Mapping Retirement Income: What the IRS Publishes, and the Year One Field Vanished

Every year, the IRS publishes how much retirement income Americans reported, broken out by state, by county, and by ZIP code. It is free, it covers essentially every filed return, and almost nobody looks at it.

There is one thing you should know before you look at the map below. For tax year 2018, and only that year, the number you would most want — taxable IRA distributions, on its own — does not exist. Not because anyone hid it. Because the Form 1040 was redesigned that year and two lines became one, so the IRS had nothing separate to count. They split it back apart the following year. But the hole is permanent, and it is the reason this map is labeled "retirement income" instead of something more specific.

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In short: IRS Statistics of Income publishes retirement income by state, county, and ZIP. Taxable IRA distributions are a separate field in most years — but not in tax year 2018, when the redesigned Form 1040 merged them with pensions and annuities. Any consistent multi-year series has to use the combined figure. Tax year 2022 is the newest data available; tax year 2023 is scheduled to arrive in August 2026.

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Prefer to watch? The two-minute version, including the state nobody guesses.

On this page

• Where the Retirement Money Is
• The Year the Line Disappeared
• Why This One Is Labeled Retirement Income
• What Gets Cut Before You Ever See It
• What This Data Can Honestly Tell You
• What It Cannot Tell You About RMDs
• When the Next Numbers Land
• Pull It Yourself
• What to Do Next

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Where the Retirement Money Is

The Statistics of Income division of the IRS takes every individual return filed in a year, strips the names, and aggregates the totals by geography. You get five slices: state, county, metropolitan and micropolitan area, congressional district, and ZIP code. Within each, the returns are sorted into adjusted gross income bands.

For retirement, the fields that matter are the number of returns reporting taxable IRA distributions and the dollar amount of them, and the same pair for taxable pensions and annuities. In the file layout they carry codes: N01400 and A01400 for IRA distributions, N01700 and A01700 for pensions and annuities. The N is a count of returns. The A is dollars — in thousands.

This is not a survey. It is not a sample of a few thousand households. It is the actual filed returns, which makes it the most complete picture of American retirement income that exists in public. It also comes with a set of quiet compromises that most people who cite it never mention.

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The Year the Line Disappeared

Here is the thing that makes this data interesting rather than merely useful.

Through tax year 2017, the Form 1040 asked about these two things separately. Line 15a and 15b were IRA distributions and the taxable amount. Line 16a and 16b were pensions and annuities and the taxable amount. Two lines, two questions, two numbers in the public files.

For tax year 2018, the Form 1040 was redesigned into the "postcard" version. IRA distributions and pensions and annuities were collapsed into one line — 4a and 4b, labeled "IRAs, pensions, and annuities." One question. One number.

SOI had no choice. Its own documentation for that year says so plainly, in a section titled "Nature of Changes":

IRA distributions (N01400 and A01400) and Pensions and annuities (N01700 and A01700), which were previously separated, have been combined to create a new field: IRAs, pensions, and annuities (N01750 and A01750).

Then, for tax year 2019, the form changed again. The IRS put IRA distributions back on their own line (4a and 4b) and gave pensions and annuities a separate one (4c and 4d). SOI followed, and its documentation for that year records the reversal in the same matter-of-fact tone:

IRAs, pensions, and annuities (A01750), which were previously separate fields and combined in tax year 2018, have been separated back into two fields: IRA distributions (A01400) and pensions and annuities (A01700).

The same paragraph appears, word for word, in the state guide and the county guide for those years. This was not a ZIP-level quirk. Every geographic level lost the field at once and got it back at once.

You can see it in the files themselves. Open the ZIP code data for tax year 2017 and you will find A01400 among the columns. Open tax year 2018 — same roughly 166,000 rows, same roughly 27,600 ZIP codes — and the column is simply not there. A01750 sits in its place. Open 2019 and A01400 is back.

