Clear Money Guide
What this guide covers
A quick view of the questions and evidence developed below.
Updated August 12, 2026. Quick answer: If the account owner owed an RMD for the year of their death and had not taken it, the beneficiary must take it — by 31 December of that same year. It is not deferred into the 10-year window and it is easy to miss in the weeks after a death.
The obligation transfers, the deadline does not move
The year-of-death RMD belongs to the decedent’s schedule, not yours. If they had already taken it, nothing is owed. If they had not, whoever inherits must take the remaining amount before the end of that calendar year.
Someone who dies in November leaves weeks, not months. This is the single most commonly missed distribution in the whole area, because the family is dealing with a death and no custodian statement arrives explaining it.
If it was missed
The shortfall carries a 25% excise tax, reduced from 50% by SECURE 2.0, and reduced again to 10% if a corrective distribution is taken inside the correction window — which ends on the earliest of a notice of deficiency, the assessment of the tax, or the last day of the second taxable year beginning after the year the tax was imposed.
For this particular distribution there is also an automatic waiver, which is better than a relief request because nothing has to be argued. Treas. Reg. §54.4974-1(g)(3) waives the tax where the owner died in the year without satisfying the requirement and the beneficiary takes the corrective distribution “no later than the tax filing deadline (including extensions thereof) for the taxable year of that beneficiary that begins with or within that calendar year (or, if later, the last day of the calendar year following that calendar year)”. That provision applies for taxable years beginning on or after 1 January 2025. The requirement date and this correction date are two different things — the deadline to take the money is still the end of the year of death; the automatic waiver decides whether missing it costs anything.
With several beneficiaries
The amount is satisfied in aggregate rather than per person, so beneficiaries need to coordinate. Two people each assuming the other handled it is a common and expensive pattern.
Get the inherited-account decision right the first time
Deciding when to take money out of an inherited account is a tax question as much as a rules question, and an adviser can price the withdrawal schedule against the rest of your income before a deadline sets the timing for you.
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Sources
Final regulations on required minimum distributions, published 19 July 2024; SECURE Act (2019) and SECURE 2.0 (2022); IRC §401(a)(9). Read at primary source 2026-08-12: T.D. 10001, 89 FR 58886 (19 July 2024) — Treas. Reg. §54.4974-1(g)(3) and (h) for the automatic waiver and its 1 January 2025 applicability date, and the preamble to that section for the requirement itself (“a beneficiary of the individual must satisfy the minimum distribution requirement by the end of that calendar year”). The 2021–2024 excise-tax relief for annual beneficiary distributions is Notice 2022-53, 2022-45 I.R.B. 437; Notice 2023-54, 2023-31 I.R.B. 382 (section V, not section IV); and Notice 2024-35, 2024-19 I.R.B. 1051 — none of which moves any deadline on this page.
This states what the cited authority says. It is not tax advice, and inherited account rules turn on facts about the decedent that no page can verify for you.
Related
What changed in 2024 was the penalty date, not this one: the distribution requirement still runs to the end of the year of death, but the excise tax is now waived automatically if the amount is taken by the later of the beneficiary’s filing deadline or 31 December of the following year. That correction window is laid out at the year-of-death RMD deadline, and the beneficiary’s own ten-year clock is a third date again — set by the year the owner died.