📅 RMD Rules 2026: Age, Deadlines, and the Penalty

By Muhammad Imran · Reviewed for accuracy against Internal Revenue Service guidance · Last updated November 3, 2026.

A required minimum distribution is the IRS telling you it is time to start paying tax on the retirement money you sheltered for years. The rule sounds simple, but three questions trip up almost everyone: what age does it start, when exactly is it due, and what happens if you miss it. This guide answers those three questions in that order, with the dates that apply right now. Everything below comes from the IRS: Publication 590-B, the RMD FAQs, and the final regulations that set the starting ages. If you want the number itself, our RMD Calculator works it out from your birth year and balance in under a minute.

What Age Do RMDs Start?

The age is set by the year you were born. Congress has changed it three times since 2019, which is why the number you remember is probably wrong. The current schedule, set by the SECURE 2.0 Act and the IRS final regulations of July 2024, is:

• Born before July 1, 1949: RMDs started at 70.5. You are already taking them.
• Born July 1, 1949 through 1950: RMDs started at 72. You are already taking them.
• Born 1951 through 1959: RMDs start at 73.
• Born in 1960 or later: RMDs start at 75.

For most readers, the answer is 73. Born in 1953, you turn 73 in 2026, and 2026 is your first RMD year. Born in 1952, you turned 73 in 2025. Born in 1960, you turn 75 in 2035, and 2035 is your first RMD year. The step to 75 does not arrive sooner for anyone.

The confusion is understandable: the two most common wrong answers are both recent history. The age was 70.5 for decades, then the SECURE Act of 2019 raised it to 72, then SECURE 2.0 raised it to 73 in 2022. Anyone who last checked before 2023 learned 72. And the jump to 75 is easy to misread as applying now, when it only applies to people born in 1960 or later, whose first RMDs are still a decade away.

One birth year carries a footnote. The SECURE 2.0 Act's wording gives two answers for people born in 1959, and the IRS final regulations left that year open. The IRS proposed regulations read it as 73, the number used on this site and in our calculator. If you were born in 1959, plan on 73; your plan or a tax professional can confirm it.

The Two Deadlines, and the Trap Between Them

Your first RMD and every RMD after it have different deadlines, and the gap between them is where the money gets lost. The first RMD is due by April 1 of the year after you reach your starting age. Every RMD after the first is due by December 31 of its year. The trap is that the April 1 delay pushes your first withdrawal into the same tax year as your second one.

Here is what that looks like for the 1953 cohort. You turn 73 in 2026, so your first RMD is for 2026, and you may wait until April 1, 2027 to take it. But your second RMD, for 2027, is still due by December 31, 2027. Take the first one in April 2027 and you will take two required withdrawals in 2027, both taxed as income that year. That extra income can push you into a higher bracket, make more of your Social Security taxable, and raise your Medicare premiums two years later through IRMAA. Taking the first RMD by December 31, 2026 instead keeps the two withdrawals in different tax years. Which choice is better depends on your income in each year, so make it with a tax professional.

The dated checklist for the two groups reading this page now:

• Turned 73 in 2025: your first RMD was due by April 1, 2026. Your 2026 RMD is due by December 31, 2026. If you delayed the first one to April 2026, you already took two in 2026, and both count as 2026 income.
• Turn 73 in 2026: your first RMD is due by April 1, 2027, or by December 31, 2026 if you take it early. Your 2027 RMD is due by December 31, 2027.
• Already past your first year: every RMD is due by December 31. There is no April 1 option after the first one.

One more deadline rule for people still working. If you are in a 401(k), 403(b), or other employer plan, still working for that employer, and own 5% or less of the business, you can delay RMDs from that plan until the year you retire. The delay never applies to a traditional IRA, even if you are still working, or to plans from jobs you already left. Some plan documents also require you to start at 73 even while working, so the plan rules matter alongside the IRS rules.

What Happens If You Miss an RMD

The penalty for missing an RMD is an excise tax on the amount you failed to take, not on the whole account. Skip a $20,000 RMD entirely and the tax is 25% of $20,000, or $5,000. Take $15,000 of a $20,000 RMD and the tax is 25% of the $5,000 shortfall, or $1,250. Report the tax on Form 5329 with the return for the year the RMD was required.

