The IRS announced back in November that the limit for IRA contributions in 2025 was to be $7000 (excluding any catch-up contributions). What will the limit be in 2026?
Answers must be in the form of a single, whole number of US dollars, comprising only of numeric characters. No letters, dollar signs, or commas allowed. Answers with any other characters or in any other format will be considered invalid.
Resolves once the IRS publishes the IRA limits for 2026 on their newsroom page, similar to the link above. I expect this to be on Nov. 1, and may extend the close date if it's not announced by then or shortly after.
Resolves to the valid answer closest to the actual value (with exact answers obviously preferred). If two answers are exactly equally close to the real value, resolves to the higher one.
Note that this is focused on the base limit only, i.e. the amount allowed for (say) a person in their thirties, and thus excludes any potential catch-up contribution limits for older people.
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@MrMe Thanks for linking the announcement, and for the behind-the-scenes of how you made your bets. This is exactly the kind of stuff I love to see in these markets. Even though the answer was "obvious" or pre-determined by around October to someone like you, you did the hard work of researching it and crunching the numbers so I don't have to. Mana well spent.
And to @Eliza's point about "making actual plans for the future": yeah, that's exactly why I made it. I planned to make my 2026 IRA contribution all at once in the beginning of the year, and having this market helped me know how much money to put aside every month in 2025 to save up for that.
Here's a near-exact copy of this market for 2027, if folks want to start betting on that:
@Eliza ok I’ll let yall in on the secret now that I’ve made my mana.
The annual limit for IRA is based on an inflation formula and rounded to the nearest $500. If you know 9-10 months of inflation data, you can often predict with near 100% certainty what the rounded amount will be absent a truly extreme inflation shock.
Several companies publish their > 99% estimates months in advance of the official number.
See for instance https://www.milliman.com/en/insight/2026-irs-limits-forecast-final-estimates
That the October report at which point all the math is over and only the release from IRS remains.
Similar reports come out even earlier that aren’t 100% deterministic but are well over 99% baring sudden extremely extreme inflation
@MRME So when I moved 7500 from 34% to 41% in January based on vibes, I was just showing that I had internalized a real system, neato!
@MRME You should make some more markets similar in spirit to this one, they are good for actual people making actual plans about the future.
Per the description:
Resolves once the IRS publishes the IRA limits for 2026 on their newsroom page, similar to the link above.
So far they still haven’t published anything, so I’m still waiting. But I also probably should extend the close date by a bit to let people keep trading.
If I somehow missed the official communication on this, please do bring it up in the comments.