If you turned 73 last year and haven't touched your retirement account yet, the IRS is waiting, and the price of forgetting just went up.
Required minimum distributions, or RMDs, are the mandatory withdrawals the government forces you to take from traditional IRAs and most 401(k)s once you hit a certain age.
Skip one, and you owe a 25% excise tax on the amount you should have pulled out.
Miss it by more than two years and the penalty drops to 10% — but only if you fix it fast.
The rules sound dull until you run the math.
Say your account balance requires a $20,000 withdrawal and you blow the deadline.
That's a $5,000 penalty, straight out of your pocket, on top of the income tax you'll still owe once you finally take the money.
The IRS does offer a path to waive the penalty if you file Form 5329 and can show the miss was a reasonable error, but "I forgot" isn't a free pass.
The deadline trips people up because it's not the tax filing deadline.
You generally must take your RMD by December 31 each year.
The one exception is your very first RMD, which you can delay until April 1 of the following year.
Take that grace period and you'll stack two distributions into one tax year, which can shove you into a higher bracket and even trigger higher Medicare premium surcharges down the road.
The Secure 2.0 Act pushed the starting age to 73 for most people and to 75 for those born in 1960 or later.
A lot of retirees who spent decades hearing "70½" are now confused about when their clock actually starts.
If you hit the wrong age, you can either leave money on the table or trigger taxes you didn't plan for.
The government, obviously, because RMDs force tax revenue out of accounts that would otherwise grow untaxed for decades.
Financial firms benefit too, since they often charge advisory fees on the assets and may nudge you toward products when you're forced to move money.
And if you hold a Roth IRA, you're off the hook entirely — no RMDs during your lifetime — which is exactly why advisors keep pitching Roth conversions.
If you own multiple IRAs, you can total the RMDs and take the whole amount from one account, which gives you some flexibility.
But 401(k) accounts generally can't be pooled that way, and each plan has its own rule.
Inherited IRAs come with their own set of deadlines that can be even tighter.
The practical move is boring but effective: check your account balance at the end of the prior year, find your life expectancy factor in the IRS tables, do the division, and set a calendar reminder for early December — not late December, when holiday chaos and slow processing can cost you.
Many brokerages will calculate the amount for you automatically, so ask before you guess.
This is one deadline where the cost of confusion lands squarely on the retiree, not the institution.
The rules aren't designed to be friendly, and the penalties aren't designed to be small.
Final Thoughts
Treat the December date like a bill that must be paid, because functionally, that's what it is.