RMD Rules in 2026: Ages, the Math, and the Coordination Trap

So you turned 73 this year, or you're about to, and you typed "when do I have to start taking money out of my IRA" into a search bar. Good instinct, because the penalty for getting it wrong used to be brutal and is still real.

Here's the short version. Under the SECURE 2.0 Act, the required beginning age is 73 for anyone who reaches 72 after December 31, 2022. So if you were born between 1951 and 1959, your RMD age is 73. If you were born in 1960 or later, it's 75. That second jump to 75 doesn't kick in until 2033, so for 2026 the number almost everyone cares about is 73.

Your first RMD is for the year you turn 73. But there's a quirk worth knowing: you get to defer that very first distribution until April 1 of the following year. The IRS calls it your "required beginning date," and it's April 1 of the year after you hit 73. Every RMD after the first one is due December 31.

That April 1 grace period sounds generous, and sometimes it is, but it's also a trap.

Why waiting until April 1 can backfire

Because if you defer that first RMD into the next year, you end up taking two distributions in one calendar year: the deferred first one by April 1, and the second one by December 31. Two years of RMD income stacked into a single tax year can push you into a higher bracket, trigger more of your Social Security to become taxable, and bump your Medicare premium two years down the line through IRMAA. For a lot of people the cleaner move is to just take the first RMD in the year you turn 73 and never deal with the pileup. Facts decide it, so run the two-year projection before you choose.

Now the math, which is less scary than it looks.

Your RMD is your account balance as of December 31 of the prior year, divided by a life-expectancy factor from the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table in Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-9. So for a 2026 RMD you use your December 31, 2025 balance. At age 73 the Uniform Lifetime Table factor is 26.5, which works out to roughly 3.77 percent of the balance. At 80 the factor is 20.2, closer to 5 percent. The percentage climbs every year as the factor shrinks. There's a separate table, the Joint Life and Last Survivor Table, that you use instead if your sole beneficiary is a spouse more than ten years younger than you, and it produces a smaller RMD.

One thing people get genuinely confused about: which accounts this even applies to.

Does every retirement account have an RMD?

No. Roth IRAs have no RMD during the owner's lifetime, full stop, under §408A(c)(5). And thanks to SECURE 2.0, starting in 2024 designated Roth accounts inside a 401(k) or 403(b) are also exempt from lifetime RMDs, so those match Roth IRAs now. Traditional IRAs, SEP and SIMPLE IRAs, and traditional 401(k)/403(b)/457(b) balances all have RMDs.

There's also the "still working" exception. If you're still employed at 73 and you don't own more than 5 percent of the company, you can generally delay RMDs from that employer's plan until you actually retire, under §401(a)(9)(C). Note the word "that." It only covers the plan at your current employer. Your old 401(k) from two jobs ago and every traditional IRA you own are still on the clock.

Which brings me to the part that actually causes the mistakes: coordination.

The coordination problem nobody warns you about

Here's the rule that saves headaches and the one that creates them. If you have several traditional IRAs, you calculate the RMD for each one separately, but you can add them up and pull the whole combined amount from just one IRA if you want. Same flexibility for 403(b) accounts among themselves. But 401(k) plans don't get this. Each 401(k) must distribute its own RMD from itself, and you can't use an IRA withdrawal to satisfy a 401(k)'s RMD or vice versa. IRAs and 401(k)s live in separate buckets that never cross.

So the person most likely to mess this up isn't the person with one IRA. It's the person with two rollover IRAs, an old 401(k) they never moved, and a small 403(b) from a teaching gig, all of which have to be reconciled by December 31.

I had a retired hospital administrator, married filing jointly, who came in after doing his own return for years. He'd been dutifully taking an RMD, but he was aggregating an old 401(k) balance in with his two IRAs and pulling the total from one IRA. The IRA side was fine. The 401(k) side had gone three years without its own distribution because he'd "covered" it from the IRA in his head. We fixed it, took the missed amounts, and filed Form 5329 to request a waiver of the penalty for reasonable cause, which the IRS granted. The relief was real, but the cleanup wasn't free, and it was avoidable.

That penalty, by the way, is the reason any of this matters.

What happens if you miss an RMD?

You owe an excise tax on the amount you should have taken and didn't. SECURE 2.0 cut it from the old 50 percent down to 25 percent under §4974, and it drops to 10 percent if you correct the shortfall within a two-year correction window and file properly. You report the shortfall and request a waiver on Form 5329, and if you had reasonable cause and are taking steps to fix it, the IRS has historically been willing to waive the penalty. But you have to actually file the form and take the missed distribution. Silence isn't a strategy.

A couple of coordination points that come up a lot for the cross-border and higher-net-worth folks I work with.

If you're doing qualified charitable distributions, a QCD counts toward your RMD and is excluded from income, and the amount you can send directly from an IRA to charity is now indexed for inflation ($108,000 per person for 2025 under §408(d)(8), with the 2026 figure to be adjusted). That's often the most tax-efficient way to satisfy an RMD you don't need to live on. And if you inherited an IRA, none of the Uniform Lifetime math above applies to you; inherited accounts run on their own set of rules, including the ten-year payout regime from SECURE, and those deserve their own conversation.

Last thing. RMDs are a moving target every year because the balance changes, the factor changes, and the tax landscape around them (brackets, IRMAA thresholds, Social Security taxability) changes too. The calculation is simple arithmetic. The planning is not. If you've got more than a couple of accounts, or a working spouse, or a Roth conversion strategy in the mix, the right answer for the year you turn 73 is worth modeling before December 31, not after.

Sources

• Internal Revenue Code §401(a)(9) (required minimum distributions and the still-working exception at §401(a)(9)(C))
• Internal Revenue Code §408A(c)(5) (no lifetime RMDs for Roth IRAs)
• Internal Revenue Code §408(d)(8) (qualified charitable distributions)
• Internal Revenue Code §4974 (excise tax on missed RMDs, as amended by the SECURE 2.0 Act)
• SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 (RMD ages 73/75; Roth 401(k) lifetime RMD exemption effective 2024; reduced excise tax)
• Treasury Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-9 (Uniform Lifetime Table and Joint Life and Last Survivor Table)
• IRS Form 5329 (reporting the shortfall and requesting a waiver of the excise tax)