RMD Calculator 2026

How Your RMD Is Calculated, and the 2026 Uniform Lifetime Table

Two numbers produce the whole answer: the balance on December 31 of the prior year, and a divisor read off the age you reach this year. Divide one by the other. At 73 the divisor is 26.5, so a $500,000 IRA owes $18,867.92 — and it owes that whatever the account is worth when you actually withdraw, because the base was fixed in December.

What makes the number grow is the column on the right. The divisor falls every single year, and it falls faster than a 6% portfolio grows. At 73 the IRS pulls 3.77% of the balance. At 80 it is 4.95%, at 90 it is 8.20%, and at 100 it is 15.63%. Nothing about that schedule depends on what you need to spend. A retiree who has been living on 3% of their portfolio for a decade finds the forced figure overtaking their own spending somewhere in their early eighties, and every dollar above what they spend is a dollar taxed for the privilege of being reinvested in a taxable account.

One quirk is worth knowing: the Uniform Lifetime Table is not its own table at all. It is the Joint and Last Survivor grid read along the diagonal where the spouse is exactly ten years younger. That is why a genuinely younger spouse gets a different answer — see the sole-beneficiary note further down — and why everyone else gets an assumption baked in that has nothing to do with their actual beneficiary.

The full 2026 Uniform Lifetime Table, with an RMD percentage column

Most published copies of this table stop at the divisor, which is the less useful of the two columns. An RMD percentage table is what tells you whether the forced withdrawal has overtaken your spending rate yet, so the percentage each divisor implies sits alongside it here.

Two other tables exist and the calculator picks between all three automatically. The Joint and Last Survivor table (Table II) applies when your spouse is your sole beneficiary and more than ten years younger — at 75 with a 60-year-old spouse the divisor becomes 28.3 instead of 24.6, turning a $40,650.41 distribution on $1,000,000 into $35,335.69, or $5,314.72 less forced income. The Single Life table (Table I) governs every inherited account. The sole-beneficiary test is made on January 1, so a mid-year death or divorce does not change the divisor you use for that year.

RMD Age by Birth Year: 70½, 72, 73 or 75

Four different starting ages are currently live at the same time, because Congress moved the age twice in three years and grandfathered everyone already past it. Your applicable age is not a policy choice; it is a function of your date of birth, which is why this calculator asks for the day rather than just the year.

The 1959 row is not a rounding problem, it is a genuine conflict in the statute. SECURE 2.0 contained two amendments that both reached that birth year, one assigning 73 and one assigning 75, and Congress has not passed the technical correction that would settle it. When Treasury issued the final regulations as T.D. 10001 in July 2024 it deliberately reserved the paragraph defining the applicable age for 1959 births and put the fix — age 73 — in the simultaneous proposed regulations instead. Announcement 2026-7 then pushed back when any of those proposed rules become applicable, leaving taxpayers on a reasonable, good-faith interpretation. This tool answers 73 for that cohort and badges it, rather than presenting a contested reading as settled.

An employer plan can start later than your birth date implies. If you are still working for the employer sponsoring a 401(k), 403(b) or 457(b) and own 5% or less of the business, that plan's first distribution year moves to the year you retire. The exception is per plan, not per person — an old 401(k) from a previous job keeps the ordinary schedule — and it never reaches an IRA, SEP or SIMPLE no matter how many hours you still put in.

The First-Year April 1 Trap

Only your first-ever distribution gets an extension, and it is generous on its face: instead of December 31 you have until April 1 of the following year, the required beginning date. Custodian letters mention it, and it reads like free money.

It is not. The second year's divisor is applied to the December 31 balance of the first year — a balance that the postponed withdrawal never reduced, because the money was still sitting there on December 31. So the second year carries its own full distribution plus the one you deferred. Take $500,000 at 73 with 5% growth: pay now and it is $18,867.92 in 2026, then roughly $20,588.24 less the effect of having withdrawn, spread across two tax years. Defer and 2027 alone carries $39,456.16. Both paths move the same money eventually; only one of them concentrates it into a single bracket.

Deferring wins in exactly one situation: when the second year's other income falls far enough to absorb the double. Retiring mid-year is the classic case, where the first year still carries six months of salary and the second carries none. The calculator prices both paths on combined two-year federal tax and flags whether either one crosses an IRMAA threshold, because a deferral that saves $400 in tax and costs $2,296.80 in Medicare premiums two years later is not a saving.

