This is empirically false. For most young people, Roth is almost always the best option. As you age and advance in your career, traditional IRAs start to make more sense. Generally I would say above the 24% tax bracket the traditional starts to really break away. The brackets 15% and below make up more than 3/4 of the US tax base and Roth is a slam dunk winner there. There are exceptions to every rule and so many variables that everyone really needs to research this for themselves (what state you will retire in, what kind of income mobility you expect over your career, etc.) and there are other benefits of Roth which make it attractive to lower bracket households. They can tap into the contributions for any reason at any time without penalty, which is not ideal, but they are the folks most likely to need it. But the statement that "most" people will do "far" better in a traditional just isn't true. Even if you take out the 0% bracket, which is a lot of people who probably don't have this choice to make, the 10 and 15% still comprise the majority of the tax base. For households at median and probably up to twice that, my advice would be to have a traditional 401k if offered at work, and max out a Roth, and do checkups at life stages to see if conversions make sense. The only thing that's "almost always" true is a that Roth is superior for young people.