RMD Table 2026: A $500,000 IRA at 73 Means $18,868

What is the RMD table for 2026?

Below is the complete IRS Uniform Lifetime Table for 2026, with the dollar withdrawal already worked out on a $500,000 and a $1,000,000 balance. These factors have not changed since the 2022 update, so the 2026 table is identical to the 2024 and 2025 tables. Most account owners use this one.

Factors: IRS Uniform Lifetime Table, Publication 590-B Appendix B Table III, unchanged since the 2022 regulations. Percentage column is 100 divided by the factor. Dollar columns are the balance divided by the factor, rounded to the nearest dollar. The table runs on to age 120, where the factor is 2.0.

Read down the percentage column and the real design of the system shows up. The IRS is not asking for a flat drawdown. It wants roughly 3.8% of the balance at 73, 5.0% at 80, 6.3% at 85 and 11.2% at 95. The schedule accelerates, which is why a portfolio that comfortably outgrew its RMD in the first decade often stops doing so in the second.

A second table exists and is worth knowing about, because it can cut your RMD by 7% to 20%. The Joint Life and Last Survivor Table (Table II) applies only when your spouse is your sole beneficiary and is more than 10 years younger than you. Both conditions must hold for the entire year. At 75 with a 60 year old spouse the joint factor is 28.3 against the uniform 24.6, which turns a $20,325 required withdrawal into $17,668. If your spouse dies, you divorce, or you add a second beneficiary, you move back to the uniform table.

At what age do RMDs start in 2026?

Age 73, unless you were born in 1960 or later. The SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 raised the starting age in two steps, having already moved it from 70 and a half to 72 under the original SECURE Act of 2019. Three starting ages in seven years explains most of the confusion in circulation.

Starting ages per the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022, Division T of P.L. 117-328, section 107. The 1959 birth year was left ambiguous by a drafting conflict in the statute; IRS proposed regulations issued in July 2024 treat anyone born in 1959 as starting at 73.

There is one exception worth checking if you are still working. If you participate in a current employer plan and you do not own 5% or more of that business, the plan may allow you to defer RMDs from that plan until you actually retire. It never applies to IRAs, and it never applies to the 401(k) left behind at a former employer. Rolling an old 401(k) into your current employer plan is one of the few ways to put a balance back inside that shelter.

Should you delay your first RMD to April 1, 2027?

Almost always no, and this is the single most expensive misunderstanding in the whole subject. The April 1 date is real, but it is a deferral of one payment, not a skipped year. Take your 2026 RMD in March 2027 and your 2027 RMD is still due by December 31, 2027. Two distributions, one tax return.

Here is what that does to a married couple who turn 73 in 2026 with $800,000 in an IRA and $70,000 of other taxable income.

IRA $800,000 | other taxable income $70,000 Married filing jointly, 2026 and 2027 brackets OPTION A: take each RMD in its own year 2026: $800,000 / 26.5 = $30,189 taxable income ... $100,189 2027: $800,000 / 25.5 = $31,373 taxable income ... $101,373 Federal tax, two years .. $23,253 OPTION B: delay the first to April 1, 2027 2026: no distribution taxable income .... $70,000 2027: BOTH RMDs ......... $61,562 taxable income ... $131,562 Federal tax, two years .. $26,271 COST OF DELAYING ........ $3,019

The mechanism is simple bracket arithmetic. The 12% bracket for a married couple ends at $100,800 of taxable income in 2026. Option A keeps both years just under that ceiling. Option B leaves the 12% bracket almost entirely unused in 2026, then shoves about $30,800 into the 22% bracket in 2027. You cannot carry an unused bracket forward, so the cheaper year is simply wasted.

Delaying only pays when the following year income will be genuinely lower, which usually means you are retiring mid-year and the first year still contains salary. Run both versions through the tax bracket calculator before you decide, and remember the stacked year can also drag more of your Social Security into tax. The Social Security taxability guide covers that interaction.

Can you take your whole RMD from one account?

Sometimes, and getting this wrong is the most common route to the penalty. The rule is not about convenience, it is about which account types the IRS lets you aggregate.

Aggregation rules per IRS Publication 590-B and the Retirement Plan and IRA Required Minimum Distributions FAQs. Inherited IRAs from different decedents cannot be aggregated with each other either.