Several Accounts? The RMD Aggregation Rules Decide Which One Pays

Every account computes its own required amount. What the aggregation rules then decide is something different and more consequential: which account the cash may legally come out of. Get that wrong and you have simultaneously over-withdrawn from one account and missed the distribution on another, and the excise tax attaches to the one you missed. The over-withdrawal earns you nothing — excess never carries forward to next year.

Take the four-account couple the calculator ships as a preset: 76 and 74, with $620,000 and $180,000 across two IRAs, a $400,000 401(k), and the spouse's $250,000 403(b). The household owes $60,436.83, but that figure breaks into three commitments that cannot be traded against each other. $33,755.27 may come from either IRA in any proportion. $16,877.64 has to leave that specific 401(k). And $9,803.92 is the spouse's own obligation from their own 403(b) — a joint return does not merge two people's distributions, and nothing either of them withdraws helps the other. Rolling the old 401(k) into an IRA before the year starts is the standard fix, since it collapses two commitments into one flexible pool.

RMD Projection: Why the Snowball Keeps Growing

Run the schedule forward and the shape surprises most people. The balance often rises for a decade after distributions begin, because a 6% return on a large account beats a 3.77% withdrawal comfortably. Then the two curves cross. The divisor is shrinking by roughly a year of life expectancy annually while the return is flat, and somewhere in the early eighties the forced percentage overtakes the growth rate and the balance starts falling for good.

That crossover is the reason a single-year figure misleads, and why an RMD projection calculator has to run the whole schedule rather than one divisor. The tax consequence arrives earlier than the balance consequence. On a $500,000 starting balance at 73 with 6% growth and a December withdrawal, the account ends its first distribution year at $511,132.08 — higher than it started — and the following year's requirement is $20,044.40 rather than $18,867.92. Each year the taxable figure climbs while the brackets around it only move with inflation. That slow squeeze, not the headline withdrawal, is what pushes a comfortable retirement into a higher bracket a decade after it began.

One projection input deserves more attention than it usually gets: the survivor year. When the first spouse dies, the survivor inherits the accounts, keeps most of the household income, and files as single from the following year on — the same distributions measured against brackets roughly half as wide, and a Social Security benefit that drops to the larger of the two rather than the sum. The widow's penalty is often the single largest bracket jump in a retirement plan, and it is the one nobody models. Switch it on in the assumptions and the projection marks the year the filing status changes.

The RMD Tax Torpedo: Why Your Bracket Lies

Ask most retirees their marginal rate and they will name their bracket. For anyone drawing Social Security alongside a distribution, that number can be badly wrong, and the mechanism is worth understanding because it is the single largest hidden cost in this whole calculation.

Social Security is taxed on a sliding scale driven by provisional income — your other income plus tax-exempt interest plus half your benefits. Cross $25,000 single or $32,000 joint and half of each further dollar of benefit becomes taxable; cross $34,000 or $44,000 and it is 85 cents. Those four thresholds were set in 1983 and 1993 and have never once been indexed for inflation, which is deliberate and is why an ordinary retirement now routinely lands inside the phase-in range that was originally aimed at high earners. Inside it, each extra dollar of distribution drags up to 85 cents of benefit into income alongside it.

The 2025 senior deduction stacks a second effect on top. Taxpayers 65 and over get an extra $6,000 each through 2028, but it phases out at 6 cents per dollar of AGI above $75,000 single or $150,000 joint, so inside that range every distribution dollar also erodes a deduction. Take a single 73-year-old with $45,000 of Social Security and a $48,000 distribution: $35,525 of benefits become taxable, AGI reaches $83,525, the senior deduction has already shrunk to $5,488.50, and taxable income lands at $59,886.50 for $7,887.03 of federal tax. That is a 22% bracket. The next $1,000 withdrawn costs 43.1% — 1.96 times the rate they would have quoted you.

This is why the calculator measures the marginal rate by actually recomputing the tax on one thousand extra dollars rather than looking up a bracket. A bracket table cannot see benefit taxation or a phaseout; a finite difference sees both. The torpedo chart plots that true rate against the statutory one across $150,000 of additional withdrawal, and the gap between the two lines is the part of your tax bill no bracket table will ever show you.

RMDs and IRMAA: The Two-Year Medicare Lookback

Medicare charges high earners a surcharge on Parts B and D, and it reads your income from a tax return filed two years earlier. The distribution you take in 2026 sets your 2028 premiums. Nothing you do in 2028 can change them, which makes this the one retirement tax with a two-year fuse and no way to defuse it after the fact.

What makes it punishing is the shape. IRMAA is a cliff, not a phase-in. One dollar over a threshold costs exactly the same as thirty thousand over it.

