Couldn't contribute to Roth IRA due to salary; can I contribute to Rollover IRA instead?

There are several important considerations regarding contributing to an IRA.

Roth vs Traditional. Which you generally seem aware of. In addition there is deductible vs non-deductible when considering a traditional IRA.

You mention that you have a rollover IRA. That is a common term that you see. That means the funds in that account came from a 401(k). You may have decided to do that when you left a company, or if the 401(k) account was small the old company could have required you to roll over the funds out of the 401(k). A rollover account is either Traditional or Roth. Yes you can have both kinds depending on the type of money that was in your 401(k).

When a person make too much in a year to contribute funds to a Roth IRA there is a option to do a Backdoor Roth conversion.

The process is simple:

• Contribute after tax money into a IRA. There will be no deduction from this. It still has to be less than or equal to the the annual contribution limit.
• A few days later convert the funds from Traditional IRA to a Roth. You will have to count any growth in the fund as taxable income, and pay taxes on the income. The good news is that the amount of income will be small because it was only a few days.

There is one very important complexity. The presence of IRA accounts with pre-tax money. This is the money in a rollover traditional IRA plus any other accounts where you had deductible IRA money. The tax code requires the IRS to take into consideration all your traditional IRA funds when determining how much of the converted money has already been taxed.

For Example:

• 60K in a traditional IRA
• 40K in a Rollover traditional IRA
• 7K in non-deductible IRA contributions
• $100 in growth connected to the non-deductible funds.

You want to convert $7100 from the deducible account to a Roth. You would want to say the taxable income is $100. But the tax law says that 100K of the 107,100 has never been taxed.

The non-taxed part is 100,000 / 107,100 or approximately 93.37%. That means the IRS will tax 93.37% of the $7100. That translates to $6,629.32 of taxable income on the $7,100 conversion.

It doesn't matter how you split the funds within the traditional IRA accounts, tax law makes you consider all of the funds.

Since it is after April 15th (it is now May 2025) any contributions now would have to follow the 2025 tax law. To know if you qualify for which types of contributions you might have to wait until you calculate your taxes in early 2026 before making any contributions.

Important note: when the tax law mentions IRA balances are to be used to calculate how much of a Roth conversion is taxable, they mean all Traditional IRA accounts across all your financial accounts, not just the ones at one financial company.