Required Minimum Distributions in 2026: The Complete Guide to RMDs, the Taxes They Trigger, and How to Plan Around Them

For most of your working life, the tax code rewards you for putting money into a traditional retirement account and leaving it there. The deduction is immediate, the growth is tax-deferred, and the compounding is left undisturbed for decades. Required minimum distributions are the moment the arrangement reverses. The government deferred the tax; it did not forgive it. Beginning at a specific age, the law requires you to start pulling money out of those accounts whether you need the income or not — and to pay ordinary income tax on every dollar as it comes out.

Here is the part that surprises people: by the time the first required distribution lands, most of the planning that could have softened it is already behind you. The RMD itself is not the problem. Once you own the accounts, the distributions are non-negotiable — there is no strategy that makes a required distribution optional. The real work is everything that happens before the first one is due: shaping the size of the balance that the distribution will be calculated against, and positioning the rest of your income so the distribution doesn’t push you into a higher bracket, a Medicare surcharge, or a larger tax on your Social Security than you would otherwise owe.

This guide covers the full picture — how RMDs are calculated under the current rules, the cascade of secondary taxes a large distribution can set off, the levers available to manage all of it, and what happens to these accounts when they pass to the next generation. It is written for the household that has done the saving and now wants to keep as much of it as possible working toward what matters, rather than handed over to an avoidable tax.

The mechanics: what an RMD actually is

A required minimum distribution is the smallest amount the IRS will allow you to withdraw from a tax-deferred retirement account each year once you reach the required age. It exists because the accounts were funded with pre-tax dollars; the deferral was always meant to be temporary, and the RMD is the mechanism that eventually collects the deferred tax.

Which accounts are subject to RMDs. The rules apply to traditional IRAs, SEP IRAs, SIMPLE IRAs, and employer plans funded with pre-tax money — traditional 401(k)s, 403(b)s, and governmental 457(b)s. The common thread is pre-tax funding: every one of these accounts gave you a deduction on the way in, so the law wants its distribution on the way out.

Which accounts are not. Roth IRAs have never been subject to required distributions during the original owner’s lifetime, because the money went in after tax — there is no deferred tax to collect. And as of 2024, under the SECURE 2.0 Act, Roth balances inside employer plans (a Roth 401(k) or Roth 403(b)) are also exempt from lifetime RMDs. Before that change, a quirk in the law forced Roth 401(k) holders to take distributions they wouldn’t have owed on a Roth IRA — which is why rolling a Roth 401(k) to a Roth IRA used to be standard housekeeping. That specific reason to roll has now disappeared, though others may remain.

This distinction — pre-tax balances are subject to RMDs, Roth balances are not — is the entire foundation of proactive RMD planning. Every dollar you can move from the first column to the second before your required beginning date is a dollar that will never generate a required distribution.

The age trigger: 73 now, 75 later

The age at which RMDs begin has moved twice in recent years, and the current rule depends on your year of birth:

• Born 1951–1959: RMDs begin at age 73.
• Born 1960 or later: RMDs begin at age 75, starting in 2033.

The SECURE 2.0 Act set this two-step schedule. If you were born in 1959 or earlier, your required beginning age is 73. If you were born in 1960 or later, you get two additional years of deferral, with the age-75 trigger taking effect in 2033 when the first of that cohort arrives.

Those extra years are not a footnote. The gap between your retirement date and your required beginning date is the single most valuable planning window you have for managing lifetime taxes on these accounts — and moving the trigger from 73 to 75 hands a large group of savers two more years of it.

The first-year deadline quirk

Your first RMD has a special deadline that trips up a meaningful number of people. For the year you turn your required age, you may delay that first distribution until April 1 of the following year — the “required beginning date.” Every RMD after that is due by December 31 of its own year.

The trap is that delaying the first one doesn’t eliminate it; it just stacks it on top of the second. If you turn 73 in 2026 and wait until April 1, 2027 to take your first RMD, you’ll take your second RMD (for 2027) by December 31, 2027 — two taxable distributions landing in the same calendar year. For a household near a bracket edge or an IRMAA threshold, doubling up can cost far more than the modest deferral was worth. The decision of whether to delay that first distribution should be made on the math, not the calendar.

