Once you reach RMD age, the IRS forces a withdrawal from tax-deferred accounts every year whether you need the money or not. The projection models that force exactly, because it's what makes "do nothing" a tax plan too.
The rules as modeled
- Start age by birth year (SECURE 2.0): 1950 or earlier → 72, 1951–1959 → 73, 1960 or later → 75.
- Amount = prior-year tax-deferred balance ÷ the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table factor for your age.
- Tax-deferred only: Roth is exempt, which is much of why conversions exist.
- Per owner: each spouse's RMD runs on their own birth year and their own tax-deferred balance, keyed by account ownership.
How RMDs interact with the plan
The forced RMD is withdrawn from tax-deferred first and counts as ordinary income; if spending needs more, the rest follows your draw order. If the RMD exceeds spending, the surplus still comes out and gets taxed. This is the classic late-70s bracket creep the RMD table lets you see coming.
RMD dollars are reported both nominal (the literal forced check) and in today's dollars. When conversions are on, the table becomes a with-vs-without comparison, so you can see the exact RMD and tax stream a conversion plan erases.
Est. tax follows the filing status of that year, not the household's. The column stacks the RMD on the year's other income and prices the difference at the year's brackets. So if you model a survivor scenario, every year from the first death is priced as a Single filer, exactly as the projection runs it, and the widow's penalty shows up in the column instead of hiding behind joint bracket widths. The panel's subtitle names the age it switches.
It also counts the Social Security the distribution drags into tax. How much of a benefit is taxable depends on your income including the distribution, so a forced withdrawal can make a benefit taxable that was not taxable without it. That is the tax torpedo, and it is a large part of what this table exists to warn you about. The column now runs the Social Security worksheet twice, with the distribution and without, and shows the difference between the two whole tax bills. For a single filer with $24,000 of Social Security and no other income, a $30,000 distribution costs $2,056 rather than the $790 the distribution alone would suggest, because it pulls $11,300 of the benefit into tax with it.
The column applies the same deductions the projection itself applies: the standard deduction, and in 2025 through 2028 the bonus deduction for filers 65 and over. That bonus is a fixed dollar amount whose phase-out thresholds do not rise with inflation, so it is measured against the year's income in that year's dollars, and it shrinks as a distribution pushes your income past the threshold.