No conspiracy. A form got simplified, a statistical series got a hole in it, and the form got un-simplified. But the hole does not heal. If you want to compare IRA distributions in your county in 2016 against 2021, there is a year in the middle where the question was never asked in a way that lets you answer it.

That is the part worth sitting with. Public data is not a fixed record of the world. It is a record of what a form happened to ask, in the year it happened to ask it. Change the form and you change what the past looks like.

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Why This One Is Labeled Retirement Income

Which brings us to the map at the top of this page.

If you want a series that runs continuously — the same measure, every year, comparable across geographies — you cannot use taxable IRA distributions. Tax year 2018 has no such number. Your only options are to skip the year, which breaks the series, or to use the concept that exists in every year: IRA distributions plus pensions and annuities, together.

So the multi-year series on this map uses combined retirement income — IRAs, pensions, and annuities together — because that is the only measure that exists in every year. Single-year views, including the tax year 2022 table below, show taxable IRA distributions on their own, and are labeled as such. The combined figure is a deliberately less interesting quantity than the one you probably wanted, and it is the only one that is honest across the whole multi-year range.

Anywhere you see a figure on this page described as retirement income, read it literally. It is not IRA money. It is not RMD money. It is the taxable portion of everything that came out of the retirement system and landed on a 1040. What any one person owes on their own slice of that is a separate calculation entirely, and no aggregate here feeds into it.

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What Gets Cut Before You Ever See It

The other thing nobody mentions when they cite this data: a lot of it is removed on purpose, to keep individual taxpayers from being identifiable.

At the ZIP code level, the documentation lays out the rules:

• ZIPs with fewer than 100 returns are not published individually. They are dumped into a catch-all ZIP coded 99999. Rural areas lose the most here.
• ZIPs identified as a single building or as nonresidential go into the same catch-all.
• Any income item with fewer than 20 returns in an AGI band is excluded, and bands that are too thin get collapsed into a neighboring one. Collapsed bands are flagged with a double asterisk.
• Return counts are rounded to the nearest 10.
• Returns with negative adjusted gross income are excluded entirely.
• A dominance rule suppresses any cell where one return makes up too much of the total. The IRS does not publish the threshold percentage it uses.

There is one more trap. The income bands are not the same across products. The ZIP files use six bands starting at $1 under $25,000. The county files use eight, including an "under $1" band that the ZIP files do not have. If you join county data to ZIP data band-for-band without checking, you will produce a number that looks fine and is wrong.

None of this makes the data bad. It makes it a data set with rules, and the rules push consistently in one direction: small places and unusual returns disappear. Sparse rural counties are systematically thinner in this data than dense suburban ones, and that is a property of the disclosure policy, not of where retirees live.

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What This Data Can Honestly Tell You

Within those limits, quite a lot.

Where retirement income is concentrated. Total dollars by state and county, and how that has moved over the past decade.

How common it is. The N fields give you the number of returns reporting retirement income, so you can look at the share of filers in a place who report any, not just the dollar totals — which is usually the more meaningful comparison between a small county and a large one.

Average size per return. Dollars divided by returns, within an AGI band, gives a rough sense of typical amounts. Rough, because an average is dragged around by a handful of very large returns, and because the bands are wide.

Where the money is moving. SOI also publishes migration data built from year-over-year address changes on returns, which is the closest thing available to a public record of where retirees relocate.

What it will not give you is anything about an individual, a household, or a street. That is the point of the suppression rules.

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What It Cannot Tell You About RMDs

This matters most for anyone using this data to reason about required minimum distributions, so it deserves saying flatly: there is no RMD field. Nothing in these files tells you who in a county even has to take one.

Even in the years where taxable IRA distributions are broken out on their own, that number contains:

• Required minimum distributions taken by owners old enough to owe them.
• Entirely voluntary withdrawals by people of any age past 59½.
• Distributions from inherited IRAs, including everyone working through the 10-year rule — ordinary income to the beneficiary, and indistinguishable here from an owner's own withdrawal.
• The taxable part of Roth conversions.
• Early withdrawals, hardship withdrawals, and distributions taken under exceptions.

