What Is the Inherited IRA 10-Year Rule?

Most people who inherit an IRA from someone who died in 2020 or later must empty the account by December 31 of the calendar year containing the tenth anniversary of the death. That is the 10-year rule. Whether annual withdrawals are also required inside those ten years depends on one thing: whether the original owner had already reached their required beginning date for their own withdrawals.

Those are two separate requirements, and almost every wrong explanation of this topic comes from collapsing them into one.

Think of it as a due date on a library book rather than a reading schedule. The book comes back on a fixed date no matter what. Whether you also have to read a chapter every year is a different question with a different answer, and it is the one that trips people up. That is the only analogy in this article.

When exactly does the 10-year window close?

December 31 of the calendar year that includes the tenth anniversary of the date of death. The regulation says so in those terms — the year by which the entire interest must be distributed is “the calendar year that includes the tenth anniversary of the date of the employee’s death” (Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-5(e)(2)).

That is not the same as “ten years from the date of death,” and the difference is real money.

Two illustrative dates show it. A death on January 3, 2026 and a death on December 28, 2026 produce the same deadline: December 31, 2036. The deadline year is always the year of death plus ten, so the earlier in the year the death falls, the more time the heir gets. The January heir gets very nearly eleven years. The December heir gets ten years and three days. Both have the same number of tax years to spread the income across; what differs is how much room sits inside the first one. Nothing about that is a loophole; it is what a calendar-year rule does.

It also means the year of death itself is not a distribution year for this count. The clock is anchored to the calendar year the death falls in, not to an anniversary date, and the deadline lands on the last day of the tenth calendar year after it.

Do I have to take money out every year, or can I wait until year ten?

This is the crux, and it is conditional.

If the original owner died before their required beginning date, no annual distribution is required in years one through nine. IRS Publication 590-B states it directly: if the owner dies before the required beginning date and the 10-year rule applies, no distribution is required for any year before the tenth year. Nothing for nine years and everything in year ten satisfies the rule. What that pattern does to a beneficiary’s own tax years is a separate question from what the regulation requires, and it turns on their income in each of those years rather than on anything in this section.

If the original owner died on or after their required beginning date, annual distributions are required during the window and the account must still be emptied by the deadline. The reasoning is in the regulation’s structure: once lifetime distributions have begun, they have to continue after death, and the 10-year deadline sits on top of that as an outer limit. The final regulations kept this requirement despite substantial comment against it.

The required beginning date is April 1 of the calendar year following the calendar year in which the owner reaches their applicable age (Treas. Reg. §1.408-8(b)(1)(i)). That applicable age is 73 for someone born on or after January 1, 1951 and before January 1, 1959, and 75 for someone born on or after January 1, 1960 (Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-2(b)(2)(iv)–(vi)). The paragraph covering birth year 1959 is reserved, so that single year is unresolved by the regulation.

So the practical test is: had the person you inherited from already passed April 1 following the year they hit their applicable age? If yes, annual minimums apply inside the window. If no, they do not.

How the annual amount is figured, and the step that is usually skipped. The divisor is set once and then counts down. Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-5(d)(3)(iii) is explicit about both halves. A designated beneficiary who is not the surviving spouse determines life expectancy “using the beneficiary’s age as of the beneficiary’s birthday in the calendar year following the calendar year of the employee’s death.” For every year after that, the same paragraph gives the number “by reducing that initial life expectancy by one for each calendar year that has elapsed after that first calendar year.” The initial figure comes from the Single Life Table at Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-9(b).

Read that twice, because the second half is where the arithmetic goes wrong. The figure is fixed at the death and then reduced. It is not looked up again each year against your current age. Looking it up fresh every year hands you a larger divisor than the regulation allows, and a larger divisor means a smaller distribution. A distribution that is too small is a shortfall, and a shortfall is what the excise tax below is measured on. Each year’s amount is the prior December 31 balance divided by that year’s reduced figure.

There is one more distribution before any of that, and it is the one most often missed. If the owner died on or after their required beginning date and had not yet taken their own required distribution for the year they died, that distribution is still owed for that year — and it falls to the beneficiary. IRS Publication 590-B states it directly: “If the owner died on or after the required beginning date, the IRA beneficiaries are responsible for figuring and distributing the owner’s required minimum distribution in the year of death.” The same passage adds that you figure it “as if the owner lived for the entire year.” So it uses the owner’s table and the owner’s age, not the beneficiary’s. It is due by December 31 of the year of the death — the same deadline the owner was working against.

The reverse case is equally clear and equally worth stating, because assuming it cuts the wrong way. If the owner died before their required beginning date, Publication 590-B says there is no required minimum distribution in the year of the owner’s death at all.

The reason this gets missed is timing. A death late in the year leaves a family a few weeks to notice an obligation nobody mentioned, in the weeks they are least able to look for one, and the custodian’s year-end statement arrives after the deadline has passed. If the year of death is already closed and the distribution was not taken, that is the §4974 excise tax below rather than a lost cause — the correction route and the reasonable-error waiver are both still open.

