Inherited IRA 10-Year Rule: Do I Have to Take RMDs Every Year, or Just Empty It by Year 10?

Your parent died, you inherited their traditional IRA, and now you’ve gotten three different answers to the same question. The brokerage rep said you have ten years and didn’t mention anything else. An article you read said you have to take money out every year. A coworker who inherited one in 2019 told you about a “stretch” that lets you spread it over your lifetime. Those answers contradict each other, and the one you act on decides whether you owe a penalty next April.

Here’s the part nobody leads with: under the inherited IRA 10-year rule, whether you have to take a required minimum distribution (RMD) every year does not depend on you. It depends on one fact about your parent. Get that fact straight and the rest follows.

Do I have to take RMDs every year, or can I just empty the account by year 10?

It depends on whether your parent had already started taking their own RMDs before they died.

• If your parent died on or after the age the IRS made them start taking RMDs, then yes — you have to take an RMD every year, in years one through nine, and empty whatever is left by the end of year ten.
• If your parent died before that age, you take nothing on a schedule. You just have to empty the account by the end of the tenth year. You could pull it all in year one, all in year ten, or anything in between.

Same ten-year deadline either way. The difference is whether there are mandatory withdrawals along the way. So the whole question turns into a simpler one: had your parent started their RMDs yet?

What is the one fact that decides it?

Whether your parent had reached their “required beginning date” — the point the IRS forces a traditional-IRA owner to start drawing the account down.

That date is built on an age. Under current law, you generally must start RMDs at age 73 (for people who reached 72 after 2022), and that start age rises to 75 for people born in 1960 or later. The actual deadline — the required beginning date — is April 1 of the year after you turn that age. This all traces back to the 10-year rule Congress created in the SECURE Act of 2019 (codified at IRC § 401(a)(9)(H)) and the Treasury regulations finalized in 2024 (Treas. Reg. § 1.401(a)(9)-5).

In plain terms: if your parent was in their late 70s or 80s and clearly already taking yearly withdrawals, you’re almost certainly in the “annual RMD” camp. If your parent died at 68, before any of that started, you’re in the “just empty it by year ten” camp. When the timing is close to the line — a parent who died the same year they turned 73 — that’s exactly the kind of detail worth confirming before you file, because it flips your obligation.

What if my parent had already started their RMDs?

Then you take an annual RMD in each of years one through nine, and clear out the rest by December 31 of year ten.

Your annual amount is based on your own life expectancy, so for most adult children inheriting in middle age it’s a relatively small slice of the account each year — not a tenth, not the whole thing. But “small” is the trap. Because the required annual piece is modest, people take just that, let the rest ride, and arrive at year ten with most of the balance still sitting there. That entire remaining balance then has to come out in a single year, stacked on top of your salary. A withdrawal you could have spread thinly across a decade instead lands in one bracket-busting lump.

So when your parent had started RMDs, you have two jobs, not one: take the required amount each year, and separately decide how much extra to take so year ten isn’t a tax bomb.

What if my parent died before their RMD age?

Then there are no required annual withdrawals. You only have to empty the account by the end of the tenth year after the year of death.

This sounds like the better deal, and on paper you have total freedom — pull nothing for nine years if you want. But “you can wait” and “you should wait” are different statements. Letting a six-figure traditional IRA grow untouched for nine years just means a larger balance to force out in year ten, all taxed as ordinary income in twelve months. The freedom here is real; the smart move is usually to use it to spread withdrawals into your lower-income years, not to defer everything to the end.

Why does this suddenly matter in 2026?

Because the grace period is over. For four years the IRS waived the penalty on these annual inherited-IRA RMDs while everyone argued over what the 10-year rule actually required.

When the SECURE Act passed, the rules were ambiguous enough that the IRS told beneficiaries it would not penalize them for skipping the year-one-through-nine RMDs. It granted that relief for 2021 and 2022 (Notice 2022-53), again for 2023 (Notice 2023-54), and again for 2024 (Notice 2024-35). A lot of people reasonably concluded the annual RMD wasn’t a real obligation.

That window has closed. The final regulations require these annual distributions for years beginning on or after January 1, 2025 — so 2025 was the first year the requirement actually had teeth, and 2026 is fully subject to it with no waiver to fall back on. If your parent had started their RMDs and you skip your distribution this year, the penalty is live again.

What happens if I skip a required distribution?

You face an excise tax on the amount you should have taken but didn’t — 25% of the shortfall under IRC § 4974.

