The Roth IRA in Georgia

Georgia taxes a Roth conversion in full, as ordinary income, at a flat 4.99% for tax year 2026. From age 62 that changes: the state's retirement income exclusion subtracts $35,000 per taxpayer at 62 to 64 and $65,000 at 65 or over, and taxable IRA distributions sit inside the exclusion base — so a conversion can arrive at a Georgia cost of nothing. Two things make that harder to use than it looks, and one thing makes it temporary.

This is the seventh state guide in this series, and Georgia is the first one where both your age and the calendar year change the answer. Every other state we have documented gives you a rate to look up. Georgia gives you a rate that is falling on a legislated schedule toward a 3.99% floor, an exclusion that switches on at 62 and grows at 65, a further increase already enacted for 2027, and a legislature that has formally studied abolishing the income tax altogether. Planning a conversion here means planning against a moving target.

It is also the state where the exclusion cuts against the Roth for the first time. In Pennsylvania the mechanics are neutral; in Illinois they tilt toward the traditional account at the contribution stage. In Georgia, a retiree inside the exclusion pays no state tax on a traditional withdrawal either — so within the cap the Roth's state-level advantage is zero, and it only switches back on above it.

Georgia Roth report card

The rate, and why it has a shelf life

Georgia was a graduated-bracket state with a 5.75% top rate until 2024. It has been flat ever since, and cut every year: 5.49% under the 2022 reform, accelerated to 5.39% for tax year 2024, then 5.19% for 2025, then 4.99% for 2026 — that last cut retroactive to January 1 and signed in May 2026. Withholding at the new rate was permitted from the day of signature.

Rate verified as of 2026-07-29

What comes next is a different kind of claim, and the distinction matters more than the numbers. From 2027 the rate is scheduled to fall a further 0.125 points a year until it reaches 3.99% — eight steps, so tax year 2034 at the earliest. But each step is contingent on three revenue tests, certified every December 1, and a single failure delays the entire schedule by a year. Tax year 2027's rate is not knowable until December 1, 2026.

Authority: O.C.G.A. §48-7-20(a.1)(1); HB 463 (2026) §§2-1, 5-1; DOR 2026 Employer's Withholding Tax Guide (rev. June 2026); O.C.G.A. 48-7-20(a.1) as amended by HB 463 (2026), Act signed 5/11/2026, Sections 2-1 and 5-1

One forward-looking change is not contingent, and it is easy to conflate with the rate. The increase in the 65-plus exclusion to $70,000 for tax year 2027 carries no trigger language at all. You can plan on the larger exclusion. You cannot plan on a lower rate.

Beyond that, a Georgia Senate committee spent 2026 studying elimination of the income tax outright and issued a final report in January. Its recommendations run further than the statutory glide path: reaching the 3.99% floor by tax year 2029 and full repeal by 2032, and — the recommendation that would matter most here — a zero bracket on the first $50,000 of income for single filers and $100,000 for joint filers from January 1, 2027. A zero bracket that size would swamp the age-gated exclusion entirely and make the 62-and-65 thresholds largely irrelevant for ordinary conversions. None of it is law. It is a committee recommendation, and it is included here because the honest description of a Georgia conversion's state cost is a range, not a number.

Authority: Georgia Senate Special Committee on the Elimination of Georgia's Income Tax, Final Report and Recommendations (January 2026), pp. 6, 20-22; Senate Special Committee on the Elimination of Georgia's Income Tax, 2026 final report, Recommendation 1

The exclusion, and whether it reaches a conversion

Georgia's retirement income exclusion is a subtraction from federal adjusted gross income available to anyone 62 or older, and to people under 62 who are permanently and totally disabled. For 2026 it is $35,000 per taxpayer at ages 62 to 64 and $65,000 at 65 or over, rising to $70,000 at 65-plus from 2027. Social Security is subtracted separately and in full, so it does not consume any of it.

Authority: O.C.G.A. §48-7-27(a)(5)(A)(xiii) and (a)(5)(D); DOR Form IT-511 (2025), Subtractions; Form 500 Schedule 1; O.C.G.A. §48-7-27(a)(5)(A)(xiii)-(xiv); HB 463 (2026) §2-3

The statute's list of what counts as retirement income is non-exhaustive and broad — pensions and annuities, interest, dividends, net rental income, capital gains, royalties, military retirement. Taxable IRA distributions are squarely in the base: Georgia's Form 500 Schedule 1 carries a dedicated line for them.