The penalty for missing one

Historically, the penalty for failing to take an RMD was a brutal 50% excise tax on the shortfall — one of the harshest penalties in the entire code. SECURE 2.0 reduced it to 25%, and further to 10% if the shortfall is corrected within a two-year window. The penalty is still steep enough to take seriously, but the reduction — and the correction window — gives a taxpayer who genuinely missed one a path to substantially reduce the damage by acting quickly and filing the appropriate form.

How the number is calculated

The RMD for a given year is a straightforward formula with two inputs:

The balance is the fair market value of the account on December 31 of the prior year. The factor comes from an IRS life expectancy table, and for most people that table is the Uniform Lifetime Table. The factor declines as you age, which means the fraction of the account you’re required to withdraw rises every year — a distribution that starts at roughly 3.8% of the balance in the first year climbs steadily into the high single digits and beyond as you move through your 80s and 90s.

A simplified illustration: a $1,000,000 IRA at the first required age, divided by the age-73 Uniform Lifetime factor of 26.5, produces a required distribution of about $37,700 — roughly 3.8% of the balance. The same account a decade later — even if the balance hasn’t grown — produces a substantially larger required distribution, because the factor has shrunk. The required percentage is designed to accelerate, drawing the account down faster the older you get.

(The age-73 Uniform Lifetime factor of 26.5 and the factors for subsequent ages are published by the IRS in Publication 590-B and change only when the IRS revises the table; the divisor for a given age should always be read from the current table when the distribution is calculated.)

One exception worth knowing: if your sole beneficiary is a spouse who is more than ten years younger than you, you use the Joint Life and Last Survivor Table instead, which produces a larger factor — and therefore a smaller required distribution. It’s a narrow rule, but for couples with a significant age gap it can meaningfully reduce the required amount each year.

Aggregation: where you can combine and where you can’t

If you own more than one IRA, you calculate the RMD for each account separately, then add them up — but you may withdraw the total from any one IRA or any combination of them. The IRS treats your IRAs as aggregable for this purpose.

Employer plans do not work this way. Each 401(k), 403(b), or 457(b) calculates and pays its own RMD; you cannot satisfy a 401(k)’s required distribution by pulling extra from an IRA, or from a different employer plan. (403(b)s have their own limited aggregation rule among themselves, but they cannot be combined with IRAs or 401(k)s.) For someone retiring with several old employer accounts, this is a common and expensive source of missed distributions — and a strong argument for consolidating accounts well before the required age, so the calculation is simpler and the chance of a costly oversight is lower.

The still-working exception

If you’re still employed past your required age and you don’t own more than 5% of the company, you can generally delay RMDs from that current employer’s plan until you actually retire. The exception applies only to the plan at the company where you still work — it does nothing for old 401(k)s from prior employers or for any IRA, both of which remain on the normal schedule. It’s a useful lever for someone who keeps working into their 70s, but a narrow one.

Why a large RMD hurts: the cascade

If required distributions were taxed in isolation, the planning would be simple. They’re not. A traditional IRA distribution is ordinary income, and ordinary income sits at the base of a stack of other calculations — each of which can be pushed to a worse outcome by a distribution you were forced to take. This is the part that separates RMD planning from RMD arithmetic, and it’s why the work has to happen before the distributions begin.

It stacks on top of everything else

By the time RMDs start, most retirees already have Social Security flowing, often a pension, frequently rental or investment income. The RMD lands on top of that base. Because the U.S. has a progressive bracket structure, those forced dollars are taxed at your highest marginal rate — not your average rate. A household comfortably in the 22% bracket on its other income can find a large RMD spilling into the 24% bracket and beyond. The distribution you didn’t want is taxed at the rate you’d least like to pay.

It can raise the tax on your Social Security

The taxation of Social Security benefits is governed by “provisional income” — a measure that includes your other income plus half your benefits. As provisional income crosses certain thresholds, a rising share of your Social Security becomes taxable, up to a maximum of 85% of the benefit. A large RMD inflates provisional income directly, and for a household sitting near a threshold it can drag more of an otherwise-untaxed Social Security check into the taxable column. The result is an effective marginal rate on the RMD that’s higher than the bracket alone would suggest, because the same distribution is simultaneously taxable itself and causing previously-untaxed benefits to become taxable.