The rate falls if you fix it quickly. Correct the shortfall within two years and the tax drops to 10%: $2,000 instead of $5,000 on a $20,000 miss, or $500 instead of $1,250 on a $5,000 shortfall. Take the missed amount out right away, file Form 5329, and pay the 10%.

The tax can also be waived. If the shortfall was an honest error and you are taking reasonable steps to fix it, the IRS may waive it entirely. Ask by filing Form 5329 with a letter explaining what happened and what you did to correct it. A wrong birth year on file, a plan that sent the wrong figure, or a death in the family that year are the kind of honest errors that qualify. Deliberately skipping the withdrawal does not. The waiver is never automatic, so file the form and the letter rather than assuming the IRS will notice the correction on its own.

Two old facts still circulate and both are out of date. Before SECURE 2.0, the penalty was 50%, not 25%: any page quoting 50% as the current rate is working from old law. And the IRS waived penalties for certain missed distributions in 2021 through 2024 while the inherited-account rules were being finalized. That relief has ended: for 2025 onward, the 25% rate applies, with the 10% correction and the waiver as the ways out.

How Much Is It? One Worked Example

The amount comes from one division: take your account balance on December 31 of last year and divide it by the factor for your age, from the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table in Publication 590-B. At 73 the factor is 26.5. A $500,000 balance on December 31, 2025, divided by 26.5, gives a 2026 RMD of $18,867.92, about 3.8% of the balance. At 75 the factor is 24.6, so the same balance gives $20,325.20, about 4.1%. The factor shrinks every year, so the required share grows as you age, and the full table is on our RMD Calculator page.

Your age for the calculation is the age you reach by December 31 of the distribution year, not your age on the day you take the money out. The balance is the prior December 31 figure, whatever the market has done since. That figure is printed on the year-end statement your plan sends you, and your plan or IRA custodian must either tell you the RMD amount or offer to calculate it by January 31.

One more note for married couples. The Uniform Lifetime Table is the one most owners use. It assumes a beneficiary ten years younger, which is why it works whether or not you have a beneficiary at all. If your spouse is your only beneficiary and is more than ten years younger, a different IRS table, the Joint Life table, gives a smaller RMD. Ask your plan for that figure if the rule fits you.

Which Accounts Owe RMDs

RMDs apply to every tax-deferred retirement account: traditional, SEP, and SIMPLE IRAs, 401(k), 403(b), and 457(b) plans, and profit-sharing plans. The withdrawal rules differ by account type in one way that matters. For IRAs, work out the RMD separately for each IRA, then add the amounts together and take the total from one IRA or spread it across them. For 401(k), 403(b), and 457(b) plans, each plan is separate: the RMD for each plan must come out of that plan. You cannot cover a 401(k) shortfall with a withdrawal from your IRA, or the other way around.

Roth accounts are the exception. A Roth IRA has no RMDs while the owner is alive, at any age. Roth 401(k) and Roth 403(b) accounts have been exempt since 2024, when SECURE 2.0 removed lifetime RMDs from designated Roth accounts in employer plans. If your savings are all Roth, there is no RMD to worry about in your lifetime. That exemption is still little known: many people who rolled a Roth 401(k) into a Roth IRA years ago to avoid RMDs no longer needed to, though the rollover itself was harmless.

Two things an RMD can never do: it cannot be rolled over into another tax-deferred account, and an excess distribution in one year cannot be applied to the next year's RMD. Take out more than the minimum one year and the extra counts for that year only. The next year's RMD is still the full amount, worked out from the new December 31 balance.

Ways to Legally Lower the Tax Hit

The RMD itself is not optional, but the tax around it can be managed, and three tools do most of the work. None of them is a loophole: each one is written into the tax code, and each one has its own conditions.

Give it away through a QCD. A qualified charitable distribution sends money directly from your IRA to a qualifying charity, and the amount counts toward your RMD without landing in your taxable income. In 2026 you can give up to $111,000 this way per person, under IRS Notice 2025-67, up from $108,000 in 2025. You must be at least 70.5 when the distribution is made, which is younger than the RMD age, so you can start before RMDs even begin. The gift must go straight from the IRA to the charity: if the money touches your bank account first, it is not a QCD. Donor-advised funds, private foundations, and supporting organizations do not qualify. The distribution is reported on Form 1099-R.