So does a conversion qualify? The chain is short and every link but the last is documented. A conversion is a taxable IRA distribution on the federal return. Georgia begins from federal adjusted gross income, so it arrives in the Georgia base automatically. The Department of Revenue states in its own instruction booklet that the provisions concerning taxability and conversion from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA are the same for Georgia as for the Internal Revenue Service. And the conversion lands on the exclusion worksheet's line for taxable IRA distributions.

What is missing is the last link. No Georgia authority expressly applies the exclusion to conversion income. We looked: the statute, the full text of the implementing regulation, three years of the instruction booklet, the Schedule 1 worksheet, the Department's retirement-income page, its retirees FAQ, and all seventeen of its published income-tax letter rulings. None of them addresses it either way. So the position here is that a conversion appears mechanically eligible, and that Georgia has addressed conversion taxability without addressing whether the exclusion reaches conversion income. That is a well-founded reading, not a settled rule, and anyone relying on it for a large conversion should get it confirmed in writing.

Authority: O.C.G.A. §48-7-27(a)(5)(A)(xiii) and (a)(5)(E)(i); DOR Form 500 Schedule 1 line 11; IRC §408A(d)(3) — no Georgia guidance addressing conversions; DOR Form 500 Schedule 1 (Rev. 07/09/25), Retirement Income Exclusion worksheet line 11; O.C.G.A. §48-7-27(a)(5)(E)(i)

If it does reach conversions, Georgia inverts the usual advice. The standard heuristic is to convert early, while rates are low and before required distributions start. Here the state-optimal window opens at 62 and widens at 65 — because before 62 the conversion is taxed in full, and after 65 a substantial slice of it may not be taxed at all.

Why the exclusion cuts against the Roth

Every state guide in this series asks the same question at some point: how much is the Roth worth here, on top of what it is worth federally? In New York and California the answer is a lot, because those states tax a traditional withdrawal heavily. In Pennsylvania and Illinois the answer is that the state stays out of it either way. Georgia produces a third answer, and it is the uncomfortable one.

Georgia's exclusion applies to retirement income, not to Roth income specifically. A traditional IRA withdrawal is retirement income. So for a retiree whose withdrawals fit inside the cap, a traditional account is already free of Georgia tax — and the Roth's state-level advantage is not small, it is exactly nothing.

Read down the right-hand column. Under 62 the Roth is worth 4.99% of every dollar withdrawn, because there is no exclusion to shelter the traditional alternative. At 62 the advantage collapses for modest withdrawals and survives only above $35,000. At 65 it disappears entirely for anyone drawing $65,000 or less — which describes a great many retirees, particularly since Social Security is subtracted separately and does not consume the cap.

This is not an argument against Roth accounts. The federal case is untouched, and it usually dominates: tax-free growth, no lifetime required distributions, no tax on the account for heirs, and no exposure to whatever federal rates do later. It is an argument against a specific piece of reasoning — "I live in a state with an income tax, so the Roth must be saving me state tax in retirement" — which in Georgia is often false for exactly the people most likely to believe it. Above the cap it becomes true again, and for a household with large balances and large withdrawals it can be worth a great deal.

There is one asymmetry that does favour the Roth, and it has nothing to do with rates. The exclusion is a finite annual allowance. Traditional withdrawals consume it; qualified Roth withdrawals do not, because they never enter federal adjusted gross income in the first place. A retiree with both account types can therefore spend the exclusion on the traditional withdrawals and take the rest from the Roth — using the allowance where it does work rather than wasting it. That is a sequencing advantage rather than a rate advantage, and it is the version of the Roth's Georgia case that actually survives scrutiny.

Authority: Computed from O.C.G.A. §48-7-20(a.1)(1) (4.99%), §48-7-27(a)(1)(B) (standard deduction), §48-7-27(a)(5)(A)(xiii) (exclusion); O.C.G.A. §48-7-27(a); DOR Form IT-511 (2025), Subtractions item 5; DOR Retirees FAQ

The question a falling rate creates

In most states the state cost of a conversion is a constant you look up. In Georgia it is a variable with a direction. That changes the shape of the decision, and not in the way people expect.

On a $100,000 conversion by someone under 62, with no exclusion in play, the arithmetic is plain: $4,990 at the 2026 rate, $4,865 at the next scheduled step, $3,990 at the statutory floor, and nothing at all if the tax were ever repealed. The spread between today's rate and the floor is $1,000 on that conversion — real money, but an order of magnitude smaller than the federal bill on the same transaction.

