Which one is real, why “how old are you” is the wrong question, what the two-year gap is worth — and the April 1 trap inside your first RMD year.
SECURE 2.0 didn’t move the RMD age once. It split it by birth year — and put the dividing line straight through the people retiring right now.
| If you were born | Your RMDs begin at |
|---|---|
| Before July 1, 1949 | 70½ — under the old rules, already underway |
| July 1, 1949 – 1950 | 72 |
| 1951 – 1959 | 73 |
| 1960 or later | 75 |
One year of birth — December 1959 versus January 1960 — is a two-year difference in when the IRS starts forcing money out of a traditional IRA. Neighbors the same age, in the same town, with the same account, can be on different clocks.
Here’s the part almost nobody knows: when Congress wrote SECURE 2.0 in 2022, the statute’s two age provisions were drafted so that someone born in 1959 technically fell under both — the text arguably assigned them RMDs at 73 and at 75 at the same time. A genuine drafting error, sitting in federal law, pointed directly at one birth year.
The IRS settled it in proposed regulations issued in July 2024: born 1951 through 1959 means 73. Born 1960 or later means 75. If you were born in 1959, your answer is 73 — not 75, and not “whichever you prefer.”
Why this matters beyond trivia: for two years, articles, calculators, and even some professionals gave 1959-born savers conflicting answers — and plans built on the wrong one are still out there. If your written plan assumes 75 and you were born in 1959, it’s counting on two low-tax years that don’t exist.
There’s a subtler trap hiding under the obvious one. The law splits on birth year — but most tools, forms, and conversations ask for your age. And for exactly one age at any given moment, an age cannot tell you the birth year.
Take 2026. A 66-year-old today was born in either 1959 or 1960, depending on whether their birthday has come yet this year. Same age, opposite sides of the line — RMDs at 73 for one, 75 for the other. Ask that person their age and you learn nothing about their RMD clock. This ambiguous age moves up by one every year until the 1960 cohort passes 75.
Full transparency about our own tool: the free calculator on this site asks for age, not birth date — deliberately, to keep it to three minutes. So for that one ambiguous cohort, it makes a choice, and we made it the conservative one: it assumes the earlier birth year. It will tell a 66-year-old their window runs to 73, and it says so on screen. If you were actually born in 1960, you have two more years than it shows — a pleasant surprise, in the only direction a surprise should ever run. We would rather understate your window than hand you two years that might not exist.
The years between retirement and your first required withdrawal are usually the lowest-income years of the whole plan — the stretch where a Roth conversion runs through the widest, cheapest brackets it will ever see. That stretch is the window, and your RMD age is the wall at the end of it.
So the 73-versus-75 question is really a window question:
Neither mistake announces itself. Both are just a quiet number in a spreadsheet, wrong by two years, compounding in the background. The fix costs nothing: check the birth year, not the age.
One more wrinkle lives inside the first RMD year, whichever age starts yours. Your required beginning date is April 1 of the year after the year you reach RMD age — a one-time grace period for the first withdrawal only.
It reads like a gift. It usually isn’t. Delay the first RMD into that window and you owe two required withdrawals in the same tax year — the postponed first one by April 1, and the regular second one by December 31. Both land on one return, stacking the income, climbing the brackets, and feeding the very number Medicare reads two years later.
Sometimes the delay genuinely helps — a retirement mid-year, a one-time income spike ending. Mostly, the doubled year costs more than the deferral saved. It’s a calculation, not a default — which is the theme of this entire subject. Your bracket room, your Medicare headroom, and your window to the wall are all knowable numbers. The free guide walks the chain in order, and the calculator runs it on yours.
73. SECURE 2.0’s text briefly created an overlap that arguably assigned 1959 both ages, and the IRS resolved it in 2024 proposed regulations: those born 1951 through 1959 begin at 73; those born 1960 or later begin at 75.
From your current employer’s workplace plan — a 401(k), for example — generally not until you retire, as long as the plan allows it and you don’t own more than 5% of the company. The exception never applies to IRAs: traditional IRA required withdrawals begin on schedule whether you’re working or not.
Your required beginning date is April 1 of the year after the year you reach your RMD age. But delaying the first withdrawal into that grace window means taking two RMDs in the same tax year — the delayed first one by April 1 and the regular second one by December 31 — which stacks the income and can push both your bracket and your future Medicare premium.
The years between retirement and your first required withdrawal are typically the lowest-income years available for converting — the window. Whether that window is measured to 73 or 75 changes how many low-bracket years exist and how large each year’s conversion can be. Planning around the wrong age either forfeits two years you had or counts on two years you don’t.
Your brackets, your IRMAA headroom, your RMD clock — free, in about 3 minutes.
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