It can trigger Medicare’s IRMAA surcharges

This is the cascade effect that catches the most people off guard, because the surcharge is structured as a cliff rather than a phase-in, and because it runs on a two-year delay. Medicare Part B and Part D premiums carry an income-related monthly adjustment amount (IRMAA) for higher-income beneficiaries — and crossing a threshold by a single dollar moves you to the next surcharge tier for an entire year. Because IRMAA is based on your modified adjusted gross income from two years prior, the RMD you take at 73 sets your surcharge at 75, often long after the distribution has been spent and forgotten.

A required distribution that pushes MAGI just over an IRMAA line can cost hundreds of dollars per month in additional premiums per spouse — a tax in everything but name. We cover the threshold structure, the two-year lookback, and the appeals process in depth in our guide to how IRMAA works in 2026; for the purposes of RMD planning, the point is simply that the distribution doesn’t end at the income tax. It can quietly reset your Medicare premiums two years down the line.

It can interact with new deductions and other thresholds

A large distribution raises modified adjusted gross income, and MAGI is the gatekeeper for a growing list of provisions. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, taxpayers 65 and older may claim an additional senior deduction — but it phases out as income rises, beginning at $75,000 of MAGI for single filers and $150,000 for married couples filing jointly, and disappearing entirely at $175,000 and $250,000 respectively. The senior deduction is a below-the-line deduction, so claiming it doesn’t lower AGI and has no direct effect on Social Security taxation or Medicare premiums — but a required distribution that pushes a household through that phaseout range doesn’t just get taxed; it can strip away a deduction the household would otherwise have kept, raising the effective marginal rate on the distribution well above the stated bracket. The senior deduction is scheduled to run from 2025 through 2028, which makes the next few years a particularly pointed window for managing income around it.

The broader lesson is that in a tax code full of MAGI-based thresholds, a large RMD is rarely “just” the income tax on the distribution. It’s the income tax plus whatever else that higher MAGI happens to trigger.

The surviving-spouse compression

There’s one more dimension that often gets missed in RMD planning, and it’s among the most important: what happens when one spouse dies.

When a married couple becomes a surviving individual, most of the retirement income doesn’t fall the way people expect. The survivor keeps the larger of the two Social Security benefits, pensions with survivor elections keep paying, and — critically — the portfolio and its required distributions are largely unaffected by the death. But the tax framework changes overnight. The survivor files as a single taxpayer the following year, with brackets that are roughly half as wide and a standard deduction that’s substantially smaller. The same retirement income that was comfortable under joint brackets gets compressed into far less favorable single-filer brackets — and the IRMAA thresholds for a single filer sit well below the joint ones, so the surcharge exposure jumps at the same time.

In other words, the RMD that was manageable for a couple can become genuinely punishing for the survivor, taxed at higher rates and triggering surcharges that the joint thresholds would have absorbed. This is one of the strongest arguments for doing Roth conversion work while both spouses are alive and filing jointly — every dollar moved to Roth during the joint years is a dollar that won’t generate a required distribution against the compressed single-filer brackets later. We walk through this dynamic in detail in our article on the widow’s tax penalty, and it deserves a central place in any RMD conversation for a married couple.

Planning lever #1: Roth conversions in the gap years

The most powerful tool for managing required distributions isn’t deployed when the distributions begin — it’s deployed in the years before they do. A Roth conversion moves money from a traditional (pre-tax) account to a Roth account, paying ordinary income tax on the converted amount today in exchange for two things: tax-free growth from that point forward, and — directly relevant here — a permanent reduction in the pre-tax balance that future RMDs are calculated against.

The logic is most compelling in what we’d call the gap years: the window between when employment income stops and when required distributions (and often Social Security) begin. For many households, this is a stretch of unusually low taxable income — the paycheck has ended, but the forced distributions haven’t started. Filling those years’ lower brackets with deliberate Roth conversions accomplishes two things at once. It uses up bracket space that would otherwise go to waste, and it shrinks the traditional balance so that every future RMD — calculated as a fraction of that balance — is smaller. Done across several years, a conversion strategy can meaningfully flatten the RMD that would otherwise spike once distributions begin, keeping the household out of higher brackets and below surcharge thresholds for the rest of retirement.