The temptation is to read that as "wait." Three things argue against treating it as a plan. First, only the 2026 figure is enacted; every step after it depends on revenue tests certified each December 1, and one failure delays the whole schedule by a year, so the floor is eight steps and tax year 2034 away at the earliest. Second, the balance you are converting is presumably growing in the meantime, so a smaller rate applied to a larger number is not automatically cheaper. Third, and most importantly, the age gate moves in the opposite direction and it moves in bigger steps: turning 62, and then 65, changes the Georgia cost far more than a 0.125-point rate cut does.

Which is the honest summary: in Georgia the state-level variable worth planning around is your age, not the calendar. The rate is drifting down slowly and conditionally. The exclusion arrives on a birthday, in full, and the 2027 increase to $70,000 is the one forward-looking change you can actually rely on.

Authority: O.C.G.A. 48-7-20(a.1)(1) as amended by HB 463 (2026) (strike/insert text as printed in the enrolled act); arithmetic derived; Georgia Senate Special Committee on Eliminating Georgia's Income Tax, Final Report (2026), Final Recommendations

Three ways to get this wrong

The middle one deserves its own arithmetic, because the Department's own worked example shows the shape of it. The earned-income slice of the exclusion is capped at $5,000, but what it consumes is measured on an everywhere basis — your total earned income, not the Georgia-apportioned part. A semi-retired arriver with any $5,000 of wages therefore has $60,000 available against a conversion rather than $65,000, which at 4.99% costs $249.50 more in Georgia tax.

The first is the expensive one. A couple both 65 or over have $130,000 of combined capacity, and it is genuinely reachable — but only by converting from both IRAs. The regulation forbids using a spouse's income in your own exclusion computation. Convert the whole $130,000 from one spouse's account and the other spouse's cap goes unused: roughly $3,243 of Georgia tax on a transaction that could have cost nothing, before the $30,000 joint standard deduction is applied.

Authority: Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. r. 560-7-4-.02(2); 2025 IT-511 p.21; 2025 IT-511 Instructions Booklet, pp.21, 24 (Retirement Income Exclusion worksheet, Steps 1-2)

The county trap: same conversion, seven different answers

This is the part of Georgia's system that nobody writes about, and it can cost far more than the income tax does. Georgia counties offer generous age-based school-tax and homestead exemptions — some of them total exemptions worth thousands a year — and most of them are income tested. The tests are not standardised. Georgia counties use at least four different income definitions, and which one applies to you decides whether a Roth conversion is irrelevant or catastrophic.

The mechanism that makes this dangerous is a sequencing detail. The retirement income exclusion is a Georgia subtraction, applied after federal adjusted gross income is computed. So when a county's test is a federal measure, the exclusion cannot protect you — the test sees the entire conversion, including the part Georgia will subsequently exempt from income tax. When the test is a Georgia measure, the exclusion has already done its work before the county looks.

Authority: O.C.G.A. 48-7-27(a)(5); GA DOR 2025 IT-511 Instructions Booklet, p.21; GA DOR 2024 Local Exemption Status Sheets (form PT-10B), DeKalb, Chattooga, Barrow entries

Read that table as a warning about a specific failure mode: a 70-year-old in DeKalb County claiming the H9 exemption can lose a 100% school-tax exemption by crossing a federal adjusted gross income ceiling, in the same year that Georgia charges them nothing at all on the conversion income that pushed them over. The income tax and the property tax are looking at different numbers.

A qualified Roth withdrawal is the mirror image and it is genuinely good news: it never enters federal adjusted gross income, so it cannot trip any federal-AGI test at all. Whether it counts in the county "net income" and "gross income" tests is not addressed in published guidance, which is worth knowing before assuming it is safe everywhere.

There is a counterweight. Some of the most valuable exemptions have no income test whatsoever — Cobb County's total school-tax exemption at 62, and Fulton's newest senior exemptions for 2026 — and those are completely conversion-proof. The practical advice is narrow and unglamorous: before a large conversion, read your own county's exemption terms and find out which income figure it tests.

Two mechanics inside those county tests are worth spelling out, because they are where the surprises live.

The first is what "net income" means when a county uses it. It is not a line from your tax return — it is a worksheet the Department of Revenue defines, and it shelters retirement income up to the Social Security maximum before anything else is counted. That is why the DeKalb H3 and H4 exemptions, with their apparently brutal $10,000 ceiling, are in practice largely conversion-proof for a retiree, while a $30,000 federal-AGI ceiling elsewhere is not. The number in the rule tells you almost nothing until you know which measure it attaches to.

