Plan inherited IRA withdrawals under the 10-year rule. Compare even, front-loaded, and back-loaded strategies.
Even annual strategy
—
Annual withdrawal (even)
—
Tax per year (even)
—
Your breakdown
Updates live as you type| Figure | Amount |
|---|
The ten-year clock and why it bites
Before the SECURE Act of 2020, a beneficiary could stretch an inherited IRA over their own life expectancy, taking small distributions for decades while the rest grew tax-deferred. That era is over for most heirs. Now, most non-spouse beneficiaries must empty the entire inherited IRA within ten years of the original owner's death. Every dollar that comes out of a traditional inherited IRA is taxed as ordinary income, so compressing a large balance into a ten-year window can shove you into much higher brackets than the old stretch ever did. This calculator shows the tax cost of the even-withdrawal approach and helps you weigh bunching against spreading the distributions.
Spreading the tax instead of bunching it
The worst outcome under the ten-year rule is doing nothing for nine years and then withdrawing the whole balance in year ten, because a single enormous distribution can land in the 35% or 37% bracket. The even-withdrawal strategy this tool models avoids that by taking a steady amount each year, smoothing the income and keeping your marginal rate flatter. There is often a smarter variant still: time larger withdrawals for your low-income years, a gap between jobs or an early-retirement window before Social Security begins, and smaller ones when your income is high. Those front-loaded and back-loaded variants depend on your personal income path, so treat them as a planning conversation rather than a fixed formula.
Draining $500,000 over a decade
Take a $500,000 inherited traditional IRA growing at 6% a year, with the beneficiary in a 24% marginal bracket. To empty the account in exactly ten years while it keeps growing, the even annual withdrawal is larger than a naive $50,000, because you are also drawing down the growth the balance earns along the way.
The even withdrawal is about $67,934 a year, not $50,000, and the total taken out reaches roughly $679,000 because the account keeps earning 6% while you draw it down. The tax bill across the decade is about $163,000. One honesty note about this model: it applies a single flat 24% rate to every withdrawal. In reality the withdrawals stack on top of your other income, so your true marginal rate may differ year to year, which is precisely why timing the withdrawals around your income matters. The chart shows the balance falling to zero over the ten years.
The RMD trap inside the ten-year rule
Here is the rule that catches even careful heirs: whether you must take annual withdrawals during the ten years depends on whether the original owner had already begun their required minimum distributions. If the owner died before their RMD start date, you can let the account ride and withdraw it in any pattern you like, as long as it is empty by year ten. But if the owner had already started RMDs, the IRS requires an annual minimum distribution in years one through nine as well as fully emptying the account by the end of year ten. Missing it can trigger an excise tax on the shortfall, so confirm the owner's RMD status before you plan your withdrawals.
Do spouses have to follow the ten-year rule?
No. A surviving spouse is an eligible designated beneficiary and has options the ten-year rule does not impose. The most common move is to treat the inherited IRA as their own, rolling it into their personal IRA and taking distributions on their own schedule based on their own age. Spouses can also remain a beneficiary and use life-expectancy distributions. Minor children of the owner, disabled or chronically ill individuals, and beneficiaries less than ten years younger than the deceased also escape the strict ten-year rule, at least for a time. The ten-year window applies mainly to adult children, other relatives, and most non-spouse heirs.
Is an inherited Roth IRA taxed the same way?
The ten-year emptying rule still applies to most non-spouse beneficiaries of a Roth IRA, but the tax consequence is very different. Qualified withdrawals from an inherited Roth come out completely tax-free, so there is no income-tax cost to draining it. That flips the optimal strategy: with a traditional inherited IRA you want to manage brackets, but with a Roth you generally want to leave it untouched until the very end of the ten years, letting it grow tax-free for as long as the rule allows, then withdraw the full balance in year ten with no tax due.
Can I just leave the money in and pay the penalty?
That is not a viable plan. If the account is not emptied by the end of the tenth year, the remaining balance is subject to a steep excise tax on the amount that should have been withdrawn, and you still owe ordinary income tax when it eventually comes out. There is no version of this where ignoring the deadline saves money. The only real decision is how to spread the withdrawals across the ten years to minimize the income-tax bite, which is what the planning in this tool is meant to support.