You have two options with a spousal IRA.
1. Treat it as yours.
2. Keep it as an inherited IRA.
If you decide to treat it as yours, you can contact the trustee to designate yourself as the owner, or you can rollover the funds into your own IRA. In either case, you must first take the owner's RMD for 2025 using the owner's formula, and you take your own RMD using your own formula. Then, beginning in 2026, you calculate your RMD using the combined balances and your age. you don't have to take the spouse's separate 2025 RMD. Instead, you calculate your own 2025 RMD based on the combined balances, the same way you would if you had two IRAs at different banks under your own name.
If you decide to keep it as an inherited IRA, you must follow all the usual rules for inherited IRAs, which include:
a. Taking the original owner's RMD for the year they died if they did not already take it (using the calculation for the original owner).
b. You must withdraw all the funds and close the account within 10 years.
c. Starting the year after the original owner's death, you must take RMDs from this account, calculated separately from your own RMD, using the RMD formula for beneficiaries in publication 590-b (which is a slightly different calculation than taking your own RMD.)
If you don't take the beneficiary RMD by the end of 2026, the IRS will automatically determine that you are assuming ownership under your own name even if you don't contact the plan to make the change.
