Calculate your 2026 RMD for a traditional IRA, 401k, or inherited IRA. Covers SECURE 2.0 rules and the 10-year inherited IRA rule.
Miss your required minimum distribution and the IRS takes 25% of the shortfall off the top, before you ever see the money. That penalty applies the moment the deadline passes. Enter your account balance and birth year below to see exactly what you owe this year, and what happens if you skip it.
Roth 401k accounts are no longer subject to RMDs starting in 2024. If your Roth 401k was rolled over to a Roth IRA, no RMD applies to Roth IRAs either. This calculator is designed for traditional (pre-tax) accounts. To permanently eliminate future RMDs on a pre-tax account, a Roth conversion may be worth exploring.
| Year | Age | Proj. Balance | Factor | RMD | Cumulative RMD |
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Projection assumes 5% annual account growth. Actual results will vary. This is a planning estimate, not a guarantee.
They depend on your specific relationship to the original owner and involve open IRS regulatory guidance (Proposed Regulations RIN 1545-BQ98), so we do not model them here. See our Methodology page for how we decide what each calculator covers.
What we can tell you: most non-spouse beneficiaries who inherited after January 1, 2020 must fully distribute the account by December 31 of the year containing the 10th anniversary of the original owner's death. For your specific situation, consult a tax professional.
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A required minimum distribution (RMD) is the minimum amount the IRS requires you to withdraw each year from a traditional IRA, 401k, SEP IRA, SIMPLE IRA, or similar pre-tax retirement account once you reach your required beginning date. The goal, from the government's perspective, is straightforward: you deferred taxes on contributions and growth for decades. At some point, those deferred taxes come due. RMDs are how the IRS collects.
Miss the deadline and the penalty is a 25% excise tax on the shortfall. That number dropped from 50% under the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022, but 25% is still a significant hit on money you were going to withdraw anyway.
This is where a lot of people get tripped up. The start age has shifted three times in recent decades.
Your first RMD must be taken by April 1 of the year following the year you reach your required beginning age. Every subsequent RMD must be taken by December 31 of that same year. If you delay your first RMD to the April 1 deadline, you will have two distributions in the same year: your delayed first-year distribution and your second-year distribution. That bunching can push you into a higher bracket and, depending on your income level, may trigger an IRMAA Medicare surcharge.
Starting in 2024, Roth 401k accounts are no longer subject to RMDs. Before 2024, Roth 401ks were one of the few Roth-type accounts that required annual distributions. SECURE 2.0 eliminated that requirement, aligning Roth 401k treatment with Roth IRA treatment.
If you have a Roth 401k and are uncertain whether RMDs apply, they do not (for the 2024 tax year forward). Roth IRAs have never been subject to RMDs during the owner's lifetime. If you converted or rolled your Roth 401k into a Roth IRA, the Roth IRA rules apply: no RMDs required.
Under SECURE 2.0, the penalty for a missed or shortfall RMD is a 25% excise tax on the amount not distributed. That rate was 50% before SECURE 2.0. The IRS also introduced a correction window: if you take the missed distribution within the correction window (typically two years), the penalty may be reduced to 10%.
Importantly, correcting the missed RMD does not eliminate the distribution requirement. You still have to take the distribution. The correction window applies to the penalty rate only. Consult a tax professional if you have missed an RMD: the correction procedures have specific timing requirements.
If you are age 70.5 or older and charitably inclined, a Qualified Charitable Distribution (QCD) may be the most tax-efficient way to satisfy your RMD. Under IRC Section 408(d)(8), an IRA holder age 70.5 or older may direct up to $111,000 in 2026 directly from the IRA to a qualified charity. That distribution counts toward your RMD but is excluded from your taxable income. The limit has risen every year since SECURE 2.0 made it inflation-indexed starting in 2024: $105,000 in 2024, $108,000 in 2025, and $111,000 in 2026.
The QCD does not show up as income on your return. This may matter more than it appears: taxable RMDs push up your adjusted gross income, which determines your Medicare IRMAA surcharge bracket, the taxable portion of your Social Security benefits, and your eligibility for various deductions and credits. A QCD keeps the distribution from touching any of those thresholds.