The second is the statewide floor, which applies everywhere and is easy to overlook because the county programmes are more generous. Georgia grants a $4,000 county exemption at 65 and a school-tax exemption at 62, each with a $10,000 income cap, and a separate floating exemption at 62 that turns on a hard federal adjusted gross income ceiling of $30,000 per household. There is also a property-tax deferral for those 62 and over, and it carries the tightest test of the lot — gross household income of $15,000 or less, which a conversion of almost any size destroys.

One question we could not answer, and it matters: whether a tax-free qualified Roth withdrawal counts inside those county "net income" and "gross income" definitions. It plainly cannot touch a federal-AGI test, because it never reaches federal AGI. But the worksheet-based measures are defined administratively rather than by reference to a federal figure, and no published guidance addresses whether a distribution that is not taxable anywhere still counts as income for them. We have graded that unresolved rather than guessing, and a retiree relying on a worksheet-based exemption should ask their county before taking a large distribution of any kind.

Authority: GA DOR Form LGS-Homestead (Rev 10-08) Section C1; DeKalb County Tax Commissioner, 2026 Homestead Exemption Information; O.C.G.A. 48-5-47; O.C.G.A. 48-5-52; GA DOR Property Tax Homestead Exemptions; O.C.G.A. 48-5-72; O.C.G.A. 48-5-72.1 (alternative deferral, counties 550,000+); Emanuel County, GA - Exemptions; GA DOR Form LGS-Homestead (Rev 10-08) Section C1 line 6; no DOR ruling or guidance located on point

On the income-tax side, by contrast, Georgia is unusually clean. A flat rate means a conversion cannot push you into a higher bracket, and we located exactly one hard income-tax cliff: the low income credit, which requires federal adjusted gross income under $20,000. Georgia's other individual credits carry no state income limits, so a conversion cannot phase them out. Compared with Illinois, where three separate provisions vanish at $250,000 of federal AGI, that is a short list.

Authority: O.C.G.A. 48-7A-3; GA DOR Low Income Tax Credit (Tax Credit Code 211); O.C.G.A. 48-7-20(a.1) as amended by HB 463 (2026) Sec. 2-1

Moving to Georgia: convert before, or after?

Georgia is a destination state for retirees, which makes this the mirror image of the question our New York and California guides answer. There the issue is whether the old state can still tax you. Here it is when your conversion becomes a Georgia event — and the answer produces the most useful finding on this page.

Two verified facts combine. First, the exclusion has no residency waiting period: eligibility turns on age or disability and nothing else, so a retiree who establishes Georgia domicile at 66 qualifies in the arrival year. Second, and less obviously, the part-year proration is an income ratio, not a day count. It divides Georgia-source retirement income by retirement income computed as if you had been a resident all year. A 66-year-old who establishes domicile in July and converts in September therefore reaches a ratio of 1.00 and keeps the whole $65,000 for that year — no pro-rata haircut for having arrived halfway through.

Authority: Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. r. 560-7-4-.02(1); O.C.G.A. §48-7-27(a)(5)(A)(xiii), (a)(5)(D); 2025 IT-511 pp.21, 24; Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. r. 560-7-4-.02(5)(a) (adopted Apr. 5, 2011); 2025 IT-511 p.24

The corollary runs against the usual advice. Converting before you establish Georgia domicile contributes nothing to that numerator, so the exclusion goes unused for the year. Converting after captures it, but exposes whatever exceeds it to 4.99%. Which is cheaper depends entirely on the rate your former state charges.

Worked through: a single 66-year-old with no other income converting $100,000 in 2026 pays $998 to Georgia after the exclusion and the $15,000 standard deduction. Converting the same $100,000 before establishing Georgia domicile costs Georgia nothing — but costs whatever the former state charges on $100,000. Arriving from Florida, Tennessee or Texas, converting first is plainly cheaper. Arriving from New York or California, waiting is.

Authority: 2025 IT-511 p.21; O.C.G.A. §48-7-20(a.1) and §48-7-27(a)(1)(B), (a)(5)(A) as amended by HB 463 (2026); Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. r. 560-7-4-.02(5); Ga. DOR Residency Filing Requirements; 2025 IT-511 p.26 (Schedule 3, Columns B and C)

Federal law does the rest of the work once you have moved. A federal statute bars any state from taxing the retirement income of someone who is not its resident or domiciliary, and it covers IRAs and Roth IRAs expressly, with no periodic-payment condition of the kind that applies to some nonqualified plans. Georgia's own instruction booklet acknowledges the prohibition. What the statute does not do is launder a conversion done while you were still domiciled elsewhere — timing governs, not the calendar year in which you eventually moved.

