At 73, the IRS Starts Deciding How Much You Withdraw. The Decade Before That Belongs to You
Most retirees let their tax bills get written for them at 73. But there is a decade before that deadline where you hold every card, and most people spend it doing nothing.
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If you have a traditional IRA or 401(k), the IRS has already circled a birthday on your calendar: the year you turn 73. That’s when Required Minimum Distributions kick in and Uncle Sam starts dictating the minimum you pull out, and pay tax on, every year for the rest of your life. What almost nobody talks about: the roughly ten years before that deadline, your 60s into age 72, is a tax-planning window you fully control. For most people, it’s the single most valuable stretch in retirement for cutting a lifetime tax bill, and most people spend it doing nothing.
The Window Hiding in Plain Sight
Once wages stop and before Social Security and RMDs stack on top of each other, your taxable income usually collapses. That temporary valley is your chance to voluntarily pull money out of pretax accounts, or convert it to a Roth, at bracket rates you may never see again. Every dollar you move now is a dollar the IRS cannot force out at 73 at whatever rate applies then. The math is straightforward: act early, control the rate. Wait, and the IRS sets the schedule.
The Law That Made This Window Bigger
The RMD start age is set by Internal Revenue Code Section 401(a)(9). The SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 (Section 107) pushed that age from 72 to 73, effective January 1, 2023, and it moves again to 75 in 2033 for anyone born in 1960 or later. That extra runway is real, and Congress literally gave you more untaxed years to work with. The default plan, doing nothing and letting the balance grow, is often the worst one.
One more piece of legislation matters here. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed into law on July 4, 2025, permanently extended the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act rate structure. The brackets at 10%, 12%, 22%, 24%, 32%, 35%, and 37% are no longer scheduled to expire, which means the “fill the bracket” math you do today is built on a stable, knowable foundation. The uncertainty that once made multi-year conversion planning difficult is largely gone.
Who This Actually Helps
This window is built for you if you have meaningful balances in traditional IRAs, 401(k)s, 403(b)s, or SEPs and you’re between roughly age 60 and 72. It’s especially powerful if you’ve retired but haven’t started Social Security, or if you’re delaying benefits to 70 to lock in the roughly 8% annual delayed retirement credit. The strategy carries far less benefit if you’re already in the top bracket, if nearly all your savings are already in a Roth, or if you’ll need the money within five years of a conversion (the Roth five-year clock will bite). Each of those situations changes the calculus enough to warrant a different approach.
How to Actually Use the Decade
- Map your bracket. Estimate taxable income for the year. The goal is to fill up the 12% or 22% bracket, or 24% depending on your situation, with intentional income, not blow past it. The OBBBA also added a new temporary $6,000 above-the-line deduction per person for those age 65 or older. That deduction phases out between $150,000 and $250,000 MAGI for joint filers, and Roth conversion income counts toward that threshold, so factor it into the bracket math before you convert.
- Do partial Roth conversions. Roth conversions have no income limit under IRC Section 408A. Convert only up to the top of your target bracket, pay the tax from a taxable account if possible, and repeat annually. Spreading conversions across several years keeps each year’s AGI manageable and protects the senior deduction from phase-out.
- Delay Social Security, spend the IRA first. Drawing down the traditional balance in your 60s shrinks the future RMD base and lets your Social Security check grow. The two moves reinforce each other: a smaller pretax account means smaller RMDs, and a larger Social Security benefit means less pressure to pull from savings at all.
- Start Qualified Charitable Distributions at 70½. Under IRC Section 408(d)(8), you can send IRA money directly to a qualifying charity, up to $111,000 per person in 2026 (up from $108,000 in 2025, with the cap indexed for inflation each year), and the amount never touches your AGI. Once RMDs begin at 73, QCDs count toward satisfying them. That double benefit, charitable credit and RMD offset, makes QCDs one of the most underused tools in the pre-RMD playbook. The OBBBA’s new restrictions on itemized charitable deductions make QCDs even more attractive for 2026 and beyond, because a QCD is an income exclusion, not a deduction, so it bypasses those new limits entirely.
- Coordinate with today’s rates. The 2026 Social Security COLA is 2.8%, and the CPI-U index stood at 333.9 as of July 2026. Inflation-indexed brackets are wider than they were five years ago, meaning more conversion fits under the same marginal rate.
The Catch Nobody Circles
Roth conversions are irrevocable. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act eliminated recharacterization in 2018, so once you convert, you owe the tax, period. There are two more traps worth naming. First, any conversion starts its own five-year clock before earnings come out tax-free. Second, and more immediately costly, boosting your AGI can spike Medicare Part B and D premiums two years later through IRMAA surcharges. In 2026, the first IRMAA tier begins at $109,000 MAGI for single filers and $218,000 for married couples filing jointly. Converting even one dollar past those thresholds means paying hundreds of dollars more in premiums per person per month, which is why careful bracket management is not optional. A large conversion can also drag more of your Social Security into the taxable zone, which is one more reason the national average 1.68% 12-month CD yield matters when you decide where the tax payment should come from.
The default is to let the balance ride and let the IRS write the withdrawal schedule at 73. The quiet rule inside your own account says you don’t have to.
Editor’s note: This article was updated to reflect the 2026 QCD limit of $111,000 (up from $108,000 in 2025), the July 2026 CPI-U index reading of 333.9, and the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (signed July 4, 2025), which permanently extended TCJA tax rates and introduced a new temporary $6,000 senior deduction for those age 65 and older. The 2026 IRMAA income thresholds were also added to the Roth conversion warning section.
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