IRA Creditor Protection by State: Where an IRA Is Actually Safe

Updated August 23, 2026. Quick answer: of the 18 states read from the statute below, 11 protect an IRA fully from ordinary judgment creditors and 7 protect it only in part — and the limited ones are not the states you would guess. California protects an IRA only to the extent necessary to support you in retirement — a judge’s assessment, not a dollar figure. And whether an inherited IRA is protected is a separate question that most state statutes simply do not answer.

18 states, read from the statute

The California problem

This is the single most important cell in the table, because California is the largest state and its rule is the least like the others. Employer plans are fully exempt. IRAs are exempt only “to the extent necessary to provide for the support of the judgment debtor when the judgment debtor retires” and for dependents.

That is a standard, not an amount. It asks a court to decide how much you need, which means the answer depends on your age, your other assets, your earning capacity and the judge. A large IRA belonging to a 45-year-old with a good income is a very different case from a modest one belonging to a 68-year-old with nothing else. Anyone in California treating an IRA as categorically safe is relying on a rule their state did not enact.

Inherited IRAs are a separate question, and mostly an unanswered one

Five of the states here — Arizona, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio — expressly address inherited accounts in the statute. The other thirteen do not, which does not mean unprotected; it means unaddressed, and an unaddressed question is one someone will eventually have to litigate. Under federal bankruptcy law the answer is settled and unfavourable: the Supreme Court held inherited IRAs are not retirement funds at all.

Two regimes, and almost every article confuses them

This table is state law, against ordinary judgment creditors, outside bankruptcy. There is a second, entirely separate system that applies inside a bankruptcy case, written in the federal Bankruptcy Code, where retirement funds get their own exemption and IRAs get their own dollar cap. The two regimes can reach opposite answers on the same account.

Which one applies to you depends on what is actually happening — a creditor with a judgment is not a bankruptcy — and, if it is a bankruptcy, on whether your state lets you choose the federal exemption list at all. Congress left that choice to the states. How the two systems interact, and why moving money between accounts can change which one protects you is the page that matters most here.

Georgia is absent for the same reason as on the homestead table: no free official source for the Code exists, so no cell is published.

The line this page does not help you cross

Everything here describes protection that exists because you arranged your affairs before anyone had a claim against you. That is ordinary, lawful planning, and it is what exemption statutes are for.

Moving assets to defeat a creditor who already exists, or one you can reasonably foresee, is a different act with a different name. Courts call it a fraudulent transfer, or in the more modern phrasing a voidable transaction, and the remedy is that the transfer is undone — often alongside consequences considerably worse than the original debt. The two things courts look at are timing and intent, and a transfer made after the car accident, after the demand letter, or after the audit notice tends to answer both questions by itself.

We have not verified each state’s version of that doctrine for this page, and we are not going to summarise fifty of them from memory. The principle is what matters, and it does not vary much: protection is something you build in advance, not something you reach for once a claim has arrived. If a claim has already arrived, the person you need is a lawyer in your state, today — not a website.

Related

Homestead exemption by state is the other half of the picture, and it runs the opposite way — enormous variation, no federal baseline outside bankruptcy. If a rollover is on your mind for other reasons, the fee side of that decision is a separate argument that points a separate way.

Each cell cites the statute it came from, read on the state’s official legislature site except where flagged. Read August 2026. Exemption statutes are amended regularly, and several states amended theirs after 2014. This is a factual compilation of published statutes and constitutional provisions for planning purposes. It is not legal advice, exemption law is intensely fact-specific, and the difference between winning and losing an exemption fight is usually a detail no article can see. Confirm your own position with a lawyer licensed in your state.