Two practical notes. Georgia's residency test is legal residence, and the Department states the filing requirement applies as long as Georgia is your legal residence even during a temporary absence. We were unable to verify, against any official Georgia source, the day-count test that aggregator sites describe — every source stating it was a commercial publisher or a law firm, and Georgia's own regulation defines "resident" purely by cross-reference to the statute without restating any day count. We are therefore not repeating a number we could not confirm. And Georgia publishes no residency-audit guidance comparable to New York's, so there is no official playbook to read on either side of a move.

Authority: Ga. DOR Residency Filing Requirements; 2025 IT-511 p.16 (residency status codes); O.C.G.A. §48-7-1(10); 4 U.S.C. §114(a); Ga. DOR Residency Filing Requirements

Bringing an existing Roth IRA to Georgia is mercifully dull: Georgia starts from federal adjusted gross income, tracks no separate Roth basis, runs no five-year clock of its own, and does not recapture conversions done before you arrived. And because a qualified Roth distribution never enters federal AGI, it never consumes any of the exclusion — so tax-free withdrawals and a taxable conversion are not competing for the same allowance.

Military retirees

Georgia has a separate military retirement exclusion, and the figure circulating in several published summaries is one that never became law. For 2026 the rule is unchanged: $17,500 of military retirement income for taxpayers under 62, plus a second $17,500 if Georgia earned income exceeds $17,500. A 2026 act raises it to $65,000 for individuals under 65 — but only from tax year 2027, and it expressly cannot be stacked with the general retirement income exclusion. So a 66-year-old military retiree takes the general exclusion and gains nothing from the newer provision. One useful asymmetry: for 2026 the base $17,500 is not prorated for part-year residents, where the general exclusion is.

Authority: O.C.G.A. §48-7-27(a)(5.1); 2025 IT-511 pp.21-22; 4 U.S.C. §114(b)(1) (concluding sentence); HB 266 (2025) §§1, 3(b), amending O.C.G.A. §48-7-27(a)(5.1); Ga. DOR 2025 Summary of Enacted Legislation p.11

Creditor protection: excluded, not merely exempt

Georgia's own bankruptcy exemption statute for retirement accounts is weak. It protects only what is "reasonably necessary for the support" of the debtor and dependants, and it never mentions Roth IRAs — its retirement provisions reference only the traditional-IRA section of the federal code. Georgia has also opted out of the federal exemption list, so a Georgia debtor cannot elect the federal scheme instead.

None of that ends up mattering, because of where the protection actually comes from. In 2022 the Eleventh Circuit held that a Georgia debtor's Roth IRA is excluded from the bankruptcy estate entirely, under the federal provision that excludes a beneficial interest in a trust subject to a transfer restriction enforceable under non-bankruptcy law — with Georgia's garnishment statute supplying the restriction. Exclusion is a stronger thing than exemption: the property never enters the estate, so no dollar ceiling and no support test applies, and the federal inflation-adjusted IRA cap is never reached. The case involved a Roth conversion account as well as a contributory one, so converted balances are squarely inside the holding.

Outside bankruptcy, the garnishment statute exempts IRA funds while they remain in the account, with no dollar cap and no support test. Note the limits: the protection is temporal, so once money is distributed only ordinary wage-garnishment limits apply; retirement funds are expressly not exempt from continuing garnishment for support obligations; and while the statute contains no contribution look-back window, a transfer into a protected account remains attackable for actual fraudulent intent — Georgia authority exists on that point and it is unfavourable, having set aside exactly such a transfer made with lawsuits pending.

An inherited Roth IRA is unsettled. No Georgia statute names inherited accounts, and no Georgia court has decided the question; the statutory phrase "or beneficiary thereof" is a real argument but it has not been tested. Given that the Supreme Court held in 2014 that an inherited IRA is not a retirement fund for the federal exemption and left the answer to state law, this is a genuine open question rather than a technicality.

Authority: In re Hoffman, 22 F.4th 1341 (11th Cir. Jan. 24, 2022); 11 U.S.C. §541(c)(2); O.C.G.A. §18-4-6(a)(2), quoted in In re Hoffman, No. 20-12823 (11th Cir. Jan. 24, 2022), at 7; O.C.G.A. §18-4-6(a)(2); Clark v. Rameker, 573 U.S. 122 (2014); 11 U.S.C. §522(b)(3)(C) vs. §541(c)(2); cf. Silliman v. Cassell, 292 Ga. 464 (2013)

What Georgia does not tax

Georgia levies no estate tax and no inheritance tax, and requires no estate tax return. The mechanism is worth stating precisely because it explains why the answer is stable: Georgia's estate tax was never an independent tax but a pickup of the federal state-death-tax credit, and when that credit was phased out federally the state tax had nothing to attach to; the statute was then repealed outright. There is no exclusion amount, no rate schedule and no cliff to plan around, and a Roth IRA balance is includible only for federal estate tax purposes.

