Clear Money Guide
What this guide covers
A quick view of the questions and evidence developed below.
Updated July 28, 2026. Quick answer: No annual RMDs. A Roth owner never has a required beginning date during life, so the condition that forces years 1–9 withdrawals cannot be met — but the account must still be emptied by the end of year ten.
Why the Roth answer is cleaner
Related guides: Inheritance tax by state and State tax on 401(k) and IRA withdrawals.
The annual-RMD trap on traditional inherited accounts turns on whether the decedent had reached their required beginning date. A Roth owner has no lifetime RMDs at all, so there is no required beginning date to have reached. The condition simply cannot be satisfied.
That makes the answer for inherited Roths uniform where the traditional answer splits: no annual RMDs, empty by year ten. It is the one place where the common advice is actually correct.
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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Which makes the strategy the opposite
Because qualified Roth withdrawals are tax-free, there is no rate-smoothing reason to spread them. Leaving the money invested for the full ten years and taking it at the end lets it compound tax-free for as long as the rules allow — the reverse of the usual advice on a traditional inherited account.
Check the account’s own five-year clock. Earnings can be taxable if the Roth was not open long enough, and that clock is the decedent’s, not yours.
Figures verified against IRS Publication 590-B (2025), the final required minimum distribution regulations (T.D. 10001, 89 Fed. Reg. 58886, July 19, 2024), IRS Notices 2022-53, 2023-54 and 2024-35, and the text of IRC §§401(a)(9) and 4974 on September 30, 2026; the July 2026 cross-check against professional analyses was not re-checked.
Sources
Final regulations on required minimum distributions, published 19 July 2024; SECURE Act (2019) and SECURE 2.0 (2022); IRC §401(a)(9). Cross-checked July 2026 against professional analyses from Kitces, Grant Thornton, Ascensus, Charles Schwab and Kiplinger. The excise-tax waivers for certain missed distributions in 2021 through 2024 are in IRS Notices 2022-53 (2021 and 2022), 2023-54 (2023) and 2024-35 (2024). Under IRC §4974(e) the 25% excise tax falls to 10% if the shortfall is distributed and a return is filed within the correction window, which ends at the earliest of a notice of deficiency, assessment of the tax, or the last day of the second taxable year that begins after the year in which the tax was imposed.
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.