Ed Slott: the QCD cap survives an RMD and a Roth conversion

Two fourth-quarter timing questions arrive in Ed Slott's Oct. 1 mailbag, and the first begins with a reader who took an early-January qualified charitable distribution against part of a 2026 required minimum distribution, satisfied the rest of the RMD, and then processed a Roth conversion. Slott's answer to whether another QCD was still permitted is yes, because the annual cap is the only limitation and it sits at $111,000 for 2026—a finished RMD does not close out the charitable room, and neither does a conversion.

The ordering matters: the reader front-loads the charitable dollar, finishes the RMD, then converts, three moves that would appear to exhaust the year. Slott's ruling is narrower than the bracket arithmetic a Roth decision normally turns on, because it leaves aside how the QCD feeds into the conversion's taxable income.

The second question carries real money. A 70-year-old holds an inherited traditional IRA from his mother, has been told the account must be emptied by the end of 2034 under the 10-year rule, and is taking annual RMDs in the meantime; he asks whether to pull more than the RMD each year so the final year does not bring a large tax bill. Slott says yes, because Congress wrote the 10-year rule to accelerate distributions from inherited IRAs and, with them, the taxation of those dollars, while the annual RMDs inside the window are not designed to deplete the account evenly across the decade.

In Slott's telling, a balance can remain in year ten—enough to push the beneficiary into a higher bracket—so withdrawing above the RMD in the remaining years spreads the tax across the window. That is a mechanical fix, but it is also a wager that 2034's bracket structure resembles today's. This fall the Tax Foundation modeled 86 tax-code changes, led by an alternative minimum tax simplification, a reminder that the far end of a ten-year window has a decade left in which to change.

For an inherited IRA already inside the clock, the choice is between tax paid on a known schedule and tax concentrated in a final year. The 70-year-old can start working backward from 2034, even if the tax law that will apply then has a decade left to change.