A qualified inherited Roth distribution is likewise free of Georgia income tax, since it never enters federal adjusted gross income. One thing does not carry over, though, and it surprises people: the decedent's retirement income exclusion does not pass to a beneficiary. The exclusion is per taxpayer and keyed to the claimant's own date of birth. A beneficiary aged 62 or over may use their own exclusion against inherited taxable IRA income; a younger beneficiary has none.

Authority: O.C.G.A. 48-12-1 (as amended by HB 658, 2014); EGTRRA 2001 phase-out of the IRC 2011 state death tax credit; Georgia DOR Estate Tax FAQ; O.C.G.A. 48-7-27(a)(5)(A)(xiv) and (a)(5)(D); 2025 IT-511 Instructions Booklet pp. 21, 24-25 (incl. Subtractions item 27); Georgia DOR Retirees-FAQ. No DOR guidance addresses inherited IRAs.

Georgia against the other six states in this series

The comparison makes Georgia's position legible. It is not a no-tax state, so a conversion before 62 costs real money. It is not Pennsylvania or Illinois either, where the conversion is free at any age by different mechanisms. Here the answer depends on how old you are AND on which year you act, and the rate you will pay next year is not yet determined. On creditor protection it is the strongest of the group. On senior property tax it is the most treacherous.

Filing mechanics that catch people out

Georgia withholding on IRA distributions is elective, not mandatory. A conversion is a non-periodic payment, and the state withholds nothing on it unless you affirmatively ask on the relevant form. That is exactly the arrangement in which a December conversion turns into an underpayment penalty in April: the tax is owed, nothing was withheld, and no estimated payment was made.

The estimated-tax system is four instalments, due in April, June, September and January, and the safe harbour is the lesser of 100% of the prior year's tax or 70% of the current year's. That 70% figure is unusual and worth noting — it is more forgiving than the federal 90%, which means a large late-year conversion is somewhat easier to cover in Georgia than federally. It still has to be covered.

Part-year filers use the standard return with a part-year residency code and a three-column schedule: one column for income as though you had been a Georgia resident all year, one for the Georgia portion, and the difference between them. That structure is what makes the arrival-timing analysis above work — a conversion done before you established domicile lands outside the Georgia column, which is simultaneously why it escapes Georgia tax and why it cannot help fill the exclusion's numerator.

A conversion done while you are a nonresident creates no Georgia exposure at all, even if you have Georgia-source wages. It does still appear in the denominator of the exclusion proration, which is a subtlety with no practical bite for most people but explains an otherwise confusing worksheet result.

Finally, conformity. Georgia adopts the Internal Revenue Code as enacted through a specific date, advanced by legislation each year, and the current date is January 1, 2026. That matters more than it sounds: a state whose conformity date lags can fail to recognise a new federal retirement provision for a year or more. Georgia's is current, so the federal Roth rules — including the SECURE 2.0 changes — flow through without a gap.

Authority: O.C.G.A. §48-7-101(h), (j) and §48-7-100(8.1); Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. r. 560-7-4-.32; DOR Form G-4P (Rev. 06/03/26); DOR 2026 Employer's Withholding Tax Guide; DOR Form 500 UET (Rev. 07/15/25) and Instructions A-G; DOR Form IT-511 (2025), Estimated Tax; Form 500ES; 2025 IT-511 Instructions Booklet, p.26 (Schedule 3 instructions); Form 500 Schedule 3; Ga. DOR Time Ratio guidance; O.C.G.A. §48-1-2(14); HB 1199 (2026), House Rules Committee Substitute, §1 and §2

Workplace plans in Georgia

Georgia has no state auto-IRA. A 2026 bill would have auto-enrolled private-sector workers without an employer plan into a Roth IRA at 5% of pay; it failed in committee. So unlike New York or California, a Georgia private-sector worker whose employer offers nothing has no state-sponsored default to fall into — the Roth IRA they open themselves is the whole of it.

