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A Traditional IRA holds pre-tax dollars — money that was deducted going in and has never been taxed. The tax was deferred, not forgiven. Required minimum distributions are how the IRS collects it: rather than letting the account compound tax-deferred indefinitely, or pass down through generations untaxed, the rules force a slice out each year and tax it as ordinary income.
This applies to the original owner during their lifetime, and — in a much more compressed form — to a non-spouse beneficiary after they inherit.
The SECURE Act eliminated the “stretch IRA”, which had let a beneficiary spread withdrawals across their own full life expectancy — often forty or fifty years of continued tax-deferred growth. Most non-spouse beneficiaries must now empty the inherited account within 10 years.
On top of that, if the original owner had already started their own RMDs before dying, the IRS requires the beneficiary to keep taking an annual minimum in years 1–9 as well — not just one withdrawal at the end. That stops the account from sitting untaxed for a full decade. This calculator models exactly that case.
The divisor is a life expectancy factor from the IRS actuarial tables (Single Life Expectancy, Table I). A larger divisor means a smaller required withdrawal, because you are dividing the balance by a bigger number.
Younger beneficiaries have a longer statistical life expectancy, so they get a larger divisor and the required withdrawals are spread thinner. Older beneficiaries get a smaller divisor, so more must come out sooner. The original owner's own RMDs work the same way — a 73-year-old withdraws a far smaller percentage than a 95-year-old.
The beneficiary looks up the table once, using their age in year 1, and then subtracts 1.0 from that factor each following year. It is not re-looked-up at the new age each year — that is the required “minus-1” method, and it is why the divisor shrinks faster than real life expectancy does, pulling more out of the account each year.
These are minimums, not a schedule you are stuck with. A beneficiary can always withdraw more in any year. Doing so is often worth it: the required-minimum path shown below defers as much as possible and then dumps the entire remaining balance into year 10 as a single lump sum, which can push that one year into the top bracket. Spreading the same money across lower-income years usually costs less tax overall, even though it means taking more than required early on.
| Year | Age | Divisor | RMD (minimum) | Balance after | Income tax | Net income |
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