If you were born on or after January 1, 1960, and you own a traditional IRA, 401(k), 403(b), or any other pre-tax retirement account, the age at which the IRS forces you to start pulling money out is now 75, not 73. That is a quiet but material change. It hands you two additional calendar years of low-income retirement in which you can execute Roth conversions before required minimum distributions start pushing your taxable income higher every year for the rest of your life.
What Actually Changed for the 1960 Cohort
Under the old rules, most savers had to begin RMDs at 70 1/2, then 72, then 73. Section 107 of the SECURE 2.0 Act, signed into law in December 2022, rewrote the schedule again. Now the required beginning date is tied to your birth year. If you were born from 1951 through 1959, your first RMD hits at 73. If you were born on January 1, 1960, or later, it doesn’t start until 75. Same account, same tax rules on the way in, but the mandatory withdrawal clock starts two years later.
Those two years matter because RMDs are taxed as ordinary income and stack on top of Social Security, pensions, interest, and dividends. A larger RMD later in life can also drag more of your Social Security into taxation and push you into higher Medicare Part B and Part D premiums through the IRMAA surcharge. Delaying the start date gives you a longer runway to shrink the account yourself, on your terms, at brackets you choose (that quiet stretch between your last paycheck and your first RMD is the whole subject of our free Roth Window guide).
Statute Behind the Age 75 Change
The primary source is Section 107 of the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022, which amended Internal Revenue Code Section 401(a)(9). The IRS finalized implementing regulations in July 2024, effective for calendar years beginning on or after January 1, 2025. Publication 590-B is the working reference for RMD mechanics and the Uniform Lifetime Table used to calculate the annual amount.
Who Qualifies for the New Age 75
Who has to take these withdrawals comes down strictly to the birth year. If you were born in 1959 or earlier, your RMD age is 73, though depending on how far back you go, it could be 72 or even 70 and a half. If you were born in 1960 or later, your RMD age is 75. There is no income test, no filing-status test, and no opting out. It applies to traditional IRAs, SEP and SIMPLE IRAs, and most employer plans. Roth IRAs still have no lifetime RMD for the original owner. Roth 401(k) accounts also no longer require RMDs during the owner’s lifetime under SECURE 2.0, which took effect for tax years starting in 2024.
How to Use the Extra Runway
- Mapping the gap means identifying every year between the year of retirement and the year of turning 75. Those are the conversion candidate years.
- Stack the low-income years first. Years before you claim Social Security and before RMDs begin are typically your lowest-bracket years.
- Convert enough to fill a target bracket each year. Move enough from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA each year to reach the top of the 12% or 22% bracket, then stop.
- Pay the tax from outside the IRA. Using taxable brokerage cash to cover the conversion tax leaves the full converted balance growing tax-free in the Roth.
- Repeat every year through age 74. For someone born in 1960 or later, that includes the age 73 and age 74 windows that the older cohort did not get.
Where This Trips People Up
Roth conversions have no income limit, but they do carry some traps. The pro-rata rule aggregates all your traditional, SEP, and SIMPLE IRAs when calculating the taxable portion of any conversion, so pretax dollars sitting elsewhere can turn what looks like a clean conversion into a messy one. Each conversion also starts its own five-year clock before earnings can come out tax-free.
Conversions have been irrevocable since 2018, which means no recharacterizations are allowed anymore. And large conversions raise your modified adjusted gross income two years forward, which is exactly what Medicare uses to set IRMAA. Miss the December 31 deadline for a given tax year, and that conversion slot is gone. The extra two years created by the new law only produce a benefit if the conversion windows are actually used.
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