If you turned 60 anytime this year, your 401(k) plan quietly unlocked a contribution limit that most of your coworkers have never heard of — and if nobody at HR flagged it during open enrollment, you're probably still capped at the wrong number. For 2026, employees who are 60, 61, 62, or 63 at any point in the calendar year can put away $11,250 in catch-up contributions on top of the standard $24,500 elective deferral limit, for a combined $35,750 in a single 401(k), 403(b), or governmental 457 plan. That's not a typo, and it's not the same catch-up your 55-year-old colleague gets.
The number that changed: $8,000 versus $11,250
Every employee 50 or older has been eligible for a standard catch-up contribution for years. For 2026, the IRS set that figure at $8,000, up from $7,500 in 2025, which brings the total 401(k) ceiling for most people over 50 to $32,500. But SECURE 2.0 carved out a separate, higher tier specifically for the four-year window between 60 and 63 — what the IRS itself now calls the "enhanced" catch-up and everyone else calls the super catch-up. For 2026 that enhanced limit sits at $11,250, unchanged from 2025, which puts the real ceiling for someone in that age band at $35,750 once you add it to the $24,500 base. The gap matters because most payroll systems don't apply it automatically. Plan administrators are required to offer the enhanced limit once you turn 60, but the software behind most benefits portals still defaults new elections — and any election you set up before your 60th birthday — to the flat $8,000 catch-up bucket. Nobody sends you an email when the eligibility switch flips, and the portal itself rarely flags it either. You have to go find the setting yourself, usually buried three menus deep under "contribution elections" or "deferral percentage," and increase it manually before the plan year locks in.
Why this window is only four years, not "50 and up"
SIMPLE IRA and SIMPLE 401(k) plans get their own version of the enhanced catch-up too — $5,250 for 2026 instead of the standard $4,000 — but the eligibility rule is identical: you have to turn 60, 61, 62, or 63 sometime in the plan year. Turn 64 and you drop back down to the standard catch-up amount, because SECURE 2.0 defined the enhanced bracket as exactly those four birth years, not "60 and older." Miss the window because your plan never updated your election, and you don't get to make it up in year five.
Traditional IRAs moved too, just less dramatically. The regular IRA contribution limit is $7,500 for 2026, up from $7,000, and the IRA catch-up for anyone 50 or older rose to $1,100 from a flat $1,000 — the first time that IRA catch-up figure has been indexed for inflation since SECURE 2.0 mandated the adjustment. It's a smaller bump than the 401(k) number, but if you're maxing an IRA alongside a workplace plan, it still adds real dollars to what you can shelter before December 31.
The Roth catch-up rule that started January 1 — and can bounce your contribution
This one is easy to miss until a paycheck rejects it.
Starting this year, anyone who is 50 or older and earned more than $150,000 in Federal Insurance Contributions Act wages from that employer in 2025 is now required to make their catch-up contributions on a Roth, after-tax basis. Pre-tax catch-up contributions are no longer an option for that group, full stop. This isn't a phase-in or a plan-by-plan choice — it's a SECURE 2.0 mandate that took effect for the 2026 plan year, and if your payroll system tries to route a catch-up contribution to your traditional pre-tax bucket after you've crossed that wage threshold, the contribution can get rejected or automatically redirected mid-year, which is worse than just setting it up correctly from the start. The $150,000 threshold is based on your prior year's wages from the specific employer sponsoring the plan — not your household income, not your income from a different job, and not this year's projected earnings. That distinction catches people who got a raise or a bonus that pushed them over the line for the first time; you might not think of yourself as a "$150k earner" if your base salary is $140,000, but a bonus or commission that lands your W-2 Box 1 wages above the threshold triggers the Roth requirement regardless of what your salary letter says. Check your actual 2025 W-2 figure, not your offer letter, before you assume you're exempt.
Whether the Roth requirement is good or bad for you depends entirely on where you expect your tax bracket to land in retirement, and pretending otherwise does you no favors. If you're 61 now and expect to draw down a large traditional IRA balance later, paying tax on the catch-up piece now — while you can still control the bracket it lands in — is usually the better trade than deferring more pre-tax money into an account that will eventually force required minimum distributions at ordinary income rates. Skip the Roth catch-up analysis and you're just accepting whatever your payroll default assigned you, which is not a strategy.
What to actually do before the plan year locks
Most 401(k) plans let you change your deferral election at any point in the year, but the practical deadline is your last paycheck of December — whatever percentage or dollar amount is on file when that check runs is what determines your final 2026 total. Four things are worth checking now, not in November when there's one pay period left to fix a mistake:
- Confirm your plan actually offers the enhanced $11,250 catch-up tier — a small number of plans, mostly older ones that haven't updated their plan documents, still cap everyone 50+ at the standard amount regardless of age, and that's a plan-design gap you can't fix from your own login.
- Check your current year-to-date contribution total against $35,750 (or $32,500 if you're 50–59) so you know exactly how many pay periods are left to close the gap without over-contributing past the limit.
- If your 2025 W-2 wages from this employer topped $150,000, verify your catch-up election is actually routed to the Roth source in the plan, not the traditional one.
- If you're self-employed or your employer's plan doesn't support the enhanced catch-up, a $7,500 IRA plus $1,100 catch-up won't get you anywhere near the 401(k) numbers, but it's still real money you're currently leaving unclaimed.
One caution: front-loading the enhanced catch-up early in the year can accidentally cause you to hit the $24,500 base limit before your employer match has fully vested for the year, and some plans only match contributions dollar-for-dollar up to a percentage of each paycheck — max out too early and you can lose match money on the paychecks after you've capped out. Spread the extra $11,250 evenly across your remaining pay periods rather than dumping it all into Q4, and you keep the match flowing the whole year instead of stopping it early.
Who this doesn't actually help
None of this changes anything if cash flow is already tight enough that maxing the standard limit is a stretch — an extra $11,250 a year is close to $940 a month, and that's not a rounding error for most households even at a strong income. The enhanced catch-up is a tool for people who are already close to maxing the base $24,500 and have real discretionary income to redirect, not a reason to cut into an emergency fund or stop paying down higher-interest debt to chase a tax bracket. If you're choosing between funding this and carrying a credit card balance at 22%, pay off the card first — the catch-up will still be there next year, at whatever the 2027 COLA adjustment sets it to.