Inherited IRA RMD Calculator 2026

Step 1, Establish your divisor once. In the year after the owner's death, look up your age on the IRS Single Life Expectancy Table. A 56-year-old beneficiary gets a divisor of 30.6. That number is your baseline and you never look it up again.

Step 2, Subtract one per year. Every following year you reduce the baseline by exactly 1.0: 30.6, then 29.6, then 28.6. This is the subtract-one or fixed-term method, and it is the single biggest difference between inherited IRA math and the owner's own RMD math.

Step 3, Divide the prior-year-end balance. A $300,000 balance with a divisor of 29.6 produces a required distribution of $10,135 for the year.

Step 4, Track the year-ten deadline separately. Annual distributions do not satisfy the 10-year rule. Whatever remains at the end of year ten must come out in full, which is why beneficiaries who take only the minimum for nine years often face a very large, very expensive final withdrawal.

Because the 10-year rule compresses distributions into a decade rather than a lifetime, the tax question is not how little can I withdraw but how do I spread the income. A beneficiary in their peak earning years who defers everything to year ten can push a six-figure distribution on top of a full salary, potentially crossing two or three tax brackets at once.

The opposite is often better: take voluntary distributions above the minimum in low-income years, a gap year, an early retirement year, a year with large deductions, so the year-ten balance is manageable. Inherited IRAs are one of the few situations where withdrawing more than required is frequently the lower-tax choice.

An inherited Roth IRA flips the logic entirely. There is no income tax on qualified distributions, so letting it compound tax-free for the full ten years and emptying it at the deadline is usually optimal.

The formula is simple once you know your divisor: take the account balance as of December 31 of the prior year and divide it by your Single Life Expectancy factor. Every required minimum distribution on an inherited IRA comes from this one calculation.

Worked example for a 56-year-old beneficiary who inherited a $300,000 IRA in 2024:

The SECURE Act of 2019 eliminated the stretch IRA for most non-spouse beneficiaries. If the account owner died in 2020 or later, a beneficiary who is not an eligible designated beneficiary must empty the inherited account by December 31 of the tenth year following the year of death. Inherit a $400,000 IRA from a parent who died in 2025 and the entire balance must be distributed by December 31, 2035.

The 10-year rule has two regimes. If the owner had already reached their required beginning date and started RMDs, the beneficiary must also take an annual RMD in each of years one through nine, based on their Single Life divisor. If the owner died before RMDs began, no annual distributions are required: the beneficiary can leave the account untouched for nine years and then face one enormous, fully taxable withdrawal in year ten. Final Treasury regulations issued in 2024 confirmed this reading, and enforcement of annual RMDs began with the 2025 distribution year after several years of IRS penalty relief.

The year-ten deadline is a hard cliff, not an average. Many beneficiaries assume taking roughly a tenth of the account each year satisfies the rule. It satisfies the annual RMD requirement in the nine annual-RMD regime, but the tenth-year payment is whatever remains, which compounds the planning problem: a $300,000 account left to grow at 6% for a decade becomes a single $507,000 taxable event in year ten.

A surviving spouse has four options, and no other beneficiary has any of them. Each fits a different situation:

• Retitle as your own IRA. Treat the account as your own: RMDs follow the Uniform Lifetime Table using your own age, you can name new beneficiaries, and early-withdrawal penalties no longer apply. Best for most spouses, especially those under 59½ who want flexibility later rather than now.
• Remain a beneficiary (the life-expectancy stretch). Use the Single Life Table recalculated annually, which produces smaller required distributions. The advantage: distributions before 59½ avoid the 10% early-withdrawal penalty, since they are required beneficiary distributions.
• Roll over into your own IRA. A spousal rollover to your existing IRA achieves the same result as retitling and consolidates accounts. The rollover must be a true spousal transfer, not a commingled inherited account.
• Elect deceased-spouse treatment (SECURE 2.0). A surviving spouse who has not reached age 59½ can elect to be treated as the deceased employee or IRA owner for RMD timing, delaying RMDs until the deceased spouse would have reached age 73.

Inherited Roth IRA rules mirror the traditional side on timing but not on taxation. The 10-year rule still applies to non-spouse beneficiaries, but because a Roth owner never has a required beginning date, no annual RMDs are ever required during years one through nine. The beneficiary can let the account compound tax-free for the entire decade and withdraw everything in year ten with no income tax, provided the original Roth was at least five years old.

This makes an inherited Roth the easiest inheritance to manage: do nothing for ten years, then empty the account. The only mistakes that cost money are missing the year-ten deadline, which triggers the 25% excise tax, or withdrawing early when deferral would have been free.