Contribution limits and allowances: what changed
Last updated: November 13, 2025
The entries here are few, because a limit change is only worth recording when it is large enough to alter a savings plan. Routine annual indexation is not.
Germany doubled the saver's allowance in January 2023, from €801 to €1,000 for individuals and €1,602 to €2,000 for couples — the first increase since 2009, and enough to shelter the dividend income of a portfolio in the low six figures. Switzerland went further in January 2025 by allowing retroactive pillar 3a buy-ins, letting savers close up to ten years of missed contributions; that is not an annual limit change but a one-off expansion of lifetime contribution room, and it is the single most valuable entry in this section for anyone with an irregular income history.
Canada supplies both directions. The TFSA annual limit was rolled back to $5,500 in 2016 after one year at $10,000, and the Home Buyers' Plan withdrawal limit was raised to $60,000 in April 2024. The FHSA, launched in 2023, added an entirely new contribution room of its own.
In the United States, SECURE 2.0 changed catch-up contribution rules and their tax treatment from December 2022 — the kind of change that matters most to savers in the last decade before retirement, where the contribution room actually binds.
Changes in this section
- Retroactive pillar 3a buy-ins allowedSwitzerland
- SECURE 2.0 Act signed into lawUnited States
Rules change; the arithmetic does not. Put your own contributions, rate and horizon into the calculator and see what a change is worth over twenty years.
Open the calculatorBy country
The 27.5% KESt, crypto pulled inside the ordinary tax net, MiFID II — and a holding-period exemption promised by two governments and enacted by neither.
The FHSA, rising TFSA room and Home Buyers' Plan limits, the CPP enhancement, the DSC ban — and a capital gains hike announced, then cancelled.
MiFID II and PRIIPs, the payment-for-order-flow ban, ELTIF 2.0 and PEPP, and the Savings and Investments Union now being built on top of them.
The 2018 fund tax reform and the Vorabpauschale, a doubled saver's allowance, the ETF savings-plan boom, and two retirement reforms arriving in 2027.
PIR accounts and BTP Valore, a crypto tax regime rewritten twice in three years, and the auto-enrolment that now moves severance pay into pension funds.
Retroactive pillar 3a buy-ins, AHV 21, the end of negative interest rates, the abolished imputed rental value, and the reforms voters turned down.
The SECURE Acts, commissions falling to zero, spot Bitcoin ETFs, the TCJA and its 2025 sequel, and the fiduciary rules that courts struck down twice.
By topic
How investment income is taxed keeps moving: allowances and rates, the Vorabpauschale, new crypto regimes, and Canada's cancelled capital gains hike.
The vehicles people actually retire on: SECURE 2.0, pillar 3a buy-ins, the CPP enhancement, TFR auto-enrolment and Germany's new retirement depots.
MiFID II, PRIIPs, FIDLEG, the payment-for-order-flow ban and the fiduciary rules that failed in court — how the selling of products was rewritten.
ETF savings plans, spot Bitcoin ETFs, PIR and FHSA accounts, BTP Valore and ELTIF 2.0: what savers can buy, and at what cost, keeps widening.
The end of negative interest rates, the inflation squeeze, T+1 settlement and zero-commission trading — shifts that changed long-term arithmetic.
Where standard advice was revised: trading costs at zero, banned sales charges, standardised fund disclosure, and what negative real rates did to cash.