The failure case is specific and it happens constantly. Someone holds an IRA and two old 401(k)s, calculates the total RMD across all three, takes the whole amount from the IRA because that is the account with a convenient withdrawal form, and believes they are finished. They are not. Both 401(k) RMDs are now unpaid, the 25% excise tax applies to each, and the oversized IRA withdrawal does not count toward either. It also cannot be undone, because RMD amounts cannot be rolled over.

The cleanest fix is structural: roll old 401(k) balances into one IRA before your first distribution year. One account, one factor, one withdrawal. Our 401(k) calculator and traditional IRA calculator help you see the balances side by side first.

What happens if you miss an RMD?

The excise tax under Internal Revenue Code section 4974 is 25% of whatever you failed to withdraw. That is already an improvement: it was 50% until SECURE 2.0 cut it for tax years beginning after December 29, 2022. It drops again to 10% if you correct the shortfall inside the correction window, which generally runs to the end of the second taxable year after the year of the missed distribution.

Rates per IRC section 4974 as amended by SECURE 2.0 Act section 302. The excise tax is on top of the ordinary income tax you owe on the distribution once you take it. Figures are the RMDs on a $500,000 balance at ages 73 and 95, and on an $800,000 balance at 73.

The repair is more forgiving than the headline rate suggests. Take the missed amount out now, as a separate distribution. File Form 5329 for the year the RMD was due, which is a standalone form you can file by itself if that return is already lodged. If the cause was reasonable, attach a short statement describing what happened and what you did about it, write RC and the amount beside line 54, and request a waiver. The IRS waives these routinely for a first, documented, promptly corrected mistake, including the common cases of a custodian error, a missed inherited account, or serious illness.

Two points of caution. The corrective distribution counts only toward the year it was missed, not toward the current year RMD, so you still owe this year separately. And filing Form 5329 is what starts the clock on the three-year assessment period for the excise tax, so not filing leaves the exposure open indefinitely.

Does an RMD raise your Medicare premium?

Yes, more often than people expect, and this is the cost almost no RMD table shows you. A distribution is ordinary income, it flows into modified adjusted gross income, and Medicare uses MAGI to set the income-related monthly adjustment amount on Parts B and D. IRMAA is a cliff, not a slope: one dollar over the threshold triggers the whole surcharge for the year.

Premiums per the CMS 2026 Medicare Parts A and B Premiums and Deductibles fact sheet, November 14, 2025, and the Federal Register notice of November 19, 2025. The annual column combines the Part B surcharge above the $202.90 standard premium with the Part D adjustment, which runs from $14.50 to $91.00 a month across the same tiers. Each spouse pays their own surcharge.

Two features of the design matter for planning. The first is the two-year lookback: your 2026 premium is set from your 2024 tax return, so a 2026 RMD shows up in your 2028 premium. The second is the cliff. A married couple sitting at $217,900 of MAGI who take a distribution $200 larger than they needed to pay an extra $2,297 across the two of them. That is a marginal cost well over 1,000% on the last $200 of income.

If your income fell because of a life-changing event such as retirement, the death of a spouse, divorce or loss of income-producing property, file Form SSA-44. Social Security will use your current income instead of the two-year-old return. Retirement itself qualifies, and plenty of people pay a surcharge based on their final working year without ever filing the form.

How can you reduce your RMD?

You cannot waive an RMD, but you can change what the factor is applied to, and you can change whether the distribution lands in your taxable income at all. Four tools, in rough order of how often they are useful.

Qualified charitable distributions. From age 70 and a half you can send up to $111,000 in 2026 directly from an IRA to a qualifying public charity. The transfer counts toward your RMD and never enters your adjusted gross income, which is the part that matters. A regular withdrawal followed by a deductible gift is not equivalent: that route still raises the MAGI that drives IRMAA and Social Security taxability, and it only helps at all if you itemise. The money has to move directly from custodian to charity, and donor-advised funds and private foundations do not qualify. The one-time transfer to a split-interest vehicle is limited to $55,000 in 2026.

Roth conversions before 73. Every dollar converted in your sixties is a dollar no longer in the denominator when the factor arrives. You pay the tax early, at a rate you choose, in years when your income is usually at its lowest, instead of later at a rate the table chooses for you. The gap between retiring and starting RMDs is the only window where you fully control the timing, and it is typically eight to twelve years long. Converted balances also stop generating RMDs entirely, since Roth IRAs have none during the owner lifetime. Compare the two paths in the Roth IRA calculator.

