RMD Rules by Birth Year

Your start age is set by your birth year, not by when you retire

Required minimum distributions begin in the year you reach the applicable age for your cohort. Congress has moved the line three times in a decade, which is why siblings five years apart can owe their first RMD at different ages:

The first RMD alone may be delayed to April 1 of the year after you reach the start age. Every later RMD is due December 31. The amount is always the same recipe: prior December 31 balance divided by the Uniform Lifetime Table factor for your age, which our RMD calculator runs with your balance.

The April 1 trap, with numbers

Delaying the first RMD feels like a free year of deferral and is usually a bill instead. Take a $500,000 IRA and a first RMD of $18,868 at 73. Delay it into the following year and that year carries two RMDs, the deferred $18,868 plus the age-74 distribution of about $19,600 on the remaining balance, roughly $38,500 of forced ordinary income in one tax year. Stacked on Social Security and any pension, that can lift a bracket, raise the share of benefits taxed, and set a higher Medicare IRMAA tier two years later. The deferral is a tool for people whose income drops sharply the next year, for instance a final high-salary year overlapping the start age, and a trap for everyone else.

Still working? The exception that actually helps

If you are still employed by the company sponsoring your 401(k), that plan's RMDs can wait until you retire, provided you do not own more than 5% of the business. The exception applies only to the current employer's plan: IRAs and old employers' plans start on schedule regardless. Rolling an old 401(k) into the current employer's plan before your start age is the standard, legal way to shelter it, and it has to happen before the first RMD year, not during it.

Inherited IRAs: the 10-year rule

Most non-spouse beneficiaries who inherited an IRA after 2019 must empty it by December 31 of the tenth year after the owner's death. If the owner had already begun RMDs, the beneficiary also owes annual RMDs in years one through nine, based on the beneficiary's own life expectancy; skipping those annual amounts carries the same 25% penalty schedule (10% if corrected promptly). The exceptions who can still stretch over a lifetime are narrow: a surviving spouse, a beneficiary no more than ten years younger than the owner, a disabled or chronically ill beneficiary, and a minor child of the owner, whose clock switches to the 10-year rule at the age of majority. Inheriting in a high-income decade of your own life is the painful case, and it argues for spreading withdrawals across all ten years rather than taking a balloon in year ten.

Charitable and Roth escape valves

From age 70½, a qualified charitable distribution sends money directly from an IRA to a charity, counts toward the RMD, and never enters your taxable income at all, which makes it strictly better than donating cash for charitably inclined owners who no longer itemize. And conversions before your start age shrink the balance the RMD percentage applies to: the gap years between retirement and 73 or 75 are the cheapest conversion years most households ever get, priced by the Roth conversion calculator.

Which dollars come out first

Within a year, the IRS deems the first withdrawals from a traditional account to be the RMD itself. That ordering rule has two consequences people miss. You cannot convert the RMD to a Roth, and you cannot roll it over; only amounts above the year's RMD are eligible for either, so a December conversion done before the RMD is satisfied is partly an ineligible conversion that must be undone. And a 60-day rollover of a distribution that included RMD money fails on the RMD portion. The clean sequence is mechanical: satisfy the RMD early in the year, then convert or spend as planned. Custodians will calculate an RMD figure for you on request and will report your year-end balance to the IRS on Form 5498 regardless, which is why "my broker never told me" is not a defense the penalty-waiver process rewards as often as a documented reasonable-cause letter does.

Form 5329 and the waiver, realistically

The excise tax is reported on Form 5329, which is also where the waiver is requested: compute the tax, attach a letter explaining the reasonable cause (a custodian error, a serious illness, bad professional advice documented in writing) and evidence that the shortfall has now been withdrawn. In practice, the IRS grants these waivers routinely for first-time, promptly corrected errors, and the two-step of "withdraw the shortfall now, file the form with the letter" is the entire remedy. What the waiver does not forgive is interest on your underpaid income tax if the withdrawal lands in a later year at a different bracket, which circles back to why the April 1 deferral on a first RMD deserves its warning label in the main text above.

Two rules that are not RMD rules

Confusion in this area is expensive, so: the Roth conversion 5-year clocks are about penalties on converted principal withdrawn early, not about RMDs, and satisfying an RMD never starts or satisfies a conversion clock. And inherited Roth IRAs, while free of annual RMDs in most cases, still sit under the same 10-year emptying deadline as inherited traditional IRAs; only the tax treatment of the withdrawals differs. Keep the three systems, RMDs, conversion clocks, and the beneficiary 10-year rule, in separate mental boxes and most published confusion on this topic dissolves.

State taxes ride along

Everything in this guide is federal. Your state may tax the same RMD again, exempt it partially (several states exclude a slice of retirement income or exempt it entirely for older residents), or ignore it, as the no-income-tax states do. The RMD itself is calculated identically either way; only the bill differs. Households choosing where to live in retirement are really choosing, among other things, the state tax treatment of a decade of forced distributions, which is why the state pages in our planned retirement-tax series will lead with the model-household computation rather than a summary of rules.