A joint MAGI of $218,001 is one dollar into the first tier, and it moves both spouses off the $202.90 standard premium onto $284.10 plus a $14.50 Part D surcharge — $2,296.80 a year for the couple, starting in 2028, because of a single dollar. A $5,000 qualified charitable distribution would have prevented all of it. Note too that tax-exempt municipal interest is added back into this MAGI even though it never appears in taxable income, so the bonds bought to dodge income tax do nothing to dodge the premium. The calculator shows your headroom to the next threshold and flags a cliff when you land within $5,000 above one.

Three Levers That Shrink an RMD — and One That Does Not

The distribution itself is not negotiable. What it costs you is. Three mechanisms genuinely reduce the bill, and it is worth being clear that simply reinvesting the money into a brokerage account is not one of them: the tax is owed on the distribution regardless of where the cash lands afterwards.

Qualified charitable distributions

A QCD is the only route that satisfies a distribution requirement without the money ever entering AGI. You must be 70½ — and the IRS means the birthday itself, not January 1 of that year, so a gift made in the January before it is simply a taxable distribution followed by a donation. The 2026 limit is $111,000 per person, indexed, with a one-time $55,000 split-interest election available inside it. IRA-family accounts only; money in a 401(k) has to be rolled to an IRA first.

Compare it honestly against the obvious alternative. Take the distribution and write a cheque, and the full amount enters income while the deduction only helps to the extent the gift clears your standard deduction — $16,100 single or $32,200 joint in 2026, plus $2,050 or $1,650 each at 65 and over. For a retiree giving $15,000 a year, the cheque is usually worth nothing at all, because the 2026 above-the-line allowance for non-itemizers stops at $1,000 single and $2,000 joint. The QCD has no such ceiling, and because it never touches AGI it also protects the Social Security calculation and the IRMAA threshold sitting behind it. Those second-order savings are frequently larger than the income tax saved.

Roth conversions before RMD age

This is the only lever that shrinks the base permanently rather than redirecting one year's distribution, because a Roth IRA carries no lifetime requirement and Roth 401(k)s lost theirs in 2024. The sequencing is what matters: once distributions have started, the required amount must come out first and cannot itself be converted, so the productive window is the stretch between retiring and your applicable age, when earned income has stopped and the forced income has not begun.

The arithmetic is concrete. A 68-year-old with $1,000,000 and a first distribution year of 2031 arrives at 73 with $1,338,225.58 if left alone, producing a $50,499.08 first distribution. Convert $40,000 a year through 2030 and the balance arrives at $1,112,741.86 instead, for a $41,990.26 first distribution — $8,508.82 less forced income that year and every year after. The conversion is not free, of course; you pay the tax now at a rate you choose instead of later at a rate the divisor chooses. The calculator reports the break-even heir bracket, which is the cleanest way to decide: if your beneficiaries would face a rate above it, converting wins.

QLACs

Up to $210,000 of IRA money can buy a qualifying longevity annuity contract, and that premium stops counting toward the distribution base until payouts begin — which they must by age 85. Move $210,000 out of a $1,000,000 IRA and the requirement at 73 drops from $37,735.85 to $29,811.32. The limit is nominally inflation-indexed but did not rise for 2026, which catches out anyone working from a 2025 article. Two honest caveats: the deferred income is ordinary income like any other distribution when it eventually arrives, and payout rates move weekly, so this tool models only a quote you enter yourself rather than inventing a rate for you.

Inherited IRA RMDs and the 10-Year Rule

Inheriting a retirement account puts you under a completely different rulebook, and the version most people half-remember is out of date. The old stretch — distributions across your own lifetime — survives only for a narrow class of eligible designated beneficiaries. For everyone else the SECURE Act replaced it with a ten-year window, and the detail that catches people is whether annual minimums run inside that window.

They do, if the original owner died on or after their own required beginning date. Treasury confirmed that in the final regulations T.D. 10001 and made it effective from 2025 onward. Notice 2024-35 had waived the missed annual amounts for 2021 through 2024 while the rules were unsettled, and a great many heirs read that waiver as permanent. It was not, and it never moved the ten-year deadline itself.

Work a real case. You were born in 1976 and inherited $400,000 from a parent born in 1945 who died in 2025, already taking distributions. Your divisor is the longer of your own Single Life figure at 50 — 36.2 — and the owner's remaining life expectancy, so 36.2 wins and the 2026 minimum is $11,049.72. The account must be empty by December 31, 2035. Those two facts do not fit together, and that is the trap: nine years of $11,000 minimums do not come close to draining $400,000, so year ten has to take everything left — well over $300,000 as ordinary income in a single tax year, stacked on top of your salary. Withdrawing deliberately from year one instead, filling a bracket each year rather than taking the minimum, is usually worth five figures. The calculator compares minimum-only, even and bracket-fill on total tax and sizes the final-year balloon each one leaves.

