What Is a Required Minimum Distribution (RMD)?

Cardio Renal Foundation is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity organization. Your donation advances our mission to provide a solution beyond dialysis.

Somewhere in your seventies, the mail changes. A letter — or a notice on your statement — arrives from the company that holds your IRA, and it says, in polite language, that this year you have to take money out. Not because you asked. Because the IRS requires it. That required withdrawal has a name — a required minimum distribution, or RMD — and every year from now on it arrives with the same three questions: How much? By when? And what do I do with it? This page answers the first two straight, the way homework deserves to be answered: what an RMD is, when it starts, how the amount is figured, and the date it has to be done by. Then it answers the third question completely — including the door most people are never told about, where money you do not need goes straight to charity, satisfies the IRS in full, and is never taxed at all. Everything about that second door is explained on this page. You will not have to go anywhere else to understand it.

What an RMD Is

An IRA was built on a trade. The money went in without being taxed, and it grew for years without being taxed — and in exchange, the IRS never promised to wait forever. A required minimum distribution is the IRS collecting on its side of the trade: starting at a set age, a minimum amount must come out of a traditional IRA every year, so it can finally be taxed as income. That is all an RMD is — a required withdrawal, figured by an IRS formula, due every year for the rest of your life. (Workplace plans like a 401(k) run a similar rule of their own; this page is about IRAs, which is where most of these letters come from.) Two plain facts around the edges: you may always take out more than the minimum — the RMD is a floor, not a ceiling — and what you may not do is skip it, or leave it short.

When RMDs Start — and the Date That Matters

The starting age depends on the year you were born. If you were born from 1951 through 1959, your required minimum distributions begin at age 73. If you were born in 1960 or later, they begin at age 75.

The deadline, in most years, is simple: December 31. This year's money must be out by December 31 of this year. There is exactly one exception, and it belongs to your very first RMD only: that first one — and only that one — may wait until April 1 of the following year. Many people take the first one in its own year anyway, for a plain arithmetic reason: waiting means two years of withdrawals land inside a single year, and both of them get taxed in that year. After the first year there is no April anything. December 31, every year.

And the deadline has teeth. Take out too little, or miss the date, and the IRS charges a penalty on the amount you should have taken. Of all the dates on a retiree's calendar, this is one worth circling.

How Your Amount Is Figured

The formula has exactly two ingredients, and neither one is a guess:

• Your IRA's balance on December 31 of last year. Not today's balance — the one the year closed with. Your custodian reports it, and it appears on your year-end statement.
• A number from an IRS table — a life-expectancy factor for your age. Most people use the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table, printed below. (The one common exception: if your spouse is your sole beneficiary and more than ten years younger than you, a different table applies — your custodian will know.)

Divide the balance by the factor. That is your RMD. An example, with round numbers, just to show the arithmetic: suppose your IRA held $100,000 on December 31 of last year, and you turn 73 this year. The factor for 73 is 26.5. So $100,000 ÷ 26.5 = about $3,774 — that would be the minimum that has to come out this year. Your custodian can give you your exact figure — most calculate it for you — but now you can check the arithmetic, and understand it, which is the real point of homework. If you would rather have the arithmetic done for you, our free RMD calculator works it out from your age and your December 31 balance — and shows you the tax both ways: what it costs if the money comes to you, and what it costs if it goes straight to charity.

Here is the Uniform Lifetime Table for the ages most readers of this page need. As the ages climb, the factor shrinks — which is why the required amount grows a little larger each year:

• Age 73 — 26.5
• Age 74 — 25.5
• Age 75 — 24.6
• Age 76 — 23.7
• Age 77 — 22.9
• Age 78 — 22.0
• Age 79 — 21.1
• Age 80 — 20.2
• Age 81 — 19.4
• Age 82 — 18.5
• Age 83 — 17.7
• Age 84 — 16.8
• Age 85 — 16.0

One more piece of homework that saves confusion every year: if you hold several traditional IRAs, you figure the RMD for each one separately — but you may take the combined total out of whichever of them you choose. The IRS watches the total, not which account it left.

If the IRA Was Inherited

Everything above is about your own IRA. An inherited IRA runs on a different rulebook: for most people who inherited one after 2019, the account generally has to be emptied within ten years, while a surviving spouse and a few other beneficiaries have options of their own. The factor table on this page is not the tool for an inherited account, and this corner deserves more than a paragraph — if the IRA you are figuring came to you from someone who died, ask your custodian or a tax advisor before you move anything.

Two Doors for the Same Money

Here is the part of the homework nobody hands out. Once your RMD amount exists, it has to leave the IRA — but it can leave by two doors, and the two doors do not cost the same.