Convert before RMDs start. A Roth conversion moves money from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA, and the converted amount is taxable income in the year you convert. That sounds like the opposite of saving tax, and in the conversion year it is. The payoff comes later: money in the Roth grows tax free, has no lifetime RMDs, and shrinks the traditional IRA balance that future RMDs are figured from. The year you turn 72 is the last year you can convert freely, because once RMDs start, the RMD must come out first and cannot itself be converted. You can still convert in an RMD year, but only money above the RMD. Model conversions with a tax professional: converting too much in one year can push you into a higher bracket or trigger an IRMAA surcharge two years later.

Take the first RMD early. The April 1 delay is a choice, not a requirement. Taking the first RMD by December 31 of the first year, instead of waiting until April 1, keeps the two withdrawals in different tax years. For many people that is the single cheapest decision in the whole RMD story, and it costs nothing.

What does not work: taking the RMD and then putting it back, rolling it into another IRA, or counting a prior year's excess toward this year. The IRS has closed each of those doors. If a pitch promises to make your RMD disappear, treat it like any too-good-to-be-true money pitch, and check it against the IRS rules before you act.

How an RMD Ripples Into Social Security and Medicare

An RMD counts as ordinary income, and that extra income can cost more than the tax on the withdrawal itself. For many retirees, the RMD is the piece that pushes Social Security into tax: depending on your total income, up to 85% of your benefit can become taxable. The same extra income can raise your Medicare premiums two years later, because IRMAA, the income-related surcharge on Part B and Part D, is set from your tax return from two years ago. A $20,000 RMD does not only cost the tax on $20,000: it can also make more of your Social Security taxable and add a monthly surcharge to your Medicare bill.

That chain is why the first years of RMDs deserve a plan rather than a single withdrawal. Use our free IRMAA Estimator to see whether your income puts you over a surcharge threshold, and our Medicare Yearly Cost Estimator to add your monthly costs into one yearly total. If a caller or a letter offers to make the surcharge or the RMD go away for a fee, run the letter through our Letter Explainer first: Medicare will never call and demand payment to fix a premium.

Inherited IRAs in Brief

If you inherited a traditional IRA, different rules apply. The short version: most non-spouse beneficiaries must empty the account by the end of the tenth year after the owner's death. That is the 10-year rule from the SECURE Act. On top of that, if the owner had already started taking RMDs before dying, you must also take annual RMDs in years one through nine of that window. If the owner died before starting RMDs, there are no annual RMDs inside the window, only the empty-by-ten-years deadline.

Two facts matter for 2026. First, the IRS waived penalties for missed annual distributions under the 10-year rule for 2021 through 2024 while the regulations were being finalized. That relief has ended, and enforcement resumed with the 2025 tax year, so a missed annual RMD inside the window now carries the same 25% excise tax. Second, the 10-year rule has exceptions: a surviving spouse, a minor child, a disabled or chronically ill person, and a person not more than ten years younger than the owner can stretch distributions over their own lifetime instead. Inherited accounts are the one RMD topic where the details depend heavily on who died, when, and who inherited, so a tax professional is worth the call before you take or skip a distribution.

RMD Questions, Answered

Sources

Rules and figures on this page come from the IRS: Publication 590-B, Distributions from Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs), including Appendix B, Table III, the Uniform Lifetime Table; Retirement plan and IRA required minimum distributions FAQs; and Retirement topics, Required minimum distributions (RMDs). The starting ages come from the IRS final regulations, T.D. 10001, published at 89 FR 58886 on July 19, 2024, and the 1959 reading from the IRS proposed regulations REG-103529-23. The 2026 QCD limit of $111,000 comes from IRS Notice 2025-67.

To work out your own number, use our RMD Calculator, and to check whether your income adds a Medicare surcharge, use our IRMAA Estimator. If a letter about your retirement account looks wrong, run it through our Letter Explainer first.