Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) Calculator

How the calculation works

Your RMD for a given account is that account's balance on December 31 of the prior year, divided by a life-expectancy factor from the IRS's Uniform Lifetime Table, based on your age this year. The table runs from age 72 (factor 27.4) down to age 120 and over (factor 2), a lower factor at older ages producing a larger required withdrawal relative to the balance, since fewer expected years remain to spread it across.

Worked example: at age 75 (factor 24.6), a $320,000 traditional IRA at one brokerage requires about $13,008, and a $90,000 IRA at a different brokerage requires about $3,659 more, a combined IRA total of about $16,667 that can be taken from either account or split between them. A separate $180,000 old 401(k) requires its own $7,317, which has to come out of that 401(k) specifically. The grand total required across everything is about $23,984.

Which accounts have a required distribution

Not every retirement account forces a withdrawal, and the difference is worth knowing before you calculate anything. Traditional IRAs, SEP IRAs, SIMPLE IRAs, 401(k)s, 403(b)s and governmental 457(b)s all require distributions once you reach the starting age.

Roth accounts do not. The IRS puts it plainly: withdrawals from Roth IRAs and designated Roth accounts inside a 401(k) or 403(b) are not required until after the death of the account owner. That is the single most common point of confusion in IRA distribution rules, and it comes with a catch worth stating: beneficiaries who inherit a Roth account are subject to distribution rules even though the original owner never was.

Inherited accounts follow a different regime entirely, and this calculator does not cover it. The Uniform Lifetime Table used here is the table for account owners taking their own distributions. For most beneficiaries of an owner who died after 2019 the balance has to be emptied within ten years instead, with exceptions for surviving spouses and certain other beneficiaries, so an inherited IRA needs a different calculation and a different table.

Why IRAs and employer plans are tracked separately

This is the single most common RMD mistake worth avoiding: treating every retirement account as interchangeable. The IRS allows IRA owners to aggregate, calculate each IRA's RMD separately, add them up, then withdraw the combined total from any one IRA or split across several, whichever is more convenient. 403(b) contracts work the same way among themselves: calculate each separately, then take the total from one or more of your 403(b) contracts. What you cannot do is cross the boundary, because a 403(b) total can't be satisfied out of an IRA or the reverse. 401(k) and governmental 457(b) plans get no aggregation at all: each one needs its own RMD taken from that same plan. Mixing these up can mean technically missing a required distribution even while having withdrawn plenty of money overall, which is exactly the kind of error this tool's two-total layout is built to prevent.

What happens if an RMD is missed

Missing all or part of an RMD carries an excise tax under IRS rules, 25% of the amount not withdrawn by the deadline, reduced to 10% if corrected within a defined correction window. The deadline is December 31 of the year the RMD applies to, except for the very first RMD, which can be delayed to April 1 of the following year (delaying it means two RMDs land in that following year, which can push more income into a higher tax bracket than spreading them across two separate years). This tool's per-account checkbox exists so a quick glance answers "have I actually taken this yet," the thing most worth double checking before the year closes out.