When Do RMDs Start? Age 73 or 75, Set by Your Birth Year

There is a version of this answer that fits in one sentence, and almost every page that gives it is wrong for about half the people reading it.

Required minimum distributions do not have a starting age. They have two starting ages, set by the year you were born — and one birth year in the middle that the published regulation does not answer at all.

That is not a technicality I am dressing up to make a page look thorough. It is the difference between starting two years early, which costs real money in tax you did not have to pay yet, and starting late, which costs a penalty. So this page does the boring thing properly: which age applies to you, what date follows from it, which accounts it reaches, and what the years before it are actually for.

When do RMDs start?

They start in the year you reach your applicable age, and the applicable age is either 73 or 75 depending on the year you were born.

Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-2(b)(2)(iv) sets one of them: “In the case of an employee born on or after January 1, 1951, but before January 1, 1959, the applicable age is age 73.” Paragraph (vi) sets the other: “In the case of an employee born on or after January 1, 1960, the applicable age is age 75.”

Read those two sentences next to each other and count the birth years they cover. The first runs through 1958. The second begins in 1960. There is a year between them, and the paragraph that would fill it — §1.401(a)(9)-2(b)(2)(v) — is printed in the regulation as “[Reserved]” and nothing else.

So the honest answer to “when do RMDs start” has three branches rather than one, and the third branch is a gap.

Two older cohorts have their own paragraphs and older applicable ages, at §1.401(a)(9)-2(b)(2)(ii) and (iii). If either of those describes you, your required distributions began years ago and this page is not really about you. Everyone currently approaching the question falls into 73, 75, or the hole.

Why does birth year 1959 have no answer?

Because the statute behind the change was drafted with two provisions that both reach that cohort and give different answers, and the regulation has not resolved it.

Here is the statutory text, because this is a claim worth showing rather than asserting. 26 U.S.C. §401(a)(9)(C)(v) defines the applicable age in two subclauses. Subclause (I): “In the case of an individual who attains age 72 after December 31, 2022, and age 73 before January 1, 2033, the applicable age is 73.” Subclause (II): “In the case of an individual who attains age 74 after December 31, 2032, the applicable age is 75.”

Now walk a person born in 1959 through both. They reach seventy-three in one of the years subclause (I) covers, which makes their applicable age 73. They also reach seventy-four in a year subclause (II) covers, which makes it 75. Both subclauses reach them. The two answers are two years apart.

That is the problem the blank paragraph (v) sits on top of. The regulation does not say why it is reserved and I am not going to put words in Treasury’s mouth. What the text alone supports is narrower and quite enough: the statute reaches this one birth year twice with two different answers, and a regulation cannot settle that by quietly choosing one of them.

What this means for you, if 1959 is your birth year, is uncomfortable and worth saying plainly: your applicable age is genuinely unsettled in the published regulation, and any article that hands you one confident number for that birth year is telling you something its own source does not say. I am not going to be the fourth page to do that.

What is available instead of an answer is a clear view of the two positions and what each one costs. That is a conversation for your tax preparer rather than a conclusion for this page — and it is worth asking which position they and your custodian are taking, in writing, because the two can differ and only one of them files your return.

The earlier position treats 73 as the applicable age. It cannot produce a shortfall: 26 U.S.C. §4974(a) taxes only the amount by which the required distribution exceeds what was actually distributed, so taking more, or sooner, is never a miss. It is not costless, and the cost is not only that income arrives two years earlier. An amount treated as a required distribution is not eligible to be rolled over — Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-7(a) — so money withdrawn under a requirement that may not have applied is money that could not have gone into a conversion or a rollover in those years.

The later position treats 75 as the applicable age. It keeps those two years open and carries the §4974 excise tax on any shortfall if it turns out to be wrong. What that penalty actually is, and how a shortfall is corrected is worth reading before weighing that risk in either direction, because the correction rules are more forgiving than the headline rate suggests — which cuts against treating this as an obvious choice in either direction.

Which way that trade lands depends on a particular household’s income in particular years, and it is not something an article can decide. What everyone in this cohort can do is watch for guidance: a gap like this closes by notice rather than by headline.

What exactly is the required beginning date?

April 1 of the calendar year after the year you reach your applicable age — not the year itself.

For an IRA, Treas. Reg. §1.408-8(b)(1)(i) states it directly: “the IRA owner’s required beginning date is April 1 of the calendar year following the calendar year in which the individual attains the applicable age.” The parallel rule for employer plans is at Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-2(b)(1), which sets the date as April 1 of the calendar year following the later of “the calendar year in which the employee attains the applicable age” and “the calendar year in which the employee retires from employment with the employer maintaining the plan.” Those last eight words are the whole still-working exception, and they are the reason it reaches no former employer’s plan.