Who is exempt from the 10-year rule?

A category called eligible designated beneficiaries. Under §401(a)(9)(E)(ii), as reflected in Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-4(e)(1), a designated beneficiary is an eligible designated beneficiary if, at the time of the owner’s death, they are:

• The surviving spouse of the owner
• A child of the owner who has not reached the age of majority
• Disabled, within the meaning of the regulation
• Chronically ill, within the meaning of the regulation
• Not more than 10 years younger than the owner

These beneficiaries can generally take distributions over their own life expectancy instead of compressing everything into ten years — but the ten-year window is not erased, only deferred. When an eligible designated beneficiary dies, the ten-year clock starts running against their own beneficiaries, measured from the eligible designated beneficiary’s own death. It is a deferral to a second generation, not an exemption from the rule.

The status is fixed at the date of death — it is a photograph, not a running condition. Someone who becomes disabled the year after the death was not disabled as of the date of death, and the regulation’s examples say plainly that this person does not qualify.

Two of those categories carry a documentation deadline in an employer plan — October 31 of the calendar year following the year of death, provided to the plan administrator (Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-4(e)(7)), and the regulation’s examples show a beneficiary losing eligible-designated-beneficiary status for missing it.

That deadline does not apply to an IRA, which is what this page is about. Treas. Reg. §1.408-8(b)(4)(i) says the documentation “need not be provided to the IRA trustee, custodian, or issuer” — there is no plan administrator to provide it to. The status still has to be true as of the date of death; what does not exist here is the October 31 filing deadline. Applying the plan rule to an IRA leads a family to conclude a status was forfeited when nothing was forfeited.

If it helps to have the numbers in one place, I keep them all in the Ultimate Retirement Guide.

The two different tens — how do I keep them straight?

There are two separate 10s in this area and they measure completely different things.

The emptying window is 10 years, measured from the death, and it applies to beneficiaries who are not eligible designated beneficiaries.

The age-gap exemption is “not more than 10 years younger than the owner,” measured between two birthdates, and it is one of the tests that makes someone an eligible designated beneficiary in the first place (Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-4(e)(1)(v)).

Two illustrative cases: a sibling three years younger clears the age-gap test and, as an eligible designated beneficiary, defers the window rather than facing it now; a child thirty years younger does not clear it and is subject to the window directly. The numbers are identical and the rules have nothing to do with each other.

What happens when a minor child inherits?

A minor child of the account owner is an eligible designated beneficiary while they are still a minor, and can take life-expectancy distributions during that period. When they reach the age of majority, the 10-year window starts running from that point — the deadline becomes the calendar year that includes the tenth anniversary of the date the beneficiary reaches the age of majority (Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-5(e)(4)).

The age of majority is 21. The final regulations set one federal answer rather than deferring to state law: “An individual reaches the age of majority on the individual’s 21st birthday” (Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-4(e)(3)).

Two limits worth knowing. This category is a child of the account owner — a grandchild is not covered by it. And where multiple children of the owner are beneficiaries, the final regulations run the clock off the youngest of them rather than the oldest.

What can a surviving spouse do that no one else can?

A spouse holds choices the other categories do not, and they do not all carry the same conditions — which is where this gets misread.

Treating the IRA as your own — designating yourself as the account owner — requires two things: you must be the sole beneficiary of the IRA, and you must have an unlimited right to withdraw amounts from it (Treas. Reg. §1.408-8(c)(1)(ii)). If a trust is named as beneficiary, that is not satisfied even if you are the trust’s sole beneficiary.

Rolling a distribution into your own IRA is a different route, and the sole-beneficiary condition does not apply to it. Publication 590-B says so in the sentence immediately after the one above: if you receive a distribution from your deceased spouse’s IRA you can roll it into your own IRA within the 60-day limit, as long as it is not a required distribution, even if you are not the sole beneficiary. So a widow who inherits alongside a stepchild has not lost the spousal route — she has lost one version of it. Reading the condition as though it governed both is how a survivor concludes the door is closed when it is not.

Doing that ends the inherited-account framework entirely. The account becomes the survivor’s own IRA, with the survivor’s own applicable age driving when required withdrawals begin and the survivor’s own beneficiaries named on it. A spouse who instead remains a beneficiary keeps a different set of rules, including access to the account without the early-distribution penalty that would apply to their own IRA before age 59½.

The two paths differ on two specific things, and both of them move with the survivor’s age relative to the deceased spouse’s. Treating the account as your own moves the start of required withdrawals onto the survivor’s own applicable age, which is later if the survivor is younger and earlier if they are older. Remaining a beneficiary keeps the account reachable before 59½ without the early-distribution penalty, which is only a live difference for a survivor who is under that age. There is also a newer election, added by section 327 of the SECURE 2.0 Act, allowing a sole-beneficiary spouse to elect to be treated as the employee. The final regulations reserved that piece and put it in a separate proposed rulemaking, so it is not settled regulatory text yet.