Door One: the money comes to you. This is the door everyone knows. The withdrawal lands in your hands as income for the year, and income tax is owed on it. What is left after the tax is yours — to spend, to save, or to give away. But notice the order of events: if you donate what is left to charity, you are giving from what survived the tax first.

Door Two: the money goes straight to charity. This door has an official name: a qualified charitable distribution — QCD for short. It works like this: instead of the money coming to you, your IRA custodian sends it directly to a qualified charity. The amount counts toward your required minimum distribution, dollar for dollar — the IRS requirement is satisfied in full. But because the money never became your income, no income tax is owed on it at all. That is the whole of it, and it is not a loophole: Door One taxes the money and then lets you give. Door Two gives first — and there is nothing left to tax.

The rules of Door Two, complete, so you never have to go look them up anywhere else:

• Age. You must be 70½ or older on the day the money moves. Notice that this door opens at 70½ — before required minimum distributions even begin.
• The limit. Up to $111,000 per person, per year (the 2026 limit). A married couple can each give up to that amount, from their own IRA.
• Direct means direct. The money must travel from your custodian straight to the charity. If it comes to you first — even briefly — it is Door One money, taxed as income, and it cannot be re-labeled afterward.
• One benefit, not two. Because QCD money was never taxed, you cannot also claim the same money as a charitable deduction. It does not need one: a deduction only lowers the tax on money that was counted as income, and this money never was.
• Where it can go. To a qualified 501(c)(3) charity — like this Foundation, which receives QCDs directly. It cannot go to a donor-advised fund.
• Part and part is allowed. You may send part of your RMD through Door Two and take the rest through Door One. The IRS watches the total; how you divide it between the doors is your decision.

For the reader who has already decided and wants the donation walk-through by itself, we keep it here: how do I donate my required minimum distribution to charity?

A word about who is doing whom a favor here. If this money was never going to be spent by you, then Door One does not hand you a windfall — it hands you a tax bill on income you never asked for, stacked on top of everything else you receive this year. Door Two removes the bill altogether. You are not sacrificing money you wanted; you are being relieved of money that was costing you, and the amount you send arrives whole. This Foundation is glad to take it off your hands.

How to Make a QCD, Step by Step

1. Decide the amount. All of this year's RMD, part of it, or — up to the $111,000 limit — even more than the RMD. Any amount up to your RMD counts toward satisfying it.
2. Call your IRA custodian — the bank or brokerage that holds the IRA — and use the exact words: "qualified charitable distribution." They have a form or a process for it; it is a routine request. Make the call well before December 31: transfers take processing days, and custodians are swamped in December. November is the right month to start.
3. Make sure the money goes directly. A check made out to the charity, or a transfer straight to it — never a check made out to you.
4. Give the custodian the charity's legal name and tax ID number. For this Foundation: Cardio Renal Foundation Inc, EIN 33-4359765.
5. Keep the paperwork. The charity will send an acknowledgment letter; keep it. The distribution may still appear on the tax form your custodian sends you, so tell whoever prepares your taxes that the amount was a qualified charitable distribution — that is how it gets reported as not taxed.

Why This Foundation

If Door Two is the door you choose, the honest question is where the money should land — and here is this Foundation's answer, in one paragraph. The Cardio Renal Foundation exists for the people living with kidney and heart disease, and its conviction is plain: dialysis should not be a life sentence. The gifts that arrive here keep a library of plain-words health articles and a shelf of free everyday tools — grocery lists, calendars, recipe boxes — free for the seniors who rely on them, and they carry forward the work of finding a way beyond dialysis for the people on it now. A QCD has one more virtue worth naming: because no tax is taken out of it on its way, the full amount you send is the amount that arrives — every dollar of it goes straight to work.

If December is when you decide, one date on it is worth knowing: December 1 this year is Giving Tuesday: the day of giving back — the year's biggest day for exactly this kind of giving. A QCD completed any time before December 31 counts for this year; December 1 is simply a fine day to have it done by.

Stated Plainly

Stated plainly, because a money page owes you the same honesty as any other kind: this page explains how the rules work in general. It is not advice about your return. Your own picture — other income, a workplace plan, state taxes, a spouse more than ten years younger — can change the details, and a qualified tax advisor who knows your situation is the right referee for your own numbers. And what can be checked, check: our legal name is Cardio Renal Foundation Inc, our EIN is 33-4359765, and we are a qualified 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization — verifiable in the IRS records by anyone, in about three minutes, and we would rather you checked than took our word.

If the IRS is making you take money out this year, the money is moving either way. The only real choice is which door it leaves by — and now both of them are on one page. Questions reach a person here, at donations@cardiorenalfoundation.org or (646) 770-3946.

This article is informational only and is not tax, legal, or financial advice. Charitable giving and tax rules change and depend on your individual circumstances; consult a qualified tax advisor or attorney about your own situation.