Public employees are better served. The state's supplemental programme offers a Roth option in both the 401(k) and the 457(b), with no income limit on either, and the two can run at the same time. The employer match, as in every plan we have examined in this series, lands pre-tax even when every employee dollar is Roth, and it is taxable on withdrawal — so a state employee contributing entirely to Roth still accumulates a traditional balance they will owe tax on. The match formula itself is unusually generous at long service: dollar for dollar up to 5% of pay, then an additional half a percent for each year of service beyond five for members contributing at least 5%, reaching a 9% maximum at thirteen years, with a further increment for eligible law-enforcement officers.

Teachers are the gap. The teachers' retirement system is a pure defined-benefit pension with no Roth feature and no defined-contribution component at all, so a Georgia teacher wanting Roth space has to look to an employer supplemental plan or to their own Roth IRA. The university system's supplemental 403(b) and 457(b) both offer Roth. City, county and local school plans vary plan-by-plan and are inconsistently documented, which is a polite way of saying you have to read your own plan's summary rather than assume.

One federal rule is now live in Georgia public plans and catches high earners by surprise: age-50 catch-up contributions must be made as Roth for anyone whose prior-year wages exceeded the statutory threshold. That is federal law rather than Georgia's doing, but it lands in Georgia paycheques from January 2026.

Worth a warning about the plan's own literature: the published handbook for the state supplemental programme is out of date, carrying contribution limits from 2022, a 3% match figure and a required-distribution age of 72. Read the current plan pages, not the PDF.

Authority: Georgia State Senate 2026 Composite Status (Session Final, May 14, 2026), p.5; SB 226 (2025-2026 Regular Session); Employees' Retirement System of Georgia (ERSGA), 'Understanding Contributions and Savings Plan Options: Roth Contributions,' dated 12/2025; ERSGA, 'Understanding Contributions and Savings Plan Options: Roth Contributions' (12/2025), Pre-tax vs Roth comparison table and FAQ; ERSGA, 'ERS GSEPS (Tier 3)' plan page; Georgia SB 328 (2008); 2022 match-increase legislation referenced by ERSGA; Teachers Retirement System of Georgia, 'Supplementing Your TRS Benefit' and 'How TRS Benefits You'; 2025 IT-511 Subtractions item 12; University System of Georgia, Retirement and Savings Plan FAQ; Georgia State University HR, 'Important Retirement Information for 2026'; SECURE 2.0 Act Sec. 603; TD 10007 (9/16/2025); ERSGA notice 'Required change for PSR 50+ Catch-up Contributions' (published 11/25/2025); USG/GSU HR 2026 retirement information; Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. R. 560-7-4-.02 (unconformed) vs. 2025 IT-511 Instructions Booklet p.21; ERSGA PSR Handbook (undated, c.2022) vs. ERSGA Roth flyer 12/2025

Medicaid long-term care, where the Roth's best feature backfires

Georgia's aged, blind and disabled Medicaid rules treat a retirement fund as a countable resource whenever the owner has the option of withdrawing a lump sum, and the state's own manual names Roth IRAs explicitly. The resource limit it is counted against is $2,000 for an individual and $3,000 for a couple — figures that have not moved since 1988.

There is an escape hatch, and this is where the Roth's most-advertised feature works against it. A retirement fund is excluded from countable resources if the individual is eligible for and receiving periodic payments that include principal. Georgia's test is about principal, not about required distributions. A traditional IRA owner past the required-distribution age is receiving such payments by force of federal law. A Roth owner never is, because a Roth has no lifetime required distributions at all — so the feature that makes a Roth attractive for almost every other purpose gives it no route into payout status, and the balance stays countable. The "no RMDs" advantage is not merely unhelpful here; it is the reason the exclusion is unavailable.

Two further points. Once periodic payments including principal are being received, Georgia budgets them as income in the eligibility determination rather than ignoring them, against an institutional net income cap. And a retirement fund owned by the community spouse — the spouse who is not applying — is excluded outright, which makes whose name an account is in a consequential detail long before anyone is ill.

Authority: Georgia DFCS Medicaid Policy Manual Section 2332, Retirement Funds (eff. April 2020, MT-59); Georgia DFCS Medicaid Policy Manual Section 2332, Retirement Funds - Requirements, Basic Considerations and Procedures; Georgia DFCS Medicaid Policy Manual Section 2332 (naming Roth IRAs); applied against IRC 408A(c)(5) and SECURE 2.0 Sec. 325 (no lifetime Roth RMD). No Georgia guidance addresses Roth payout status directly.; Georgia DFCS Medicaid Policy Manual Section 2332, Basic Considerations; cf. Sections 2304 and 2342 (transfer of assets); Georgia DFCS Medicaid Policy Manual Appendix A1, ABD Financial Limits (eff. June 2025, MT 76), Charts A1.1, A1.2, A1.3, A1.9