If you have multiple traditional IRAs, you calculate the RMD for each account separately, but you can satisfy the total from any single account (or combination). The aggregation rule applies to traditional IRAs, rollover IRAs, SEP IRAs, and SIMPLE IRAs.
401k accounts are different. If you have multiple former-employer 401k plans, each plan generally requires its own RMD. You cannot aggregate across 401k plans. If you still work for an employer at RMD age and have not yet retired, you may be able to delay RMDs on that employer's 401k. Consult the plan administrator.
The SECURE Act (2019) fundamentally changed inherited IRA rules for most beneficiaries who inherit on or after January 1, 2020. The old "stretch IRA" (which allowed beneficiaries to spread distributions over their own lifetime) was eliminated for most non-spouse beneficiaries. In its place: the 10-year rule.
Under the 10-year rule, most non-spouse beneficiaries must distribute the entire inherited account by December 31 of the year containing the 10th anniversary of the original owner's death. There are exceptions for "eligible designated beneficiaries" (surviving spouses, disabled individuals, chronically ill individuals, minor children, and beneficiaries who are not more than 10 years younger than the deceased owner).
The question of whether annual distributions are required within the 10-year period is resolved: the IRS published final regulations (T.D. 10001) in the Federal Register on July 19, 2024, retaining the annual-RMD requirement as originally proposed. Beneficiaries who are not "eligible designated beneficiaries" must take annual RMDs in years 1 through 9 whenever the original account owner died on or after their required beginning date, then empty the account by the end of year 10. The IRS separately waived the penalty for missed annual distributions in 2021 through 2024 (Notices 2022-53, 2023-54, and 2024-35) while the rule was being finalized, but the requirement itself applies for distribution calendar years beginning on or after January 1, 2025 (source: Federal Register, T.D. 10001, 89 FR 58886). Consult a tax professional on your specific inherited IRA situation, since eligible-designated-beneficiary status and the original owner's age at death both change which rule applies.
The default scenario ($350,000 traditional IRA, born 1951, 22% federal bracket, no spouse toggle) walks through the full mechanics:
Switching the same $500,000 balance to an owner born in 1950 (age 76) with a spouse born in 1962 (age 64, more than 10 years younger) triggers the Joint Life Expectancy Table instead of the Uniform Lifetime Table. Per IRS Publication 590-B, Appendix C, the factor for that exact age combination is 25.2, a meaningfully more favorable number than the Uniform Lifetime factor of 23.7 that would apply at owner age 76 alone. The RMD drops to $500,000 ÷ 25.2 = $19,841, about $1,256 less than the $21,097 the Uniform Lifetime Table alone would have produced on the same balance. That gap is the entire point of the younger-spouse exception: it lets the account stretch out longer because two life expectancies, not one, are being averaged against. The calculator above uses this same corrected 25.2 factor and returns $19,841 for this exact combination.
This calculator's Joint Life Expectancy Table is built for owner ages 70 through 80 and spouse ages 55 through 80. If your combination falls outside that window (an owner past 80, or a spouse younger than 55), the calculator silently falls back to the Uniform Lifetime Table instead of the true Joint Life factor. The Uniform Lifetime result is always a larger, more conservative RMD than the real Joint Life table would produce for a much-younger spouse, so if your situation falls outside the built-in table, treat the result as a safe upper bound and pull your exact factor from IRS Publication 590-B Appendix C directly.
The optional 10-year projection chart grows the account balance at a constant 5% annually and applies the same federal bracket percentage to every year's RMD. Real accounts do not grow in a straight line, and RMDs stacking on other income over a decade routinely push a household into a higher bracket than the one they started in, especially once both spouses are taking RMDs. Treat the 10-year chart as a directional shape (RMDs rise as the divisor shrinks faster than typical growth replaces the withdrawn amount), not a specific dollar forecast for any single future year.
The RMD amount itself is federal law and does not change by state. The tax and after-tax figures on this page are federal-bracket estimates only. States that tax retirement account withdrawals as ordinary income add their own rate on top of every after-tax number shown; states with no income tax, or that exempt retirement income, do not change the after-tax figure at all.
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