Retirement & Income

By the Retiree Report Editorial Team · Updated 2026-04-30 · 7 min read

This article is general information, not financial, tax, or legal advice. Consult a licensed professional before acting on it.

Required minimum distributions in 2026: the SECURE 2.0 rules retirees should know

If you’ll turn 73 in 2026, the IRS expects your first required minimum distribution — and the rules around it look different than they did three years ago. The SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 reshaped almost every part of the RMD process, from the starting age to the penalty for missing one. The numbers below are the ones you’ll actually use to plan a withdrawal this year.

Who has to take an RMD in 2026?

Under SECURE 2.0, your RMD age depends on the year you were born. According to the Internal Revenue Service, you must begin taking distributions from your traditional IRA, SEP IRA, SIMPLE IRA, and most workplace retirement plans the year you reach age 73. That covers anyone born between 1951 and 1959 — the cohort hitting 73 in 2024 through 2032. People born in 1960 or later won’t have to start until age 75, a change that takes full effect in 2033.

If 2026 is the year you turn 73, you have a small but useful timing choice. Your first RMD can be taken any time in 2026, or you can delay it until April 1, 2027. The catch: if you wait until 2027 to take the first one, you’ll also owe the 2027 RMD by December 31, 2027, and stacking two distributions in a single tax year can push you into a higher bracket and into a worse Medicare premium tier two years later. Every RMD after the first must come out by December 31 of its calendar year.

Roth IRAs have always been exempt from lifetime RMDs, and as of 2024, designated Roth accounts inside 401(k) and 403(b) plans are exempt too. That means you can leave Roth 401(k) money untouched for the rest of your life if you don’t need it. Inherited Roth accounts are a different story — beneficiaries are still subject to distribution rules, just without an income-tax bill on the way out.

How the math actually works

The formula is the same one the IRS has used for years: take your December 31, 2025 account balance, divide by the life expectancy factor for your age in the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table, and that’s your 2026 RMD. The factor at age 73 is 26.5; at 75 it’s 24.6; at 80 it’s 20.2. The factor shrinks each year, which is why the required percentage of your account climbs as you age.

Here’s a concrete example. Say your traditional IRA closed 2025 with a balance of $400,000 and you turn 73 in 2026. Divide $400,000 by 26.5. That’s about $15,094. You can withdraw it as one lump sum, in monthly installments, or in any combination — as long as the full $15,094 leaves the account by the deadline. If you have several traditional IRAs, calculate the RMD for each one separately and then take the total from any single IRA or any combination. With 401(k)s and other workplace plans, that aggregation isn’t allowed: each plan’s RMD must come from that plan.

AARP’s RMD calculator will do the arithmetic for you, but it’s worth understanding the inputs so you can sanity-check what your custodian sends. Custodial estimates are sometimes off when you’ve rolled money in or out late in the year, or when you have an outstanding loan against a 401(k).

The penalty if you miss the deadline

Before SECURE 2.0, missing an RMD triggered an eye-watering 50% excise tax on the shortfall. The new law cut that in half, and the IRS now allows the penalty to drop to 10% if you withdraw the missed amount and file Form 5329 within a two-year correction window. That’s a meaningful change. A retiree who forgot a $15,000 RMD used to face a $7,500 penalty; today, with a quick fix, the same mistake might cost $1,500.

The penalty isn’t automatic, but the IRS increasingly cross-checks the 1099-R forms your custodian files against the distributions actually taken, so don’t count on slipping by. If you do miss one, file Form 5329 with a short letter explaining the cause and the corrective distribution. A reasonable-cause waiver is still possible, but the cleaner path is the two-year reduced-penalty rule.

Three SECURE 2.0 wrinkles that hit hardest in 2026

Several SECURE 2.0 provisions take their final shape this year. They aren’t dramatic, but they change the planning math for specific groups of retirees, and they’re easy to miss because they didn’t make the cable-news cycle.

The first is the inherited IRA 10-year rule. After several years of IRS waivers, final 2024 regulations confirmed that beneficiaries subject to the 10-year window must take annual RMDs starting in 2025 if the original owner had already begun their own RMDs. By 2026, those annual distributions are routine — and the 25% excise tax applies if you skip a year. Spouses, minor children, the chronically ill, the disabled, and beneficiaries within 10 years of the decedent’s age remain “eligible designated beneficiaries” who can still stretch distributions across their own life expectancy. Everyone else is on the 10-year clock.

The second is the expanded Qualified Charitable Distribution limit. If you’re 70½ or older — note that’s still 70½, not 73 — you can send up to $111,000 directly from your IRA to a qualifying charity in 2026, up from $108,000 in 2025. The gift counts toward your RMD without showing up in your taxable income. The one-time QCD that funds a charitable gift annuity or charitable remainder trust rises to $55,000 for 2026. Kiplinger summarizes the IRS inflation adjustments published in Notice 2025-67. Done correctly, a QCD can knock your modified adjusted gross income down enough to drop your Medicare premium tier — our walkthrough of the 2026 IRMAA income thresholds shows where those brackets sit this year.

The third is the surviving-spouse election. A surviving spouse who is the sole beneficiary of a deceased spouse’s retirement account can elect to be treated as the participant for RMD purposes, which means using the more generous Uniform Lifetime Table instead of the Single Life Table. The IRS extended the formal effective date of related proposed regulations to January 1, 2026, so spouses making the election this year are operating under the cleaned-up rules for the first time. Kiplinger’s roundup of the new RMD rules is a useful plain-English summary if you’re working through an inheritance.

What to do before December 31

Pull your December 31, 2025 statements together early. Custodians will calculate and send a notice with what they think your 2026 RMD is, but the responsibility for taking the right amount sits with you, not them — especially if you have accounts at more than one firm or you’ve changed brokerages in the past 18 months. Confirm the figure against the IRS worksheets before scheduling the withdrawal, and decide whether you’d rather take it monthly, quarterly, or all at once.

If you don’t need the cash to live on, think through where it’s going. RMDs are taxable when they come out of a traditional account, but nothing stops you from reinvesting the after-tax dollars in a brokerage account or, if charity is in the picture, sending some directly through a QCD. RMDs also count toward the income that determines how much of your Social Security is taxed and which IRMAA bracket you land in two years later. If you’re trying to coordinate Social Security with retirement-account withdrawals, it’s worth a separate look at how the 2026 cost-of-living adjustment changes your monthly check.

This is one of the places where a CPA or fiduciary advisor often pays for themselves. The arithmetic is easy. The timing decisions — Roth conversions before 73, QCDs versus cash giving, the order in which to draw from taxable, tax-deferred, and Roth accounts — are where the dollars actually move. None of this is medical or legal advice, and your situation may need professional input the IRS website can’t provide.

What to remember

If you’re 73 in 2026, your RMD is due December 31 unless you push the first one to April 1, 2027 and accept stacking two distributions in 2027. The miss penalty is 25% of the shortfall, dropping to 10% if you fix it within two years. SECURE 2.0 keeps reshuffling the edges — Roth 401(k) lifetime RMDs are gone, the QCD ceiling rose to $111,000 for 2026, and most non-spouse heirs are now well into their 10-year inherited-IRA clock. Your custodian’s auto-calculation is a starting point, not a guarantee.