Two things follow from that and they pull in opposite directions.

The first is that your required beginning date is later than your first required year. The distribution that is due by that April is the distribution for the earlier calendar year — the year you reached your applicable age. Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-5(a)(2)(ii) makes that earlier year your first distribution calendar year in its own right, and §1.401(a)(9)-5(a)(3) says only that the distribution for it “may be made on or before April 1 of the following calendar year.”

The second is that the grace period is a deadline extension, not a year of relief. Your second year’s distribution is running on its own schedule and is due at the end of that second year, with no extension at all. Use the April date in full and both distributions land inside one tax year, on one return, on top of each other.

That stacking is the single most expensive mechanical mistake in this whole area, and it is entirely avoidable by taking the first distribution in the year it is for. I have written up why the April 1 grace date doubles one year’s income, and the narrow case where deferring is still the better call, alongside the table itself, so I am not going to repeat the arithmetic here. What belongs on this page is only the timing fact: the grace date moves the deadline, never the year.

Every distribution after the first one is due December 31, with no grace period whatsoever. §1.401(a)(9)-5(a)(3) again: the required distribution for any other distribution calendar year “must be made on or before the end of that distribution calendar year.” That is one sentence covering the rest of your life.

What does “the year you reach your applicable age” mean if your birthday is in December?

It means that whole calendar year, including the eleven months before your birthday.

The rule runs on the age you attain during the calendar year, not on the age you are on any particular date. Two paragraphs carry it between them. Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-2(b)(2) keys the applicable age to the calendar year in which the employee attains it, and §1.401(a)(9)-5(a)(2)(ii) makes that year the first distribution calendar year — which is what settles which year is your first. §1.401(a)(9)-5(c)(1) then does the same for the table lookup, determining the denominator “for the employee’s age as of the employee’s birthday in the relevant distribution calendar year.”

So if your birthday falls on December 28 and you reach your applicable age that day, the entire year that just passed was your first distribution calendar year. You could have taken the distribution in February, months before the birthday, and it would have counted. Nothing about the requirement waits for the birthday to arrive.

This trips up two kinds of people in opposite directions.

Late-in-the-year birthdays sometimes assume they have effectively bought themselves an extra year, and they have not. What they have is a very short window between the birthday and the year-end deadline, unless they use the April grace date and accept the stacking that comes with it. If your birthday is in the fourth quarter, one common answer is to take the first distribution early in that same year rather than in the fortnight after a birthday, when custodian processing queues are at their worst.

Early-in-the-year birthdays sometimes assume the requirement starts on the birthday and take nothing in January or February on the theory that it is too soon. It is not too soon. A distribution taken in January of your first distribution calendar year counts toward that year’s requirement in full.

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

Which accounts start when?

Traditional IRAs, SEP IRAs, SIMPLE IRAs and employer plans all start on this schedule. A Roth IRA never starts at all during your lifetime.

Traditional IRAs. These are the straightforward case. The required beginning date is April 1 following the year you reach your applicable age, full stop, whatever you are doing for a living.

SEP and SIMPLE IRAs. Same treatment, and this surprises people who think of them as workplace accounts. Treas. Reg. §1.408-8(a)(4) says IRAs receiving employer contributions under a SEP arrangement or a SIMPLE IRA plan “are treated as IRAs, rather than employer plans, for purposes of section 401(a)(9).” Your employer funded it; the required distribution rules still see an IRA.

Employer plans — a 401(k), 403(b), or governmental 457(b). These follow the “later of” rule quoted above, which is what creates the still-working exception described in the next section. An old plan left behind at a former employer does not get that treatment, because you are not still working there.

Roth IRAs. Nothing is required during your lifetime, and the regulation is unusually plain about it. Treas. Reg. §1.408-8(b)(1)(ii): “No minimum distributions are required to be made from a Roth IRA while the owner is alive.” A Roth IRA has no required beginning date, no denominator, and no place in the calculation.

Designated Roth accounts inside an employer plan — the Roth side of a 401(k) or 403(b). This one changed, and a great deal of published material has not caught up. Those accounts used to carry a lifetime required distribution; they no longer do. Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-5(b)(3) removes them from the balance the calculation runs on: for distribution calendar years up to and including the year of the employee’s death, “the account balance does not include amounts held in a designated Roth account.” If you find an article telling you to roll a Roth 401(k) to a Roth IRA specifically to escape required distributions, check its date. That reason is gone. There may still be other reasons to do it — investment menu, fees, beneficiary flexibility — but the required distribution is no longer one of them.