The discipline is in the sizing. Because a conversion is itself ordinary income in the year you do it, an oversized conversion can trigger the very problems you’re trying to avoid — pushing MAGI through an IRMAA threshold, into a higher bracket, or past the senior deduction phaseout. The goal is usually to convert up to the top of a target bracket or up to just below a threshold, not through it. This is precise, year-by-year work, and it’s exactly the kind of multi-year coordination we lay out in our guide to Roth conversion planning under OBBBA.

It’s also worth naming the legacy dimension: because Roth IRAs carry no lifetime RMDs and heirs inherit them tax-free, conversion work done in the gap years isn’t only about your own brackets — it’s about whether your children inherit a pre-tax account that forces them into taxable distributions during their peak earning years, or a Roth account they can let grow. We return to that below.

Planning lever #2: Qualified charitable distributions

For the charitably inclined, the qualified charitable distribution is the single cleanest tool in the entire RMD toolkit — and it’s the one most underused relative to its value.

How a QCD works

A qualified charitable distribution lets you send money directly from your IRA to a qualified charity, and that amount — up to an annual limit — is excluded from your income entirely. Critically, a QCD counts toward your required minimum distribution. If your RMD for the year is $40,000 and you direct $40,000 to charity via QCD, your RMD is satisfied in full and none of it appears in your adjusted gross income. The distribution happened — the IRS got its required withdrawal — but it never touched your tax return as income.

For 2026, the QCD limit is $111,000 per person per year (the figure is indexed for inflation). A married couple where each spouse has their own IRA can each do a QCD up to that limit from their respective accounts.

Why “off-AGI” beats a deduction

Here’s the distinction that makes the QCD so powerful, and it’s subtle enough that it’s worth being explicit. A normal charitable gift — writing a check to the same charity — gives you an itemized deduction. A QCD gives you an exclusion from income. Those are not the same thing, and the difference matters enormously in retirement.

A deduction only helps if you itemize, and with today’s large standard deduction many retirees no longer do — meaning a cash gift may produce no tax benefit at all. More importantly, a deduction reduces taxable income after AGI is calculated, which means it does nothing to lower the MAGI figure that drives IRMAA surcharges, Social Security taxation, and the various phaseouts discussed above. A QCD, by contrast, keeps the money out of AGI in the first place. It’s not a deduction against a number that’s already been computed — it prevents the number from rising at all. For a retiree managing against an IRMAA threshold or trying to keep Social Security taxation down, satisfying part or all of an RMD through a QCD is often worth far more than the same gift made by check.

The age-70½ quirk

One genuinely counterintuitive detail: the age at which you become eligible to make a QCD is 70½ — which is younger than the age at which RMDs begin. This is a holdover from when 70½ was itself the RMD age, and it was never moved when the RMD age rose. The practical consequence is a multi-year window, from 70½ until your required beginning date, during which you can make QCDs that reduce your IRA balance before RMDs even start — quietly shrinking the balance that future required distributions will be calculated against, while supporting causes you care about. For a charitably inclined household, beginning QCDs in that early window is a quietly effective way to get ahead of the RMD curve.

Bunching charitable intent through QCDs

The QCD also opens a timing strategy. Because the standard deduction is now large enough that many households only itemize in certain years, charitable giving has become something to time rather than spread evenly. A household can concentrate — “bunch” — several years of intended giving into specific years to clear the itemizing threshold, while using QCDs in the off years to keep giving in a way that delivers a tax benefit (the AGI exclusion) even when not itemizing. Coordinating the QCD against bracket-filling Roth conversions and the itemize-or-not decision is where a charitable household can extract real, repeatable value year after year — and it’s a natural complement to the broader bunching mechanics we cover in our work on tax strategy and timing of deductions.

