Rules current as of September 2026. Informational only; not tax, legal, or investment advice.
Every inherited-IRA calculator, including ours, stops at the number. You inherited $400,000 from a parent who was already taking required distributions, you're 52, the tool says $11,730.21 is due this year, and that's the end of the page.
The harder question starts there. The account is full of investments you didn't choose. Some of them meant something to the person who did. And the deadline doesn't care.
This is the page for that question. Four ways to satisfy an inherited-IRA RMD, ranked from least to most disruptive, and one rule that most heirs don't know about until it's too late to use it.
The rule first: selling is not the taxable event
Inside an IRA, nothing you do is taxed. You can sell every position, buy new ones, rebalance the whole account, and owe nothing. The only taxable event is money or property leaving the account.
That separates two decisions people tend to fuse together. "Do I have to sell what they left me?" and "Do I have to take money out?" are different questions with different answers. You have to take money out. You do not have to sell anything, ever, to do it.
Hold that thought through the four options.
Option 1: use the cash that's already there
Most inherited accounts hold some cash, and most of them are set to reinvest dividends automatically. Turn that off. Dividends and interest then accumulate as cash instead of buying more shares, and on a $400,000 account paying two percent, that's $8,000 a year toward an $11,730 obligation without selling a share.
Check the year-end statement for a money-market or settlement fund balance; the custodian sweeps cash there. Between existing cash and one year of dividends, a lot of heirs can cover year one without a single sale.
Option 2: sell what you'd sell anyway
An inherited account often has positions nobody would buy today: a fund that closed to new investors a decade ago, a duplicate of something else in the account, a bond ladder that matured into cash equivalents. Selling those to fund the RMD costs you nothing in tax (see the rule above) and takes the pressure off the holdings that matter.
The emotional weight usually sits on one or two positions. Fund the RMD from the other twenty.
Option 3: distribute the shares themselves
This is the option most heirs never hear about. An RMD can be taken in kind. You instruct the custodian to move shares, not dollars, from the inherited IRA to a regular taxable brokerage account in your name. The value of those shares on the day they move counts toward the RMD, exactly as cash would.
You now own the same shares, outside the IRA. Nothing was sold. Their cost basis resets to the value on the transfer date, so if you do sell them later, you pay capital-gains tax only on growth from that day forward.
If the position that matters is your father's employer stock, this is how you keep it. The distribution is taxable as ordinary income either way (it's an IRA; every dollar out is ordinary income), but the decision to sell stays yours, on your schedule, for as long as you want.
Two things to handle when you do this. Withholding: custodians default to withholding 10% federal tax on IRA distributions, and there's no cash in an in-kind transfer to withhold from. Most custodians will ask you to either elect zero withholding on the form or send cash alongside. Elect zero and plan an estimated payment, or take a small cash piece for the withholding. And the amount: shares move at that day's closing price, so distribute slightly more than the RMD, never slightly less.
Option 4: take more than the minimum, on purpose
The 10-year rule means the account has to be empty by the end of year ten, whatever the annual minimums were. For an heir in a moderate tax bracket, the minimum in years one through nine followed by a large balance in year ten can push that last distribution into a bracket the earlier ones never touched.
Taking more than the minimum in a lower-income year (a sabbatical, a job change, a year with a big deduction) spreads the income. This is a tax-planning choice, not a compliance one, and it's worth a conversation with whoever does your return. It changes the answer to "how much" before you get to "from where."
What doesn't work
Taking the inherited account's RMD from your own IRA. Inherited accounts are never aggregated with accounts you own, and a withdrawal from your own IRA does nothing for the inherited one (it just creates its own tax bill). Two inherited IRAs from the same person can be combined for RMD purposes; from different people, they can't.
Waiting for December. Custodian processing runs three to seven business days most of the year and ten to fourteen in the last two weeks of December. An in-kind transfer can take longer because a person has to review it. Put the request in by early December.
Assuming the calculator that said "$0" was right. In our test of 21 public RMD calculators this summer, one broker-dealer's inherited-IRA tool returned $0.00 for this exact scenario. It was running a 2022 build of its vendor's engine, from before the 2024 regulations that added the annual requirement. The correct answer was $11,730.21. If a tool says you owe nothing on an account inherited from someone who was already taking RMDs, check it against a second source.
Year one, in order
Confirm whether annual RMDs apply. They do if the original owner died in 2020 or later, had reached their required beginning date, and you're not a spouse or other eligible designated beneficiary. If they died before their required beginning date, there's no annual amount, only the year-ten deadline. (The IRS waived penalties for missed annual amounts in 2021 through 2024 while the rule was being settled. From 2025 on, they apply.)
Get the December 31 balance from the prior year. That's the number the RMD is computed on.
Compute the amount. The single-life factor for your age in the year after death, minus one for each year since. Our inherited-IRA calculator shows the factor and the deadline.
Pick the source, in the order above: existing cash, dividends turned off, positions you'd sell anyway, shares in kind.
Decide withholding before you submit the form.
Submit by early December. Keep the confirmation with the year-end statement.
Want the amount and the deadline for your account? The SimpleRMD inherited-IRA calculator shows the table, the factor, the year-ten deadline, and the regulation behind each, so you can check it against the statement in front of you.
The 2026 RMD Season Checklist has a one-line-per-account worksheet with a column for the inherited account's year-ten date. Read it here or get the printable PDF by email.
Rules cited: IRC §401(a)(9); Treas. Reg. §1.401(a)(9)-5 (T.D. 10001, July 2024); IRS Notices 2022-53, 2023-54, 2024-35; 26 CFR §1.401(a)(9)-9 Table I. In-kind distributions: IRC §408(d)(1) and IRS Publication 590-B. Your situation may differ; confirm with a qualified professional. Version 1.0, September 2026.