At 73, the IRS Starts Deciding How Much You Withdraw. The Decade Before That Belongs to You

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 is when Required Minimum Distributions kick in and Uncle Sam starts dictating the minimum you must pull out, and pay tax on, every year for the rest of your life. What almost nobody discusses is the roughly ten years before that deadline, from your 60s through age 72, a tax-planning window you fully control. For most people, it is the single most valuable stretch in retirement for reducing 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 begin stacking on top of each other, your taxable income typically collapses. That temporary valley is your opportunity to voluntarily pull money out of pretax accounts, or convert it to a Roth, at marginal 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. Act early and you control the rate. Wait, and the IRS writes the schedule for you.

The Laws That Made This Window Bigger

The RMD start age is governed 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. Congress handed retirees more untaxed years to work with. Letting the balance grow during that extended window without any deliberate planning is often the most costly default a retiree can choose.

A second law matters here. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed 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 set to expire. That stability removes the guesswork that once made multi-year conversion planning difficult: the fill-the-bracket math you do today rests on a foundation that will not shift in two or three years.

Who This Actually Helps

This window is designed for people who carry meaningful balances in traditional IRAs, 401(k)s, 403(b)s, or SEP-IRAs and are between roughly age 60 and 72. It is especially powerful for those who have retired but have not yet claimed Social Security, or who are delaying benefits to 70 to lock in the roughly 8% annual delayed retirement credit. The strategy offers far less benefit if you are already in the top bracket, if nearly all your savings are already in a Roth, or if you will need the converted money within five years (the Roth five-year clock applies to earnings). Each of those conditions changes the calculus enough to warrant a different approach entirely.

How to Actually Use the Decade

1. Map your bracket. Estimate your taxable income for the year. The goal is to fill the 12%, 22%, or 24% bracket with intentional income without blowing past it. The OBBBA also added a new $6,000 bonus deduction per person for those age 65 or older, available for tax years 2025 through 2028. For single filers, the deduction begins to phase out at $75,000 MAGI and disappears entirely at $175,000. For joint filers, the phase-out runs from $150,000 to $250,000. Because Roth conversion income counts toward MAGI, factor this phase-out into your bracket math before you convert, to protect as much of the deduction as possible.
2. Do partial Roth conversions. Roth conversions carry 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 the process annually. Spreading conversions across several years keeps each year’s AGI manageable and helps protect the new senior deduction from the phase-out.
3. Delay Social Security, spend the IRA first. Drawing down the traditional balance in your 60s shrinks the future RMD base while letting your Social Security check grow. The two moves reinforce each other: a smaller pretax account produces smaller RMDs, and a larger Social Security benefit reduces the pressure to pull from savings at all. The 2026 Social Security COLA came in at 2.8%, and the Social Security Administration has already announced a 3.6% COLA for 2027, which underscores how the benefit compounds when you delay claiming.
4. 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 enters your AGI. Once RMDs begin at 73, QCDs count toward satisfying them. That combination of income exclusion 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, because a QCD is an income exclusion rather than a deduction and therefore bypasses those new limits entirely.
5. Coordinate with today’s rates. Inflation-indexed tax brackets are wider than they were five years ago, meaning more conversion can fit under the same marginal rate than was possible even recently. The national average yield on a 12-month CD stood at 1.73% as of September 2026, per FDIC data, which helps frame what a conservative after-tax return looks like when you are deciding where to hold the funds set aside to cover a conversion tax bill.

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. Two additional traps deserve attention. First, any conversion restarts its own five-year clock before earnings can come out tax-free. Second, and more immediately expensive, boosting your AGI can push Medicare Part B and D premiums higher two years later through IRMAA surcharges.

The IRMAA threshold structure uses cliff brackets. In 2026, the first surcharge tier begins at $109,000 MAGI for single filers and $218,000 for married couples filing jointly. Earning even one dollar above those thresholds triggers an additional $81.20 per month on Part B premiums plus $14.50 per month on Part D, adding up to nearly $1,148 per year per person. A large conversion can also pull more of your Social Security benefits into the taxable zone, adding yet another layer of cost. That cascade of effects is why careful bracket management is not optional, and why the tax payment itself should come from a taxable account rather than the IRA wherever possible.

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 do not have to.

Editor’s note: This version adds the 2027 Social Security COLA of 3.6%, announced by the SSA on October 14, 2026, to the section on delaying benefits. It also updates the IRMAA first-tier annual cost figure to include both the Part B ($81.20/month) and Part D ($14.50/month) surcharges for a combined $1,148 per year per person, correcting the prior figure that counted only Part B. The senior deduction’s effective period (2025 through 2028) is now stated explicitly in the bracket-mapping step.

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