Inherited IRA 10-Year Rule Distribution Calculator

The rules for inherited IRAs changed dramatically with the SECURE Act of 2019, and then again with a set of IRS final regulations released in July 2024 that clarified exactly how the new rules work in practice. Before the SECURE Act, a non-spouse beneficiary could often stretch withdrawals across their own life expectancy, sometimes for decades, keeping the tax hit small and spread thin. That option is gone for most beneficiaries today. If you inherited an IRA from someone who died after 2019 and you're not a spouse, minor child, disabled or chronically ill individual, or someone less than 10 years younger than the original owner, you're almost certainly bound by the 10-year rule: the entire account has to be distributed, and taxed, within a decade.

What trips people up is a detail buried inside that 10-year window. If the person you inherited from had already reached their own required minimum distribution age before they died, the IRS final regulations require you to take an annual RMD in years one through nine of the 10-year period, not just drain the account whenever you want as long as it's empty by year ten. Skip a required annual distribution and you're looking at a 25% excise tax penalty on the shortfall (reduced to 10% if you correct it within the IRS's specified window), a detail plenty of beneficiaries missed for years while the IRS delayed enforcement, but which is now firmly in effect starting with the 2025 tax year.

If the original owner died before reaching their required-beginning-date, you get more flexibility. There's no mandatory annual distribution; you can withdraw nothing for nine years and take it all in year ten, or spread it however you like, as long as the account reaches zero by the deadline. That flexibility is valuable for tax planning, because a lump sum in year ten can push you into a much higher tax bracket than the same money spread evenly across the decade.

This calculator models both scenarios side by side.

When annual RMDs are required, the calculator estimates a single-life-expectancy divisor for you at your current age, using the Social Security Administration's period life table, then divides the account balance by that divisor (reduced by one each subsequent year) to estimate each year's required distribution, growing the remaining balance at your assumed investment return along the way. In year ten, whatever balance remains is fully distributed regardless of the divisor math, because the account must reach zero by then no matter what.

When no annual RMD is required, the calculator models an even, or level, drawdown strategy: dividing the remaining balance by the number of years left in the window each year. This isn't a legal requirement, it's simply one common approach financial planners suggest for smoothing the tax impact across the decade rather than taking one enormous, bracket-jumping distribution at the very end.

For the tax estimate, each year's distribution is stacked on top of your other taxable income for that year, and the platform's shared progressive tax engine calculates the tax on that combined total, then subtracts the tax you would have owed on your other income alone. That difference is the tax specifically attributable to the inherited IRA distribution for that year, correctly reflecting how the distribution pushes you through your existing tax brackets rather than assuming a flat rate.

One limitation worth being upfront about: this tool approximates your RMD divisor using the SSA's period life table rather than the IRS's own Single Life Expectancy Table (published in Treasury Regulation 1.401(a)(9)-9), which uses somewhat different, IRS-specific divisors for RMD purposes. The two tables produce broadly similar numbers but are not identical, so treat the RMD-required scenario here as a close estimate, not an exact substitute for the IRS table your custodian will actually use.

Consider a $100,000 inherited IRA, a 50-year-old beneficiary, the original owner had not yet started RMDs (so no annual RMD is required), a 0% assumed growth rate to keep the arithmetic transparent, $90,000 of other taxable income, filing single.

With 0% growth and the even drawdown strategy, the math collapses to a clean pattern. Year one distributes $100,000 divided by 10 remaining years, or exactly $10,000, leaving a $90,000 balance. Year two distributes $90,000 divided by 9 remaining years, again exactly $10,000, leaving $80,000. This pattern repeats for all ten years: with zero growth, dividing the remaining balance by the remaining years always produces the same $10,000 payment, because the balance and the year-count shrink in exact proportion together.

On the tax side, using 2026 single-filer brackets with a $16,100 standard deduction: tax on $90,000 of other income alone (taxable income $73,900) comes to $1,240 (10% of the first $12,400) plus $4,560 (12% of the next $38,000) plus $5,170 (22% of the remaining $23,500), for a total of $10,970.00.

Each year, adding the $10,000 distribution brings total income to $100,000 (taxable income $83,900), and the tax on that comes to $1,240 plus $4,560 plus 22% of $33,500 ($7,370), totaling $13,170.00. The tax specifically attributable to that year's IRA distribution is $13,170.00 minus $10,970.00, or $2,200.00, identical every single year since the distribution amount and other income never change.

Over the full 10 years: $100,000 total distributed, $22,000 in total federal tax owed on those distributions, leaving $78,000 net after tax, and the account balance reaches exactly zero at the end of year ten.

• State income tax. Most states tax IRA distributions as ordinary income too, on top of the federal tax modeled here, and a handful of states have no income tax at all.
• The IRS's official Single Life Expectancy Table. As noted above, this tool approximates using SSA data rather than the IRS's specific RMD table, which will produce slightly different required minimum distribution figures than what your account custodian calculates.
• Roth IRAs. Inherited Roth IRA distributions are generally tax-free (as long as the account met the 5-year holding rule), which is a fundamentally different tax situation than the traditional, pre-tax IRA this calculator models.
• Multiple inherited accounts or multiple beneficiaries. If several people inherited shares of the same IRA, or if you inherited more than one account from different people, the RMD calculations and 10-year windows are tracked separately per inherited account, which this single-account tool doesn't combine.
• Changing tax brackets over the decade. This model uses a single year's tax brackets and your current income for every year of the projection; in reality, both will likely change over a real 10-year window.
• Net Investment Income Tax and other surtaxes. High-income beneficiaries may owe an additional 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax on top of ordinary income tax, not modeled here.

• Assuming you have full discretion over withdrawal timing. Many beneficiaries wrongly believed, based on the SECURE Act's original ambiguous wording, that they could wait until year ten no matter what. The 2024 final regulations closed that gap for beneficiaries of owners who had already started RMDs.
• Missing a required annual distribution and the resulting excise tax. The 25% penalty (10% if timely corrected) on a missed RMD is steep, and IRS enforcement leniency during the transition years is now over.
• Taking the entire balance in year ten to "get it over with." That single massive distribution can push you into a much higher marginal tax bracket than spreading withdrawals across the decade would, resulting in materially more total tax paid on the same inherited balance.
• Confusing this rule with the rules for a spouse beneficiary. A surviving spouse has fundamentally different, more flexible options, including treating the inherited IRA as their own, which are not covered by this calculator.
• Forgetting the 10-year clock starts at the original owner's death, not when you learned about the inheritance or when you retitled the account.

• Internal Revenue Service, T.D. 10001, final regulations on required minimum distributions, published July 2024, effective for the 2025 tax year and after.
• Internal Revenue Service, Publication 590-B, "Distributions from Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs)."
• engine/tables/2026/federal-tax.json, IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32, 2026 federal income tax brackets and standard deduction.
• engine/tables/2026/ssa-life.json, Social Security Administration Office of the Chief Actuary, Period Life Table (2026 Trustees Report basis).