What Are RMDs, and Why the Years Before Them Matter Most.

Required minimum distributions, or RMDs, are the amounts the IRS makes you withdraw from your traditional retirement accounts once you reach a certain age. For most people that age is 73. If you were born in 1960 or later, it's 75. Your first withdrawal is due by April 1 of the year after you turn that age, and every one after that is due by December 31. Miss it and the penalty is 25% of what you should have taken, dropped to 10% if you fix it inside the correction window.

That's the compliance answer, and it's the part everyone already knows. The video below walks through it, and then gets to the part that actually moves the needle: the planning window in the years before RMDs ever start.

▶ Video: youtube.com/watch?v=5he1TsbAXSk, “What Are RMDs? The Planning Window Retirees Miss.”

Watch: Patrick Shope on why the years before RMDs matter more than the deadline itself.

When do RMDs actually start, age 73 or 75?

Here's the clean version. If you were born between 1951 and 1959, your RMDs begin at 73. If you were born in 1960 or later, they begin at 75. That change came out of the SECURE 2.0 Act, so the age you use depends entirely on your birth year.

The first year gets its own special deadline, and this is where people trip. Your very first RMD can be delayed until April 1 of the following year. It sounds like a nice bit of flexibility. It usually isn't.

What's the trap with the April 1 first-year deadline?

If you delay that first distribution into the next year, you don't skip a year. You double up. The RMD you pushed off, plus the current year's RMD, both land in the same tax year.

Think about it this way. Say you turn 73 with about $1 million in a traditional IRA. In the video I use the round example of roughly $38,000 to $40,000 for a single year's RMD. Spread across two tax years, that's manageable. Stack both into one year and you're pulling something like $77,000 to $80,000 in a single twelve months. (Those are illustrative figures; your exact number depends on the IRS table factor for your age.)

That kind of income spike does two things. It can push you into a higher tax bracket, and it can raise your Medicare premiums two years down the road. So the "flexibility" of waiting until April often costs more than it saves. For a fuller list of these snags, I walked through the RMD mistakes to avoid in a separate piece.

How are RMDs calculated?

The math is simpler than people expect. You take your account balance as of December 31 of the prior year and divide it by a life expectancy factor from the IRS tables. That gives you the dollar amount you have to withdraw.

Two things surprise people every time. First, the required percentage rises a little each year as you get older, and if your balances grow with the market, the dollar RMD tends to climb right along with them. So these don't stay flat. They generally get bigger over time.

Second, there's a wrinkle with account types. You calculate the RMD for each IRA separately, but you can take the total from any one IRA or any mix of them. That's convenient. Your old 401(k) accounts from former employers don't get that treatment. Each 401(k) has to be calculated and withdrawn on its own, separately from your IRAs. People miss this and think they've covered everything by pulling from one account. They haven't.

Why do the years before RMDs matter more than the deadline?

This is the part I care about most. When you're working, your income is mostly your paycheck, and you don't have much say over it. Once RMDs start, a chunk of your income becomes mandatory. The IRS decides you have to take a certain amount whether you need it or not, and you can't tell them no.

But in between, especially if you retire before 73, there's often a window where you have more control over your income than at almost any point since you started working. Your income in those years can be lower than your working years and lower than what it'll be once RMDs and Social Security are both flowing.

Here's why that matters so much. Decisions you make in that low-income window compound for the next 20 or 30 years. Let me show you what that looks like with a composite couple.

Whether a conversion is right depends entirely on your numbers, and I've laid out how the current rules change that math in the 2026 tax law and Roth conversions. The point isn't that everyone should convert. It's that once RMDs start, you lose some of the control you had.

Can I give my RMD to charity instead?

Yes, and it's one of the better-kept tools in the box. If you're 70½ or older, you can make a qualified charitable distribution, or QCD, sending money straight from your IRA to a qualified charity. For 2026 the limit is up to $111,000 per person, and it's indexed for inflation, so it creeps up over time.

Here's the piece that makes it powerful. The QCD counts toward your RMD requirement, but it never shows up as taxable income. So if you were going to give to charity anyway, routing the gift through your IRA can satisfy your RMD and keep that income off your return. That lower income can then help you dodge the shadow taxes below.

How do RMDs connect to Social Security and Medicare?

These aren't separate decisions. They're pieces of the same puzzle. Someone who delays Social Security to 70 for the larger benefit needs to see how that higher check will stack on top of a mandatory RMD at 73. Both hit your income at once.

And that combined income can cross a Medicare line called IRMAA, which raises your Part B and Part D premiums. In 2026 that line sits at $218,000 of modified adjusted gross income for a married couple. Cross it and a couple on Parts B and D pays roughly $2,297 more for the year, and Medicare uses a two-year lookback, so income this year sets premiums two years out (Source: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 2026 IRMAA brackets). If that's new to you, here's what IRMAA is and how the tiers work. RMDs, Social Security timing, and Medicare cost all pull on the same rope.

If you remember one thing about RMDs

RMDs mark a shift from optional to required, from flexible to mandatory. You can see the deadline coming from miles away. The couples who do well aren't the ones who memorize the penalty rate. They're the ones who use the quiet, low-income years before 73 to shape what their income looks like after.

If you want to see the exact lines your income will run into, our 2026 numbers sheet lays out the brackets, the IRMAA thresholds, and the RMD ages on a single page.

The RMD deadline is the easy part. The hard part, and the valuable part, is what you do in the years before it, while you still hold the pen on your own income.

Frequently asked questions