I’ve been reading through the final SECURE 2.0 Roth catch-up regs and trying to picture what this actually looks like in real life starting in 2026.
On paper it’s simple: prior-year wages over the threshold → catch-ups must be Roth.
In practice, it feels like this touches a lot of systems that don’t talk cleanly:
payroll → prior-year wage history → contribution coding → plan admin → audits → corrections.
Curious how people think this will go.
Where do we expect the biggest problems?
• payroll pulling the wrong wage data
• employers mis-certifying eligibility
• misclassified catch-ups getting deposited
• cleanup/corrections later
• audit documentation
• something else?
And realistically — who ends up dealing with the mess when it happens?
