If you’ve felt like the tax rules keep shifting under your feet the last few years, you’re not imagining it. Between SECURE 2.0 and last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, 2026 brought a real reshuffling of the numbers that drive retirement income planning and most of it hasn’t made its way into everyday conversation yet.
So what’s most important to know before it’s too late?
RMD age is now locked in but it depends on your birth year
If you were born between 1951 and 1959, your required minimum distributions start at age 73. If you were born in 1960 or after, your RMD age is actually 75. It sounds like a small detail, but for some individuals it provides you with an extra one or two years to do Roth conversions or Roth Alternatives before the IRS starts requiring withdrawals on its own schedule.
This makes this time period critical. The gap between retirement and the start of RMDs is your last window for preventative tax planning in retirement. A couple extra years in that window can meaningfully change what your income looks like a decade from now.
The new senior deduction is easy to miss
There’s now a $6,000 senior deduction available through 2028 for those 65 and older. On its own, it’s not life-changing. But stacked with other planning moves – a Roth conversion sized to fill a lower bracket, a QCD instead of a taxable RMD – it can shift the math on decisions you might otherwise make on autopilot.
SALT cap moved to $40,400
For clients in higher-tax states, or with a second home in one, the SALT deduction cap rising to $40,400 changes the calculus on itemizing versus taking the standard deduction. It’s worth a second look even if you haven’t itemized in years.
IRMAA brackets shifted too
The income thresholds that trigger higher Medicare premiums moved to $109,000 for single filers and $218,000 for married couples filing jointly. If an RMD, a Roth conversion, or a big capital gain pushes your income even a dollar over one of these lines, you can end up paying meaningfully more for Medicare the following year. This is exactly the kind of “danger zone” income spike we spend a lot of time helping clients avoid – the cliff is real, and it’s not forgiving.
QCDs are more powerful than ever
If charitable giving is part of your picture, qualified charitable distributions now let you send up to $111,000 per person directly from an IRA to a charity – money that counts toward your RMD but never touches your taxable income. For clients who don’t need every dollar of their RMD to live on, this remains one of the cleanest moves in the entire tax code.
Why this matters beyond the numbers
None of these changes exist in isolation, meaning an RMD decision affects your IRMAA bracket. Your IRMAA bracket affects whether a Roth conversion makes more sense this year or next year. A QCD (qualified charitable distribution) can quietly solve two problems at once. This is the whole idea behind coordinated income planning – looking at Social Security, RMDs, taxes, and Medicare all together, because they all work together and need to be in alignment.
Markets will do what markets do, and sequence-of-returns risk doesn’t take a year off just because tax law changed. But tax rules are one of the few variables in retirement you actually have some control over if you know what to do in advance.
If you’re not sure how these changes land on your specific situation, that’s exactly the kind of conversation a Strategic Assessment is built for. We’ll walk through where you stand today and where these new rules create opportunity – or risk – in your plan.
