Do I have to take RMDs from an inherited Roth IRA?

No annual distribution is required. Roth IRAs have no required minimum distributions during the owner's lifetime, so the owner can never have reached a required beginning date, and the rule that forces annual withdrawals on beneficiaries of traditional IRAs does not apply. The ten-year deadline still applies.

Are inherited Roth IRA withdrawals taxable?

Qualified distributions are tax-free. The account must have satisfied a five-year holding period, measured from January 1 of the year the original owner made their first Roth contribution. If that period was not met, earnings withdrawn before it ends are taxable, though contributions and conversions come out first under the ordering rules.

Should I leave an inherited Roth IRA alone for ten years?

For most beneficiaries this is the better approach. Since qualified withdrawals are not taxed, there is no bracket to manage and no benefit to withdrawing early. Leaving the balance invested preserves a decade of tax-free growth. The one risk is forgetting the deadline.

Inherited IRA

Inherited Roth IRA rules

Everything you have read about taking a withdrawal every year, spreading distributions, and managing brackets applies to traditional IRAs. With a Roth, most of it reverses.

What actually applies

Two rules, and only two.

The ten-year deadline applies. If you inherited from someone other than a spouse who died on or after January 1, 2020, the account must be empty by December 31 of the tenth year following the year of death. Roth accounts are not exempt from this.

The annual withdrawal requirement does not. Roth IRAs have no required minimum distributions during the owner's lifetime, which means the owner could never have reached a required beginning date. The rule that forces beneficiaries of traditional IRAs to keep taking annual distributions has nothing to attach to. You can take nothing at all for nine years.

If you are not certain which type of account you inherited, or whether you fall under the ten-year rule in the first place, the five-question checker sorts it out.

Why the strategy inverts

With a traditional inherited IRA, every dollar that comes out is taxed as ordinary income, so the planning problem is how to spread the withdrawals to avoid climbing through tax brackets. That is the year-ten tax bomb, and the answer is usually to withdraw steadily rather than wait.

A Roth has no such problem. Qualified withdrawals are not taxed at all, so there are no brackets to manage and no reason to take money out before you want it. Every year the balance stays invested is another year of growth that will also come out tax-free.

For most beneficiaries this makes the answer straightforward: leave it alone, let it grow, and withdraw in year ten. The only real risk is forgetting — a decade is long enough that people change custodians, change addresses, and lose track of an account they were told they did not have to touch.

Set a calendar reminder for the deadline the day you inherit. Set a second one a year earlier.

The five-year rule that decides whether earnings are taxable

Tax-free treatment is not automatic. The account must have satisfied a five-year holding period, and this is where inherited Roths get technical.

The clock is not yours. It runs from January 1 of the year the original owner made their first contribution to any Roth IRA, and you inherit whatever progress had already been made. If your father opened his first Roth in 2015 and died in 2024, the period was long since satisfied and everything you withdraw is tax-free.

If the account was opened recently — say the owner converted a traditional IRA to a Roth two years before dying — the period may still be running. Withdrawals of the original contributions and conversions remain tax-free regardless, because Roth distributions come out in a set order with contributions first. It is only the earnings, withdrawn before the five years are up, that would be taxable.

The practical step: ask the custodian in writing when the owner's first Roth contribution was made. They hold this and it is the single fact that determines your tax treatment.

Three mistakes specific to inherited Roths

Rolling it into your own Roth

A non-spouse beneficiary cannot do this. The account must stay titled as an inherited IRA naming the deceased owner. Moving it into your own Roth can be treated as a full distribution, which forfeits the remaining years of tax-free growth and may create a taxable event on earnings.

Leaving it in cash for ten years

The whole advantage of waiting is growth that will never be taxed. A balance sitting in a money market for a decade wastes the best feature of the account. The investment decision deserves the same attention it would get in your own retirement account, adjusted for a ten-year horizon.

Assuming a spouse has to follow this at all

A surviving spouse has options no other beneficiary has, including treating the Roth as their own — which removes the ten-year deadline entirely and means no withdrawals are ever required during their lifetime. The spousal options are worth understanding before moving anything.

Common questions

Can I take withdrawals along the way if I want to?

Yes. There is no penalty for withdrawing from an inherited IRA at any age, and no minimum you have to hit. Take what you need. The argument for waiting is about maximising tax-free growth, not about any rule requiring it.

What happens if I miss the ten-year deadline?

The excise tax on an amount that should have been distributed is 25 percent, reduced to 10 percent if corrected within a two-year window. Because a Roth requires no annual distributions, the year-ten deadline is the only date where this can bite — which is exactly why it gets missed. There is a correction process.

Do I report anything each year if I take nothing?

Generally there is nothing to report in a year with no distribution. The custodian will send a Form 5498 showing the year-end value for informational purposes. Keep those — they document the account's history if the five-year question ever comes up.

I inherited both a traditional and a Roth IRA. Can I combine them?

No. They are separate accounts with different tax treatment and cannot be merged. Practically this is convenient rather than annoying — it lets you draw down the traditional account across the ten years for bracket management while leaving the Roth untouched until the end.

Educational information only. Not tax advice. The five-year rule, the ordering rules for Roth distributions, and the treatment of conversions all contain exceptions this page does not cover. Confirm the account's contribution history with the custodian and your own situation with a CPA.