After the owner’s death, both kinds of Roth account enter a different regime entirely. That is the inherited-account rules rather than this page, and the ten-year rule for inherited accounts covers it.

Can working past your applicable age push the start date back?

For one specific plan, yes. For everything else, no.

26 U.S.C. §401(a)(9)(C)(i) sets the required beginning date as April 1 of the calendar year following the later of the year you reach the applicable age and “the calendar year in which the employee retires.” That second limb is the still-working exception, and it can push a plan’s start date years past the birth-year answer.

It is narrower than it sounds in four separate ways. It never touches an IRA — §401(a)(9)(C)(ii)(II) rules the second limb out for the IRA provisions by name. It reaches only the plan of the employer you are still working for, so old plans left at former employers start on the ordinary schedule. It is removed for an employee who is a five-percent owner of the business, under §401(a)(9)(C)(ii)(I). And a plan can switch it off. The regulation’s default is the later-of rule, but Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-2(b)(4) lets a plan “provide that the required beginning date for purposes of section 401(a)(9) for all employees is April 1 of the calendar year following the calendar year described in paragraph (b)(1)(i) of this section” — one uniform date for everybody, exception gone. Note which way that runs: the plan does not have to grant the exception, it has to have declined to take it away.

The practical version: if you are past your applicable age and still at your firm, the answer comes from your plan administrator, not from a table and not from this article. Get it from them in writing before you assume either way. The still-working exception, in full walks through each of those limits and the situations where people think they qualify and do not.

Why does the start date matter more than the number?

Because the years before it are the only years in which the withdrawal is a decision.

This is the part that gets left out of nearly every “when do RMDs start” page, and it is worth more than the date itself. Nothing in the required distribution rules takes money away from you. The account balance is yours either way. What the required beginning date takes away is control over when the tax on it is recognized — and for a household with a large traditional balance, timing is close to the only lever there is.

Before your required beginning date, every dollar that comes out of a traditional account comes out because you chose to move it. You can fill a lower bracket deliberately in a year when income is down. You can convert to a Roth and pay the tax at a rate you selected rather than one that arrived. You can take nothing at all. Those years are usually the lowest-income years of an entire retirement — after the paychecks stop, often before Social Security is claimed, and before any required amount exists.

After it, a floor appears under your taxable income every single year, and it rises. The denominator shrinks with age, so the same balance produces a larger required withdrawal each year — the mechanics of that are in how an RMD is calculated. That rising floor is what pushes into the next bracket, lifts the income Medicare surcharges are measured against two years later, and pulls more of a Social Security benefit into taxable income. Not because anything went wrong, but because the schedule works exactly as designed.

So the start date is really a countdown on a planning window. The width of that window is the number of years between when your earned income stops and when your required distributions begin, and it is set by two dates you mostly cannot move. Knowing it early is what makes it usable. Discovering it in the January of your first required year means it has already closed.

If you want to see the size of the requirement waiting at the end of that window, the RMD calculator will run the division on a balance you enter, and running it a decade early is a more useful exercise than running it the year it applies.

What do people get wrong about this?

Five things, and only one of them is arithmetic.

They use a single starting age. It is the most common error in published writing on this subject and it is wrong for a large share of the audience — including, in the expensive direction, everybody born in 1960 or later who is told to start two years early. Check your birth year, never a headline age.

They assume 1959 has an answer. It does not, in the published regulation, and confident writing about it is confidence borrowed from nowhere.

They confuse the required beginning date with the first required year. The April date is a deadline for a distribution that belongs to the year before. Treating it as the start of the requirement is what produces two distributions in one tax year.

They assume still working means no RMDs. It means no RMDs from one specific plan, if that plan says so, and only if you are not a five-percent owner. The IRA is unaffected and the old plans from previous employers are unaffected.

They treat the start date as a compliance date rather than a planning date. By the time it arrives, the decisions it foreclosed were available for years and are no longer. The date is knowable from the moment you know your birth year, which makes it the most predictable deadline in retirement and the one most often noticed late.

If charitable giving is part of your year, there is one more piece worth reading before your first required distribution rather than after, because a transfer sent straight from an IRA to a charity can satisfy part of the required amount without ever entering your taxable income. 26 U.S.C. §408(d)(8) is where that lives, and its own age test at §408(d)(8)(B)(ii) is lower than either applicable age — so the move becomes available before the requirement it can satisfy does.