All of it in one bucket. You cannot separate the required from the voluntary, and you cannot tell an inherited IRA distribution from an owner's own. A county with high taxable IRA distributions might be full of dutiful 80-year-olds taking their minimums, or it might be full of 62-year-olds doing Roth conversions ahead of retirement, or of beneficiaries deliberately taking far more than their minimums to avoid a year-10 balloon. The data cannot distinguish them, and any article that claims otherwise is inferring, not reporting.

Your own required minimum distribution is a function of your account balance, your age, and which IRS table applies to you. No geographic average has anything to do with it. If you want your number, run the calculator.

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When the Next Numbers Land

The most recent released data covers tax year 2022, across state, county, metropolitan area, congressional district, and ZIP.

Tax year 2023 is scheduled to arrive in two waves, per the IRS's own release calendar:

Release	Scheduled date
State, county, and metropolitan/micropolitan data, TY2023	Scheduled August 13, 2026 — not yet posted as of August 25, 2026
ZIP code data, TY2023	August 27, 2026

When the ZIP data lands, we will publish a full what-changed analysis within 48 hours — it will be linked here.

Two things to keep in mind when it lands. Tax year 2023 returns were filed mostly in 2024, so the newest picture available is always two to three years behind the present — this is a lagging record, not a current one. And release dates on the SOI calendar are planned dates. They move.

If you are reading this after those dates, tax year 2023 should be live, and this map may still be built on tax year 2022. Check the year label on the map itself rather than assuming.

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Pull It Yourself

You do not need anyone's chart. The files are free and they are just spreadsheets.

1. Start at SOI Tax Stats — Data by geographic area and pick your level: state, county, congressional district, or ZIP.
2. Download the year you want. ZIP data comes as one CSV covering all states with AGI bands, another with the bands collapsed, and per-state Excel workbooks.
3. Read the documentation guide for that specific year before you use it. Each year has its own, and the "Nature of Changes" section at the top is where the IRS tells you what moved. This is the step everyone skips and the step that prevents every serious error.
4. Remember the units. Dollar amounts are in thousands. A value of 1,250,000 means $1.25 billion, not $1.25 million.
5. If you are building a series across years, decide up front how you are handling tax year 2018. Combine everything into IRAs-plus-pensions for consistency, or drop the year and say you dropped it. Do not silently splice a combined number into a series of IRA-only numbers.

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What to Do Next

• Run the calculator — free, no account required. Your own RMD, from your own balance and age.
• How inherited IRA rules work — the 10-year rule, eligible designated beneficiaries, and what applies to you.
• Check the year label on any retirement-income map you read, including this one, and check whether the figure is IRA-only or combined. The two are not interchangeable and the difference is large.
• Read the "Nature of Changes" section of the SOI documentation guide for any year you cite. It takes two minutes and it is where the surprises live.

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This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute tax, legal, or financial advice. Aggregate geographic statistics describe populations, not individuals, and have no bearing on any particular taxpayer's required minimum distribution. IRS rules and tax laws are subject to change. Consult a qualified tax professional or financial advisor for guidance specific to your situation. SimpleRMD is a calculation and tracking tool — not a financial advisory service.

Sources: IRS Statistics of Income (Data by geographic area; Individual Income Tax Statistics — ZIP Code Data; SOI Tax Stats: What's New). Field definitions, the "Nature of Changes" quotations, and the disclosure rules are taken from the SOI ZIP Code, County, and State Data documentation guides for tax years 2017 through 2022, and confirmed against the published data files themselves. Form line references verified against the 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2022 Forms 1040 in the IRS prior-year forms archive. State figures on this page use the IRS county/state product; our release-week analyses of ZIP-level data use the ZIP product, which is more heavily suppressed and runs slightly lower on totals. The two are not interchangeable and we never mix them. Data current as of August 2026; tax year 2022 was the most recent release at publication.