Inherited IRA RMD Calculator

How this works

Post-SECURE inherited IRAs are the most-confused corner of retirement tax, and almost all of the confusion comes from two questions being collapsed into one. Which regime am I in is a separate question from do I owe a distribution this year. Getting the first one right decides everything else. If you want the reasoning in prose rather than in a tool, the companion guide to inherited IRA RMD rules and the 10-year rule walks through the same logic with a beneficiary decision table and a worked example.

Step one: which beneficiary are you?

The SECURE Act split individual beneficiaries into two groups, and the group you land in is fixed at the owner's death.

• Surviving spouse. The only beneficiary with real options. A spouse who is the sole beneficiary can treat the IRA as their own (or roll it into their own IRA), which ends the inherited-account rules entirely, or keep it as an inherited IRA and stretch distributions over their own life expectancy. This tool models the keep-as-inherited stretch path, because that is the one with a calculable inherited-IRA RMD. Assuming the account as your own is usually the better answer — nothing is required until your own RMD age of 73, and the Uniform Lifetime Table produces smaller distributions than the Single Life Table. The main exception is a spouse under 59½ who needs penalty-free access.
• Other eligible designated beneficiaries. A minor child of the owner (not a grandchild, not a niece), a disabled or chronically ill individual, or anyone not more than 10 years younger than the owner. These beneficiaries get the life-expectancy stretch.
• Everyone else who is an individual. Adult children, siblings more than 10 years younger, friends. This is the 10-year rule group, and it is the largest one by far.
• Deaths before 2020. The pre-SECURE stretch rules still govern those accounts for their whole life. This tool does not model them; the calculator will tell you so rather than guess.

A minor child of the owner is a hybrid. They stretch over their own life expectancy until they reach the age of majority — 21 under the final regulations — and then a 10-year clock starts. The account must be emptied by December 31 of the year containing the tenth anniversary of turning 21, which is the year they turn 31, and the annual distributions continue through that window because they had already begun.

Step two: the 10-year rule, precisely

The 10-year rule says the entire account must be gone by December 31 of the year containing the tenth anniversary of the owner's death. A 2024 death means a December 31, 2034 deadline. That part was never in dispute.

What was in dispute — for four years — is whether anything is required inside the window. The July 2024 final regulations settled it, and the answer turns on one fact:

• Owner died on or after their required beginning date → you must take an annual RMD in each of years one through nine, on top of emptying the account in year ten. The logic is that distributions had already begun and must continue "at least as rapidly."
• Owner died before their required beginning date → no annual RMDs at all. One deadline, ten years out, and total freedom about timing in between. An inherited Roth IRA always lands here, because Roth IRAs have no lifetime RMDs and so the owner is always treated as dying before their required beginning date.

The IRS waived penalties for annual RMDs missed under this rule in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 while the regulations were pending. That grace is over. Annual RMDs under the 10-year rule are enforced beginning with the 2025 distribution year, which means a beneficiary who has been sitting still since 2021 has real 2025 and 2026 exposure — but no back-year liability for the waived years.

Step three: the factor

Every inherited-IRA RMD is the same arithmetic: the account's December 31 balance from the prior year, divided by a life expectancy factor. Not today's balance — last year's closing balance. The factor comes from the IRS Single Life Table (Table I in Publication 590-B, reproduced in the regulations at §1.401(a)(9)-9), on the mortality basis that took effect for 2022 and later years.

You look the factor up once, using your age on your birthday in the year after the owner's death — the first year a distribution is required — and then subtract one from it every following year. That is the subtract-one method, and it is why the required percentage climbs every year: the numerator is a real balance but the denominator shrinks by exactly 1.0 annually.

A worked example. The owner dies in 2024. You turn 52 in 2025, the first distribution year. Table I gives 34.3 at age 52, so your 2025 factor is 34.3, your 2026 factor is 33.3, your 2027 factor is 32.3, and so on. With $500,000 sitting in the account on December 31, 2025, the 2026 RMD is $500,000 ÷ 33.3 = $15,015.

A surviving spouse is the one exception. A spouse who keeps the account as an inherited IRA does not subtract one — they look the factor up fresh in Table I every single year, using their age that year. Because the table's life expectancy falls by less than a full year per year of age, annual recalculation produces a persistently larger factor and therefore smaller required distributions than the subtract-one method would. That difference compounds over decades, and this calculator implements it.

One more mechanical point people miss: if subtract-one grinds your factor down to 1.0 or below, the remaining balance must come out in full that year. For an older beneficiary on a long stretch, that can arrive before a 10-year deadline would have.

The Single Life Table factors

The calculator carries the complete published table — every integer age from 0 through 120+ — because a minor-child beneficiary can genuinely be eight years old. Selected values, so you can check the tool's arithmetic against the source:

Do not confuse this with the Uniform Lifetime Table (Table III), which is what account owners use for their own RMDs and which gives much larger factors — 26.5 at age 73 against the Single Life Table's 16.4. Using the wrong table is the single most common inherited-IRA error, and it understates the required amount by roughly 40%.

QCDs: the one way to make a forced distribution disappear

If you are 70½ or older, a qualified charitable distribution from an inherited IRA satisfies that account's RMD dollar-for-dollar while staying out of your income entirely — up to $111,000 in 2026. For a charitably inclined beneficiary compressed into a 10-year window, this is the most powerful lever available: dollars you are forced to remove anyway can leave the account without ever touching your 1040. Beneficiary age is what qualifies you; the age of the person you inherited from is irrelevant. The RMD tax guide covers the other levers, and withdrawals and taxes covers how these distributions stack on the rest of your income.

What this tool does not model

Deliberately narrow, so the numbers it does produce are right:

• Successor beneficiaries — someone who inherited from a beneficiary rather than from the original owner.
• Trusts, estates, charities and other non-individual beneficiaries, including see-through and conduit trusts, and the 5-year rule that applies to non-designated beneficiaries when the owner died before their required beginning date.
• Annuitized accounts and IRAs holding annuity contracts under §1.401(a)(9)-6.
• The "longer of" rule. Where the owner died on or after their required beginning date, a beneficiary may use the longer of their own single life expectancy or the owner's remaining life expectancy. That only helps a beneficiary older than the owner, and it needs the owner's age at death, which this tool does not collect. If you are older than the person you inherited from, ask your CPA — your real factor may be larger and your RMD smaller than shown here.
• Multiple beneficiaries on one account, separate-account timing rules, and the September 30 beneficiary-determination date.
• Inherited employer plans (401(k), 403(b)) before they are moved by direct transfer into an inherited IRA.
• The year-of-death RMD. If the owner died on or after their required beginning date and had not taken their own full RMD for the year they died, the beneficiary owes that amount too. It is a separate calculation on the owner's factor, not yours.
• Taxes. This tool tells you what must come out, not what it will cost you. Use the tax calculator for that.

Figures are estimates for education. Confirm your own numbers with a CPA or your custodian before you withdraw — you are the one the IRS holds responsible for getting the amount right.