offered one
13%
Eligible savers 60 to 63 who went past the ordinary catch-up cap
Thirteen in a hundred. The door is open, the plumbing is built, and the room sits empty.
Pay explains most of that. Median full-time earnings ran $1,251 a week in the spring quarter. Call it $65,000 before tax. The full $35,750 would swallow more than half of it.
Your plan does not have to carry the bigger band at all. Congress left that piece to your employer.
A second change switched on the same January, and it points somewhere the coverage did not look.
If your wages last year passed $150,000, your catch-up money has to go in as Roth. You pay the tax this year. The withdrawals come out untaxed later.
Plans with no Roth option had two roads. Build one, or switch the catch-up off for those earners.
Roth carries a real cost for a high earner. The tax comes out of this year’s pay, at this year’s rate. Untaxed withdrawals later are what the money buys.
One account pays for every aisle below it, and the rules for filling it change with your age.
This one lands on your own statement. The rule arrived with a date on it, and the date did not wait to see who would use the room.
Every plan in the country had to be reprogrammed by January. Payroll files, plan documents, statements, the whole chain.
The arithmetic
Limits: IRS Notice 2025-67, released November 13, 2025. The 2026 elective deferral limit is $24,500. The age-50 catch-up is $8,000. Savers who reach 60, 61, 62 or 63 during the year may use $11,250 instead, which replaces the $8,000 rather than adding to it, and the standard limit returns at 64. Totals of $32,500 and $35,750 follow from those lines. The $3,250 gap and the $13,000 four-year figure are Boomers Trade’s own arithmetic on them. The higher band is optional for the employer under SECURE 2.0 section 109; the IRS issued final rules on September 16, 2025, with compliance from January 1, 2026. Roth catch-up requirement: SECURE 2.0 section 603, applying in 2026 to workers whose 2025 Social Security wages passed $150,000. Usage: Vanguard, How America Saves 2026, published June 2026 on 4.6 million participant accounts. In plans offering a catch-up, 17% of participants 50 and over used one in 2025, and 13% of eligible participants aged 60 to 63 contributed above the standard catch-up cap. Pay: Bureau of Labor Statistics, median usual weekly earnings for full-time wage and salary workers, $1,251 in the second quarter of 2026, about $65,000 a year annualized. Inherited account rules: the SECURE Act ten-year distribution window.
The next date on this calendar sits in your plan document. If you are 60 to 63 this year, the bigger band is written in there or it is not. December settles it. Mine stopped mattering before I got around to asking. That is the one part of this I would rather you skip.
Andrew
Boomers Trade is written by someone getting older right alongside you, and watching who profits from it.
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