Qualified longevity annuity contracts. A QLAC moves part of your IRA balance out of the RMD calculation until payments begin, which can be as late as age 85. SECURE 2.0 removed the old 25% of balance limit and set a flat dollar cap, indexed annually. It is a narrow tool, and it buys deferral at the price of liquidity, but for someone with a large balance and real longevity in the family it does both jobs at once. The annuity calculator shows what the eventual income looks like.

Keep working past 73. Covered above, and limited to a current employer plan where you own less than 5% of the business. Useful, but it only defers, and it does nothing for your IRAs.

Worth saying plainly: taking only the minimum is a strategy, not a default virtue. If your RMD leaves you inside the 12% bracket with headroom to spare, filling that bracket deliberately often beats leaving the balance to compound into a larger required withdrawal later, or into a tighter inherited-account deadline for your children.

Do Roth accounts have RMDs?

Not during your lifetime, and the rule got simpler in 2024. A Roth IRA has never required distributions from its original owner. Designated Roth accounts inside a 401(k) or 403(b) used to, which forced a pointless annual rollover to an IRA to escape them. SECURE 2.0 ended that for tax years from 2024, so a Roth 401(k) balance now sits untouched like a Roth IRA.

Inherited Roth accounts are different. A beneficiary does face distribution deadlines, though the money still comes out tax free if the five-year holding requirement was met.

What are the RMD rules for inherited IRAs in 2026?

This is the part that changed most recently and the part where penalty relief has now ended. Most non-spouse beneficiaries who inherited after 2019 fall under the 10-year rule: the entire account must be emptied by December 31 of the tenth year after the year of death.

The long-running question was whether annual withdrawals were also required during those ten years. Treasury Decision 10001, finalised on July 18, 2024, answered yes in one specific case: if the original owner died on or after their required beginning date, the beneficiary must take an annual distribution in years one through nine and empty the account by year ten. If the owner died before their required beginning date, only the year-ten deadline applies.

The IRS waived the penalty for missed annual beneficiary distributions across 2021 through 2024 while this was unsettled. That waiver series is over. From the 2025 tax year, a missed annual distribution under the 10-year rule carries the same 25% excise tax as any other. Beneficiaries use the Single Life Expectancy Table, not the Uniform Lifetime Table, with the factor set in the first year and reduced by one each year after.

Eligible designated beneficiaries, which include a surviving spouse, a minor child of the owner, a disabled or chronically ill person, and anyone less than ten years younger than the owner, sit outside the 10-year rule and may stretch distributions over their own life expectancy.

The mistakes that actually cost money

1. TAKING THE 401(k) RMD FROM AN IRA IRAs aggregate. 401(k)s do not. Each plan pays its own, or each plan owes its own 25% excise tax. 2. DELAYING THE FIRST RMD TO APRIL 1 It stacks two distributions into one tax year. Cost in the worked example above: $3,019. 3. USING THE CURRENT BALANCE The RMD is set by the prior Dec 31 balance. A bad market year does not shrink the distribution you owe. 4. DONATING AFTER WITHDRAWING A QCD keeps the money out of AGI. Withdrawing first and donating later still raises MAGI, IRMAA and the taxable share of Social Security. 5. ROLLING OVER AN RMD RMD amounts are not eligible for rollover. Move one into an IRA and you have created an excess contribution on top of everything. 6. FORGETTING AN INHERITED ACCOUNT It never aggregates with your own. From 2025 the penalty relief on missed annual distributions is gone. 7. TRUSTING THE CUSTODIAN TOTAL Custodians report a figure for the account they hold. Nobody computes your household total but you. 8. IGNORING THE DECEMBER QUEUE Custodians are busiest in the last two weeks of December. Take it in November and the deadline stops being a risk.

This article is general information, not personalized tax, legal or investment advice. RMD rules interact with your filing status, other income, state tax, Medicare premiums and estate plan in ways no single table can capture, and the figures here assume the standard Uniform Lifetime Table applies to you. Verify your own factor and balance with your custodian, and speak to a CPA or enrolled agent before acting, particularly on inherited accounts, Roth conversions, QLACs or a missed distribution. Primary sources are named throughout; rely on IRS Publication 590-B and official IRS guidance rather than summaries, including this one.