Inherited IRA Deadline by Death Year (2020-2026)

Updated August 12, 2026. Quick answer: if the ten-year rule applies to you, one fact fixes your final deadline — the year the owner died. The account has to be empty by the end of the calendar year that contains the tenth anniversary of the death, so a 2021 death means 31 December 2031 and a 2026 death means 31 December 2036. The IRS relief that ran from 2021 through 2024 did not move that date. It waived a penalty on the annual distributions inside the window, and nothing else.

The deadline, by the year the owner died

On a phone the table scrolls sideways — the first two columns are the answer.

Read the first two columns if you only want the emptying date. The third and fourth columns matter only if the owner had already reached their required beginning date — that is the test for whether annual distributions also run inside the window, and it is covered further down.

Where the deadline column comes from

Not from an article. From the operative sentence of the regulation, which supplies its own worked example:

The same rule is stated a second time, from the other direction, in the paragraph that fixes the outer date: for a designated beneficiary who is not an eligible designated beneficiary, the year by which the entire interest must be distributed is “the calendar year that includes the tenth anniversary of the date of the employee’s death” (Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-5(e)(2)).

Two details in that sentence are worth slowing down for. It says the calendar year that includes the tenth anniversary, not ten years from the date — so a death on 2 January 2021 and a death on 31 December 2021 share the same 31 December 2031 deadline, and no part-year proration exists. And the example is stated for a death on any day in the year, which is what makes a table like the one above possible at all.

One thing that is not in the ten-year rule: a 2020 skip. The regulation does disregard the 2020 calendar year in one place — paragraph (c)(2), the five-year rule, and only for owners who died before 1 January 2020. Paragraph (c)(3), the ten-year rule, contains no such sentence. A 2020 death is a 2030 deadline.

What the 2021–2024 IRS relief actually did

Three notices, issued a year apart, are the reason this area is confusing. Each one says the same thing in the same narrow way:

That is the whole of it. The relief is about an excise tax on a missed annual distribution. It never extended the outer emptying date, and none of the three notices claims to. A beneficiary who took nothing at all from 2021 through 2024 on a 2020 death owes no penalty for those years — and still has to empty the account by 31 December 2030.

The years each notice covers are what build the fourth column above: Notice 2022-53 covers distributions required in 2021 or 2022 where the owner died in 2020 or 2021 on or after the required beginning date; Notice 2023-54 extends the same relief to 2023 for deaths in 2020, 2021 or 2022; Notice 2024-35 extends it to 2024 for deaths in 2020 through 2023. After that the relief stops: the final regulations apply for determining required minimum distributions for calendar years beginning on or after 1 January 2025.

If you are checking a citation someone else gave you, one trap is worth knowing. In Notice 2023-54 the beneficiary relief is section V. Section IV of that notice is about something else entirely — the SECURE 2.0 change to the required beginning date. A page citing “2023-54 section IV” for the waiver is pointing at the wrong part of the document.

Whether annual RMDs also run inside your ten years

The outer deadline is the same for everyone on the ten-year rule. Whether you also owe a distribution in each of the intervening years turns on one question about the owner, not about you: had they reached their required beginning date before they died?

• Died before their required beginning date. No annual distribution is required inside the window. You can take nothing for nine years and empty the account in the tenth, if that is what your tax picture wants.
• Died on or after their required beginning date. An annual distribution is required in each distribution calendar year, and the account must still be empty by the outer date. Two requirements, not one.

The longer version of that test, including how to find out whether the owner had reached their required beginning date, is on does the 10-year rule require annual RMDs. To model what the withdrawals do to your tax bill across the window, the 10-year drawdown calculator takes it year by year.

Who is not on this clock at all

The table above applies to a designated beneficiary who is not an eligible designated beneficiary. Five categories are eligible, measured as of the date of death:

• the surviving spouse of the owner;
• a child of the owner who has not reached the age of majority;
• a disabled individual;
• a chronically ill individual; and
• an individual not more than ten years younger than the owner.

An eligible designated beneficiary generally takes life-expectancy payments instead of a ten-year window, so there is no fixed emptying date while those payments run. Two of the five carry a date the table cannot show:

• A minor child of the owner. The regulation defines the line precisely — “An individual reaches the age of majority on the individual’s 21st birthday” (Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-4(e)(3)). Eligible status ends there, and the account must be empty by the end of “the calendar year that includes the tenth anniversary of the date the designated beneficiary reaches the age of majority” (§1.401(a)(9)-5(e)(4)). So the deadline is set by the 21st birthday, not by the death. The category is the owner’s own child; a grandchild does not qualify.
• An eligible designated beneficiary who dies first. A fresh window opens, run off the second death rather than the first: the calendar year that includes the tenth anniversary of the eligible designated beneficiary’s death (§1.401(a)(9)-5(e)(3), and section 401(a)(9)(H)(iii) behind it).

And if no individual was named — an estate, a charity, or a trust that does not look through — there is no designated beneficiary, and neither the table nor the ten-year rule applies. Where the owner died before their required beginning date, the five-year rule governs (Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-3(c)(5)(i)(A)). Where they died on or after it, distributions run on the owner’s own remaining life expectancy (Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-5(d)(1)(iii)), which for an older owner can be shorter than ten years and for a younger one considerably longer.

Which category you are in is the first thing to establish: who counts as an eligible designated beneficiary, the minor-child rules, spouse versus non-spouse, and inheriting an already-inherited IRA.

The year-of-death RMD is a different date entirely

If the owner owed a distribution for the year they died and had not taken it, that amount is not part of your ten-year window and is not governed by the table above. There are two dates on it, and conflating them is the most common error in this corner:

• The requirement date is the end of the calendar year of the death. That did not change in 2024.
• The penalty-free correction date did change. The excise tax is waived automatically if the corrective distribution is taken by the later of the beneficiary’s tax filing deadline (including extensions) for the year the owner died, or the last day of the following calendar year (Treas. Reg. §54.4974-1(g)(3), applying for taxable years beginning on or after 1 January 2025).

Both dates, and who takes it when several people inherit, are on the RMD in the year someone dies and what changed about that deadline in 2024. If a distribution has already been missed, the missed-RMD penalty page covers the correction window.

Sources

Every date and quotation on this page was taken from the primary document, read 2026-08-12. T.D. 10001, “Required Minimum Distributions”, 89 FR 58886 (19 July 2024) — the Federal Register text: Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-3(c)(3) (the ten-year deadline and the 2021/2031 example), §1.401(a)(9)-3(c)(5)(i)(A) (no designated beneficiary), §1.401(a)(9)-4(e)(3) (age of majority), §1.401(a)(9)-5(d)(1) (annual distributions and the no-beneficiary denominator), §1.401(a)(9)-5(e)(2) to (e)(4) (the outer year in each case), §54.4974-1(g)(3) and (h) (the automatic waiver and its applicability date). Notice 2022-53, 2022-45 I.R.B. 437 (PDF); Notice 2023-54, 2023-31 I.R.B. 382 (PDF); Notice 2024-35, 2024-19 I.R.B. 1051 (PDF) — the excise-tax relief for 2021 through 2024.

This states what the cited authority says. It is not tax advice, and inherited-account rules turn on facts about the owner — their age at death, whether distributions had begun, what the plan document says — that no page can verify for you.

Related

• Inherited IRA rules: the whole cluster
• Does the 10-year rule require annual RMDs?
• The RMD in the year someone dies
• Splitting an inherited IRA between beneficiaries
• Inherited Roth IRA and the 10-year rule