Planning lever #3: QLACs and deferring part of the base

A more specialized tool: a qualified longevity annuity contract (QLAC) lets you move a portion of your IRA into a deferred annuity that begins paying later in life — and the amount placed in the QLAC is removed from the balance used to calculate RMDs until the annuity’s payments begin (which can be deferred to as late as age 85). For 2026, the lifetime amount you can place in a QLAC is $210,000. The appeal is twofold: you carve that amount out of the RMD base for years, reducing required distributions in your 70s and early 80s, and you create a guaranteed income stream that begins precisely when longevity risk is highest. It’s not a universal solution — annuitizing assets has trade-offs around liquidity, inflation, and the insurer’s credit — but for the right household, a QLAC is a legitimate way to both defer required distributions and address the risk of outliving the portfolio.

Planning lever #4: Coordinating which account you tap

RMDs don’t exist in a vacuum; they sit inside the larger question of which accounts a retiree should draw from, and in what order. The conventional sequencing wisdom — taxable accounts first, then tax-deferred, then Roth last — is a reasonable default, but it interacts directly with RMD planning. The years before RMDs begin are precisely the years a thoughtful withdrawal strategy uses to draw down (or convert) tax-deferred balances at low rates, so that the eventual required distributions are smaller. Treating the RMD as one piece of a coordinated, multi-account withdrawal plan — rather than an isolated annual event — is what turns a series of forced distributions into a managed, intentional drawdown.

When RMDs pass to the next generation: inherited accounts

RMD planning doesn’t end at your own distributions. What happens to these accounts when they pass to heirs has changed dramatically, and it reshapes the case for the lifetime planning described above.

The end of the “stretch” and the 10-year rule

For most of the last few decades, a non-spouse beneficiary who inherited an IRA could “stretch” distributions over their own life expectancy — spreading the tax over decades and letting the account grow. The SECURE Act ended that for most beneficiaries. Now, a non-eligible designated beneficiary — which includes most adult children — must generally empty the entire inherited account by the end of the tenth year after the original owner’s death. The stretch is gone; the tax that was once spreadable over a lifetime is now compressed into a decade.

This matters enormously for when that decade lands. An adult child who inherits a large traditional IRA in their 50s — often their peak earning years — must draw it down on top of an already-high income, frequently at the highest marginal rates of their life. A pre-tax account that felt like a gift can arrive as a ten-year tax burden falling at the worst possible time.

The 2024 twist: annual RMDs within the ten years

The 10-year rule came with a wrinkle that took years and several rounds of IRS guidance to settle. Under the final regulations, if the original owner had already begun taking their own RMDs before death, the beneficiary must take annual distributions in years one through nine and empty the account by year ten. If the owner died before their required beginning date, the beneficiary can wait and take it all by year ten with no required annual amounts in between. The distinction turns on whether the deceased had reached their required beginning date — and it means inherited-IRA beneficiaries can’t assume they have a decade of flexibility; many are now required to take something every year.

(The inherited-account rules are nuanced and have been the subject of multiple rounds of IRS guidance; the specific requirements for a given inheritance should be confirmed against the current regulations and the particular facts.)

Eligible designated beneficiaries: the exceptions

A narrower category — eligible designated beneficiaries — is exempt from the 10-year compression and retains the ability to stretch distributions. This group includes a surviving spouse, a minor child of the account owner (only until age 21, after which the 10-year clock starts), a disabled or chronically ill individual, and a beneficiary not more than ten years younger than the deceased. For everyone outside that list, the 10-year rule applies.

Spousal options

A surviving spouse has the most flexibility of any beneficiary. They can generally treat the inherited IRA as their own — rolling it into their own IRA, using their own age for the RMD schedule, and naming new beneficiaries — or they can keep it as an inherited IRA, which is sometimes preferable if the survivor is under 59½ and needs penalty-free access. Choosing between these is a real decision with real consequences, and it should be made deliberately rather than by default.

Why this strengthens the case for lifetime planning

Put the inherited rules next to the lifetime planning, and a single theme emerges: the pre-tax balance you don’t address during your lifetime doesn’t disappear — it passes to your heirs as a compressed, often poorly-timed tax bill. Roth conversions done in your own gap years don’t only smooth your own brackets; they convert a future ten-year tax burden on your children into a tax-free inherited Roth they can let grow for a decade. For households focused on what they leave behind, this turns RMD planning from a personal tax exercise into an act of estate planning.