Two smaller mechanics

Two smaller mechanics worth knowing. Georgia's 529 plan gives a deduction of $4,000 per beneficiary a year, $8,000 for joint filers, and a rollover from a 529 to a Roth IRA is treated as a qualified withdrawal at the Georgia level — no deduction recapture and no state tax on earnings. A nonqualified withdrawal is treated harshly by comparison: Georgia adds back both the taxable earnings and the previously deducted contributions, pro rata, and the same recapture applies to rolling the account out to another state's plan. And Georgia withholding on IRA distributions is elective rather than mandatory — a conversion is a non-periodic payment on which nothing is withheld unless you ask, which is exactly the situation in which a Q4 conversion turns into an underpayment penalty. The safe harbour is the lesser of 100% of last year's tax or 70% of this year's.

Authority: Path2College 529 Plan (GA Higher Education Savings Plan) FAQ; IRC 529(c)(3)(E) (SECURE 2.0 sec. 126); O.C.G.A. 48-1-2 as amended by HB 290 (2025); O.C.G.A. §48-7-101(h), (j) and §48-7-100(8.1); Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. r. 560-7-4-.32; DOR Form G-4P (Rev. 06/03/26); DOR 2026 Employer's Withholding Tax Guide; DOR Form 500 UET (Rev. 07/15/25) and Instructions A-G; DOR Form IT-511 (2025), Estimated Tax; Form 500ES

Four official Georgia sources that currently disagree with the statute

Anyone checking this page against the state's own websites should know what they will find, because in four places the official source is out of date. The Department's retirees FAQ still states an earned-income sublimit that the legislature raised in 2024. Its federal-conformity page still tops out at a code date two years superseded. The regulation implementing the retirement income exclusion is served as current but was last substantively amended in 2011, and its worked examples still use the old sublimit and an exclusion maximum that has since risen — though its procedure is still controlling, because the regulation delegates both eligibility and amount back to the statute by its own terms. And the Attorney General's garnishment-exemptions publication still cites a code section that was repealed a decade ago.

None of those errors changes an answer on this page; we cite the statutes, the enrolled bills and the current forms instead. They are listed because a reader who checks our work against a stale state page deserves to know which one is behind, and because the exercise of finding them is a fair test of whether a page like this has actually been checked.

Authority: Re-fetched 2026-07-29; O.C.G.A. §48-7-27(a)(5); HB 1199 (2026); HB 1437 (2022); 2016 Ga. Laws 325

Traps

Debunked

Frequently asked questions

What is deliberately not on this page

Three things we researched are absent, and saying which is part of the point of publishing a dataset alongside an article.

We do not state Georgia's day-count residency test. Commercial tax publishers and law-firm summaries describe one, and it may well exist in the statute — but the official code sits behind a paywalled platform that refused us, and every source we could actually reach that states a day count is a secondary one. Georgia's own regulation defines "resident" purely by cross-reference to the statute without restating any threshold, and the Department's residency page describes the test as legal residence. So we describe legal residence, which we verified, and we leave the threshold to sources that can show you the statutory text. Note the distinction: we are not saying Georgia has no such test. We are saying we could not confirm one.

We do not state whether someone who turns 62 or 65 during a year gets that year's full exclusion. The statute appears to key eligibility to attaining the age during any part of the taxable year, which would mean yes — but we could not reach the operative text, and the regulation delegates the question back to the statute without answering it. Since the practical consequence is whether someone turning 65 in December can convert in January at the higher cap, an unverified answer is worse than none.

And we do not assert that Georgia has no gift tax, though we expect that it does not. The source we had for it turned out not to say what it appeared to say, and a claim resting on a misread citation is not worth making regardless of whether the underlying fact is true.

The dataset

Every figure on this page comes from a dataset of 127 facts, each carrying its statutory or administrative authority, a verbatim quote from the source, a confidence grade and an independent verification verdict. Of 127 facts, 101 were confirmed on re-verification against primary sources and 21 were corrected before publication. Three could not be verified to our standard and were cut rather than hedged — including a widely repeated residency day-count test that no official Georgia source we could reach actually states.

The workbook carries seven sheets, including two live calculators — what a conversion costs at your age, and whether to convert before or after moving to Georgia. The CSV is one row per fact, with authority, source quote, confidence grade and verification verdict.

This page is educational and is not tax or investment advice. Georgia's rate is scheduled to change and its county property-tax rules vary; verify current figures against the Georgia Department of Revenue and your county tax office before acting. Rate verified as of 2026-07-29.