It used to be 50%. SECURE 2.0 cut it to 25%, and to 10% if you fix the miss inside the correction window (generally by the end of the second year after the one you missed). The penalty is reported on Form 5329, which is also where you ask the IRS to waive it for reasonable cause — and for an honest, promptly corrected miss, that waiver is routinely granted. If you think you already missed one, the move is to take the late distribution now and file. We walk through that repair in our guide to Form 5329 penalties and exceptions.

Don’t forget your parent’s final-year RMD

If your parent had started RMDs and died before taking their distribution for the year they died, that last RMD doesn’t disappear — it becomes your responsibility. The 2024 regulations gave heirs some breathing room on the timing: instead of the old December-31-of-the-year-of-death deadline, you now generally have until your own tax-filing deadline, including extensions, for the year your parent died. That’s relief, not permission to forget it.

This is still the obligation heirs miss most, because it lands in the middle of grief and paperwork and the custodian usually won’t chase you for it. Check whether your parent had already taken their full RMD for their final year; if not, take the rest before that deadline. It’s reported to you on a Form 1099-R with a death-distribution code, and it’s taxed to you, not the estate.

What’s the one mistake that taxes the whole account at once?

Taking the money out in your own name. As a non-spouse beneficiary, you cannot roll an inherited IRA into your own IRA, and you cannot take a check and redeposit it within 60 days the way an account owner can.

The only safe move is a direct trustee-to-trustee transfer into a properly titled inherited IRA — an account that reads something like “Jane Parent, deceased, for the benefit of John Child, beneficiary.” If instead you have the custodian cut you a check, the entire balance is treated as distributed and fully taxable the moment it lands, and the inherited-IRA status is gone for good. Worse, if you then deposit that money into your own IRA thinking you “rolled it over,” it becomes an excess contribution that draws its own annual penalty until you pull it back out. This is the error that turns a $300,000 inheritance into a $300,000 taxable event in a single year. The rule that permits the non-spouse direct rollover is IRC § 402(c)(11); there is no 60-day version of it.

What if it’s a Roth, a trust, or an account I inherited from another heir?

The 10-year deadline still applies, but the details shift:

• Inherited Roth IRA: there are no annual RMDs during the ten years regardless of your parent’s age — a Roth owner is never deemed to have a required beginning date — and qualified withdrawals come out tax-free. You still have to empty it by year ten. (More in our walkthrough of Roth versus traditional IRAs.)
• Inherited through a trust: if the trust doesn’t meet the IRS “see-through” requirements, the payout window can shrink — in some cases to five years — and accelerate the tax. Trust-inherited IRAs are their own animal and worth a specific review.
• You inherited from someone who had already inherited it: as a “successor” beneficiary you generally don’t get a fresh ten years — you finish out the clock that was already running.

How should I think about the ten years so I don’t get a year-ten tax bomb?

Treat the deadline as a planning window, not a countdown to a single withdrawal. The goal is to pull money out in the years your other income is lowest and stop short of the income lines that trigger their own costs.

A conversion-style mindset helps here even though you’re not converting: every dollar you withdraw is ordinary income that year, so you fill up your lower brackets, then stop before you cross into a higher one or trip an income-based surcharge. The same cliffs that haunt retirees doing Roth conversions apply to your inherited-IRA withdrawals — Medicare premium surcharges (IRMAA) if you’re near 65, the ACA subsidy cliff if you buy your own health insurance, and the bracket math we lay out for sizing withdrawals year by year. If you’re charitably inclined and over 70½, a qualified charitable distribution can satisfy part of the draw-down without adding to your taxable income at all.

The point is that the ten-year window is the rare tax problem you get to control the timing of. Spreading $300,000 across nine deliberate years lands in a very different place than $300,000 in one.

What should I do first?

The first thing to nail down is the fact this whole thing rests on: had your parent started their RMDs? Pull that answer, check whether the final-year RMD was taken, and confirm the account is titled as an inherited IRA — not sitting in your own name. From there it’s a multi-year withdrawal plan, not a single deadline.

If you’d rather have someone confirm which camp you’re in and map the ten-year draw-down against your actual income — your brackets, the IRMAA and ACA lines, and the year-ten balloon you’re trying to avoid — that’s the heart of our inherited IRA tax planning. Book a remote consult with our office; it’s a lot cheaper to plan the withdrawals than to unwind a missed RMD or a check you should never have cashed.

Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment, tax, or financial advice. Tax law is highly fact-specific and subject to change. Always consult a qualified professional about your specific situation.