Bringing it together

Required minimum distributions are, by design, unavoidable. Once the accounts exist, the distributions will come, and they’ll be taxed as ordinary income on a schedule the IRS controls. What’s not fixed is everything around them: the size of the balance the distribution is calculated against, the bracket it lands in, the surcharges and phaseouts it does or doesn’t trigger, and the tax burden it eventually passes to the next generation.

Nearly all of that is shaped in the years before the first distribution is due. Roth conversions in the gap years to shrink the base. QCDs to satisfy distributions without inflating AGI — started as early as 70½ to get ahead of the curve. A QLAC to carve out part of the base where it fits. Account sequencing that treats the RMD as one element of a coordinated drawdown rather than an isolated event. And conversion work done while both spouses are alive, to protect the survivor from the compression that follows. None of these are exotic. They’re the ordinary tools of a well-run plan — but they only work if someone is looking eighteen months and ten years ahead, not reacting in April.

That forward look is the entire point. A tax preparer can tell you, after the fact, that a distribution pushed you into a surcharge. A planner’s job is to have seen it coming and restructured the years before so it never happened — the distinction we draw in our piece on what a tax strategist actually does. RMDs are where that difference shows up most clearly, because by the time they arrive, the planning window has mostly closed. The households that keep the most of these accounts are the ones who started managing them long before the first required dollar came out.

Common Questions About RMDs

At what age do RMDs start in 2026? Required minimum distributions begin at age 73 for anyone born between 1951 and 1959. For those born in 1960 or later, the starting age is 75, beginning in 2033. The age was set by the SECURE 2.0 Act, which raised it in two steps.

How is my RMD calculated? Divide your account balance as of December 31 of the prior year by a life expectancy factor from the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table. At age 73, that factor is 26.5 — so a $1,000,000 IRA produces a first-year required distribution of about $37,700, roughly 3.8% of the balance. The factor shrinks each year, so the required percentage rises as you age.

What happens if I miss an RMD? The penalty is a 25% excise tax on the amount you failed to withdraw — reduced to 10% if you correct the shortfall within a two-year window and file the appropriate form. This is far less severe than the old 50% penalty, but still steep enough to take seriously.

Do Roth accounts have RMDs? Roth IRAs have never required distributions during the original owner’s lifetime. As of 2024, Roth balances inside employer plans — a Roth 401(k) or Roth 403(b) — are also exempt from lifetime RMDs under the SECURE 2.0 Act. Inherited Roth accounts, however, are still subject to distribution rules.

Can I avoid the tax on my RMD by giving it to charity? Yes — through a qualified charitable distribution (QCD). Money sent directly from your IRA to a qualified charity counts toward your RMD and is excluded from your income entirely, up to $111,000 per person in 2026. Because it stays out of adjusted gross income, a QCD also avoids inflating the figure that drives Medicare IRMAA surcharges and Social Security taxation. You can begin making QCDs at age 70½ — earlier than RMDs themselves begin.

How can I reduce my future RMDs? The most common levers are deployed before RMDs begin: Roth conversions in the lower-income years between retirement and your required beginning date shrink the pre-tax balance that future distributions are calculated against; qualified charitable distributions (available from age 70½) draw the balance down while supporting causes you care about; and a qualified longevity annuity contract can carve up to $210,000 out of the RMD base for years. Each works best as part of a coordinated, multi-year plan rather than a last-minute reaction.

What are the rules when someone inherits an IRA? Most non-spouse beneficiaries — including most adult children — must empty an inherited IRA by the end of the tenth year after the original owner’s death. Under IRS final regulations effective in 2025, if the original owner had already started their own RMDs, the beneficiary must also take an annual distribution in each of years one through nine. If the owner died before their required beginning date, no annual distributions are required, but the account must still be emptied by year ten. A narrower group of eligible designated beneficiaries — a surviving spouse, a minor child of the owner (until age 21), a disabled or chronically ill individual, or someone not more than ten years younger than the deceased — can still stretch distributions over their life expectancy. A surviving spouse generally has the most flexibility, including the option to treat the inherited IRA as their own.

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