A surviving spouse has options nobody else does, and the default is usually right: roll the account into your own name, at which point your own applicable age and the Uniform Lifetime table take over and nothing is due until you reach it. Staying a beneficiary is occasionally better — notably if you are under 59½ and need access without the early-withdrawal penalty — and it comes with a quiet advantage, because a sole spouse beneficiary looks Table I up fresh each year instead of subtracting one, which keeps the divisor larger for longer. The third option, the SECURE 2.0 §327 election, sits in the proposed regulations rather than the final ones, so the calculator badges it as a good-faith position rather than settled law.

Missed an RMD? The Penalty and How to Fix It

The excise tax under IRC §4974 is 25% of whatever you failed to withdraw, down from the 50% that applied before SECURE 2.0, and it drops to 10% if you correct the shortfall inside the correction window. Miss $10,000 of a required amount and the choice is between $2,500 and $1,000, decided entirely by how fast you move.

The window closes on the earliest of three events: the IRS mails a notice of deficiency, the IRS assesses the tax, or the last day of the second taxable year after the year the tax was imposed. For a 2026 shortfall that generally means December 31, 2028 — but the first two triggers are outside your control, which is the argument for acting now rather than at the edge of the window.

The fix is three steps and it is worth doing properly. Withdraw the missed amount immediately, as a separate transaction you can point to. File Form 5329 for each year you missed, which means a separate form per year rather than one covering all of them. Then request the waiver by attaching a statement of reasonable cause — a custodian who failed to send the notice, a serious illness, an address change that lost the paperwork. The IRS grants these routinely when the explanation is plausible and the money is already out, which is why taking the distribution before you file matters more than the wording of the letter.

How the Report Card Grades Your Plan

Six measures, weighted, turned into letters and averaged. Compliance carries the most weight because it is the only dimension with a statutory penalty attached; the other five measure how much the distribution costs you beyond the withdrawal itself.

Two scoring decisions needed care. A dimension that cannot apply is marked not applicable and its weight is redistributed across the rest, rather than being scored as a free A — a 60-year-old with no Medicare exposure should not be flattered by an IRMAA grade they cannot earn, and a household that gives nothing to charity should not be marked down on giving efficiency. And the grades never punish an unavoidable position: a household whose income sits deep inside a high IRMAA tier because of a pension and a large balance gets a D rather than an F, with recommendation copy that names the available lever instead of blaming them for the tier. Press E for a presentation summary of the whole thing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Methodology & Sources

Every figure in this tool is a dated constant in one object, verified on September 12, 2026, so an annual refresh is a single edit rather than a hunt. Life-expectancy divisors for all three tables come from IRS Publication 590-B Appendix B and have not changed since the 2022 tables took effect. The inherited-beneficiary rules follow the final regulations T.D. 10001, with the 2021–2024 waiver from Notice 2024-35 flagged where it applies. Items that rest on the July 2024 proposed regulations — the age-73 answer for 1959 births, the §327 spousal election — are badged in the interface, because Announcement 2026-7 delayed their applicability and the IRS asks for a reasonable, good-faith interpretation until they are final.

The $111,000 qualified charitable distribution limit, the $55,000 split-interest election and the $210,000 QLAC cap come from Notice 2025-67. Brackets and the standard deduction are Rev. Proc. 2025-32 as announced in IR-2025-103; the $6,000 senior deduction and its 6% phaseout follow Schedule 1-A, and it expires after 2028. Social Security taxation uses the IRC §86 provisional-income bases, left unindexed exactly as the statute leaves them. Premium thresholds and amounts are the CMS 2026 Part B fact sheet. The 10% default withholding rate is Form W-4R, and the 25% and 10% excise figures are IRC §4974 as amended by SECURE 2.0 §302. The engine lives in a separate module with a unit test for every worked example quoted on this page, so a constant that drifts out of date breaks a test rather than quietly contradicting the prose.

These are estimates, not tax or legal advice. Out of scope and deliberately so: capital-gains and qualified-dividend stacking, the net investment income tax, AMT, state retirement-income exclusions, pre-1987 403(b) balances, annuitized accounts, successor beneficiaries, see-through trust analysis, head-of-household and married-filing-separately status, and in-kind valuation. Confirm your figures with your custodian before you withdraw, and with a tax professional before you convert.

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