RMDs at 73 and 75: The Withdrawal You Don't Get to Postpone

What an RMD is, and the bargain behind it

A required minimum distribution is the smallest amount you must withdraw from certain retirement accounts each year once you reach a specified age. You may always take more. You may not take less.

The logic is straightforward once you see the arrangement from the government's side. Traditional 401(k) and IRA contributions were deducted from taxable income in the year they were made, and everything they earned compounded without annual taxation. That is a substantial subsidy, extended on the understanding that the tax would eventually be collected. RMDs are the collection mechanism. Without them, a wealthy retiree with other income could simply never withdraw, let the account compound untaxed for life, and pass the whole thing on.

Understanding it as a deferred bill rather than a penalty makes the planning clearer. The question was never whether this money would be taxed. It was only when, and at what rate.

The starting age depends on your birth year

This changed twice in recent years, which is why so much older guidance is now wrong. The original age was 70½. The SECURE Act moved it to 72. The SECURE 2.0 Act moved it again, and staged a further increase.

The current rules break on birth year:

• Born 1950 or earlier: RMDs already began under the prior rules.
• Born 1951 through 1959: RMDs begin at age 73.
• Born 1960 or later: RMDs begin at age 75.

If you have read anything suggesting 70½ or 72, it was written before these changes and does not apply to anyone starting now. Anyone born in 1960 or later has effectively been handed two extra years of deferral — and two extra years in which Roth conversions can be done at controlled rates before the forced withdrawals start.

The first-year trap

Here is the mechanical detail that catches people, and it is worth reading twice.

Your required beginning date for the first RMD is April 1 of the year after you reach the applicable age. Every subsequent year's RMD is due by December 31 of that year.

So someone turning 73 in 2026 may delay their first distribution until April 1, 2027. That sounds like a gift. It is frequently a mistake, because the second RMD — for tax year 2027 — is still due by December 31, 2027.

Delay the first one and you take two distributions in the same calendar year. Both land on the same tax return. The combined amount can push you into a higher bracket, increase the taxable portion of your Social Security benefit, and trip an IRMAA threshold that raises your Medicare premiums two years later.

For most people the right move is to take the first RMD in the year you reach the age, not the following April, keeping one distribution per tax year. The deferral is only worth taking if you have a specific reason — an unusually low-income year in the second year, for instance — and have run the numbers.

Deferring your first RMD to April doesn't skip a year. It stacks two taxable distributions into one, on the same return.

How the amount is calculated

The formula is simpler than its reputation:

RMD = account balance on December 31 of the prior year ÷ a life expectancy factor

The factor comes from the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table, published in Publication 590-B. It is not your actual life expectancy — it is a standardized divisor that shrinks each year, so the required percentage rises steadily as you age. Roughly, an RMD starts at about 3.8% to 4% of the balance in the first year and climbs past 5% in the early eighties and higher from there.

One exception to the table: if your sole beneficiary is a spouse more than ten years younger than you, a different table with larger divisors applies, producing smaller required distributions.

Two account-level details matter. IRAs can be aggregated — calculate the RMD for each traditional IRA, add them up, and withdraw the total from any one of them. 401(k)s cannot. Each employer plan's RMD must be taken from that specific plan, which catches people who have left several 401(k)s scattered across former employers.

What is exempt

Not every retirement account is subject to RMDs, and one of the exemptions is recent.

• Roth IRAs have never required distributions during the original owner's lifetime.
• Roth 401(k) and Roth 403(b) accounts were subject to RMDs until 2024, when SECURE 2.0 eliminated them. The old workaround — rolling a Roth 401(k) into a Roth IRA specifically to escape RMDs — is no longer necessary for that purpose.
• The still-working exception. If you are still employed past the applicable age and do not own more than 5% of the company, you may generally delay RMDs from that current employer's plan until you retire. It does not apply to IRAs, and it does not apply to plans from previous employers.

Inherited accounts follow an entirely separate set of rules, including the ten-year distribution requirement for most non-spouse beneficiaries, and are outside the scope of this guide.

The penalty, and how to fix a miss

Missing an RMD used to carry a 50% excise tax on the shortfall — one of the harshest penalties in the tax code. SECURE 2.0 reduced it to 25%.

Better still, the penalty drops to 10% if you correct the shortfall within the correction window, which generally means taking the missed distribution and filing the appropriate return by the end of the second year following the year it was due.

The IRS can also waive the penalty entirely for a reasonable-cause error. You take the missed distribution as soon as you discover it, file Form 5329, and attach a statement explaining what happened and what you did to fix it. Waivers for genuine, promptly corrected mistakes are routinely granted — but you have to ask, and the form has to be filed.

Qualified charitable distributions

If you give to charity anyway, a QCD is the most tax-efficient way to satisfy an RMD. From age 70½, you can direct a distribution from an IRA straight to a qualifying charity, up to an annual limit that is now indexed for inflation.

The amount counts toward your RMD but is excluded from your adjusted gross income entirely. That is strictly better than taking the distribution and claiming a charitable deduction, because a lower AGI also helps with the taxability of Social Security, IRMAA thresholds and any deduction subject to an AGI floor. It works even if you take the standard deduction. The transfer must go directly from the custodian to the charity — take possession of the money first and the exclusion is lost.

The planning window is before 73, not after

Once RMDs begin, your options narrow considerably. The leverage sits in the years between retirement and the required beginning date, when earned income has stopped but forced withdrawals have not started. That gap is often a decade or more, and it is frequently the lowest-bracket stretch of an entire adult life.

Those are the years to convert traditional balances to Roth at controlled rates, filling the 12% or 22% bracket deliberately each year rather than being forced into whatever bracket an RMD lands you in later. Every dollar converted in that window is a dollar not subject to a required distribution afterward — and, if it goes into a Roth, never subject to one at all.