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If you’re married and in a single-income household, there’s still time to boost your 2025 retirement savings through a lesser-known strategy.
The move entails using a spousal individual retirement account, which is a separate Roth or traditional IRA for non-earning spouses. The last chance to make retroactive contributions for 2025 is April 15, which is also the federal tax deadline for most filers.
Spousal IRAs are “one of the most overlooked tax breaks in the retirement system,” said certified financial planner Randy Bruns, founder of advisory firm Model Wealth in Naperville, Illinois.
“As long as the working spouse has sufficient earned income, both spouses can make IRA contributions,” he said. “This effectively doubles the household’s opportunity to save in tax-advantaged accounts.”
For 2025, the IRA contribution limit is $7,000, plus an extra $1,000 catch-up contribution for investors age 50 and older. The IRA contribution limits are higher for 2026, with a $7,500 cap, plus $1,100 for investors age 50 and older.
That means older couples still have about a month before the April 15 deadline to save up to $8,000 per IRA, or $16,000 total, for 2025.
Pre-tax contributions to traditional spousal IRAs could provide a deduction for 2025, depending on your income and workplace retirement plan participation.
Spousal IRAs can also help boost retirement savings when one spouse temporarily leaves the workforce, said CFP Otto Rivera, principal at advisory firm Mindful Wealth in the greater Orlando, Florida area.
“I wish more couples knew about it,” he said.
In mid-2024, IRA ownership reached a record high with roughly 57.9 million U.S. households saying they owned accounts, according to an April 2025 report from the Investment Company Institute, a trade organization for regulated investment funds.
Still, as of mid-2024, only 37% of U.S. households with IRAs were making contributions, the ICI report found. The growth in traditional pretax IRAs has largely been fueled by rollovers from employer retirement plans, such as 401(k)s, according to the findings.
As of Dec. 31, 2025, the average IRA balance was $137,095, up 7% from the previous year, according to Fidelity Investments’ quarterly summary based on 18.9 million IRAs.
Spousal IRAs could offer ‘tax diversification’
Beyond higher savings, spousal IRAs could also improve “tax diversification” across the household’s portfolio, said CFP Christopher Giambrone, co-founder of advisory firm CG Capital in New Hartford, New York.
Many couples already have “substantial pre-tax savings through employer plans,” he said.
As of year-end 2024, nearly 90% of company plans offered after-tax Roth contributions, but only 18% of workers were making them, according to estimates from Vanguard’s 2025 How America Saves report.
While pre-tax contributions provide an upfront tax break, investors pay regular income taxes on future withdrawals. But funneling spousal IRA contributions to Roth accounts could provide “tax-free income later in retirement,” Giambrone said.