Does the 10-year rule apply to an inherited Roth IRA?

Yes, the window applies. The tax treatment does not, and that is the whole difference.

Roth IRAs also get an important structural break on the annual question. No minimum distributions are required from a Roth IRA while the owner is alive, and after the owner dies “the required minimum distribution rules apply to the Roth IRA as though the Roth IRA owner died before his or her required beginning date” (Treas. Reg. §1.408-8(b)(1)(ii)).

Read that against the second section of this article and the consequence follows: a non-spouse beneficiary of a Roth IRA is on the branch with no annual minimums. Empty it by the deadline; nothing is required in the years before that. Qualified distributions from it are not taxable income, so a beneficiary can leave it alone for the full window without the bracket problem that drives most traditional IRA sequencing.

What is the penalty for missing a required distribution?

26 U.S.C. §4974 sets the excise tax on an amount not withdrawn at 25%, reduced to 10% only if you both take the missed distribution and file a return reflecting the tax (§4974(e)(1)(A) and (B)). The reduction is also conditioned on doing those two things inside a correction window, and that window ends at the earliest of three events: the IRS mailing a notice of deficiency, the tax being assessed, or the last day of the second tax year that begins after the year the tax was imposed. That last prong can run to nearly three years — longer than “two years” suggests — but the other two can cut the window much shorter, so there is no single number that describes it safely.

There was also transition relief, and its edges matter. Notices 2022-53, 2023-54 and 2024-35 provided that a beneficiary who failed to take one of these annual distributions would not be assessed the excise tax for 2021, 2022, 2023 or 2024 — but only if the original owner died in 2020, 2021, 2022, or 2023, and died on or after their required beginning date. Someone who inherited from an owner who died in 2024 or 2025 got no waived year at all. That series ended there. The final regulations apply for calendar years beginning on or after January 1, 2025 (Treas. Reg. §1.408-8(j)), and no equivalent waiver has been issued for 2025 or 2026 as of this writing.

Separately, §4974(d) lets the IRS waive the excise tax where the shortfall “was due to reasonable error” and the beneficiary is taking reasonable steps to correct it — the relief most people who miss a distribution actually end up using.

The thing the relief did not do is stop the clock. Those waived years still counted toward the 10-year window. Someone who inherited in 2021 skipped three years of annual distributions legitimately — 2022, 2023 and 2024, the distribution calendar years beginning after the death and waived by the three notices above — and is still working against a 2031 deadline on a balance that never came down.

What do people get wrong about this?

“Annual RMDs always apply during the ten years.” They apply only where the owner died on or after the required beginning date. This is the most common error in print, and it is wrong in both directions — some heirs take distributions they never owed, others assume they are safe when they are not.

“I have ten years from the date of death.” You have until December 31 of the year containing the tenth anniversary. In most cases that is more time, not less.

“My friend stretched hers over her lifetime, so I can too.” The rule is keyed to the date of death — it applies to owners who died on or after January 1, 2020 (Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-1(b)(2)(i)). An inheritance from an earlier death can still be on the old schedule, and that person’s experience says nothing about yours.

“An inherited IRA gets a step-up in basis.” It does not. The pre-tax balance is ordinary income to whoever receives it.

“The exemption is for anyone within 10 years of my age.” The age-gap test measures the beneficiary against the owner, and only in one direction: not more than 10 years younger.

“Taking a little each year is always the safe answer.” Level withdrawals are a default rather than a conclusion. How they compare to front-loading or back-loading depends on the beneficiary’s own income in each of those years, and for a beneficiary still working, the years inside the window are often peak earning years.

When this does not apply to you

• The person died before 2020. The 10-year rule applies to owners who died on or after January 1, 2020. Older inheritances can still be running on life-expectancy schedules.
• You are the surviving spouse and you treated the account as your own. There is no inherited-account window at that point. It is your IRA.
• You are an eligible designated beneficiary. A sibling close in age, or a disabled or chronically ill beneficiary, defers the window rather than facing it now. A minor child of the owner is on this track only until age 21 — the window then starts running and the account still has to be emptied, typically around age 31.
• The account is a Roth and you are the spouse. Both exceptions stack, and almost nothing in the traditional-IRA sequencing discussion transfers.
• The IRA went to a trust or an estate rather than a person. Trust drafting decides whether there is a designated beneficiary at all, and a non-person beneficiary is a different set of rules entirely. That is an estate attorney’s work.
• You are not a U.S. taxpayer. The withholding and treaty questions dominate, and none of the above is the operative constraint.

Where this fits

The 10-year rule is the reason a large traditional IRA is a different kind of inheritance than a brokerage account, and the reason the question “who is named on this account” is what decides which of the rules above applies. The rest of it — beneficiary designations, what does and does not get a step-up, and how these accounts land on the people who receive them — sits in the estate and legacy topic hub.

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Trust and beneficiary drafting decisions described here are made with an attorney.