1st Year RMD reporting for withdrawals made before April 1

[fanfare]

"Since it’s not a required payment at that point, all the responses about putting in”zero”  to the TurboTax question about required payments seems correct."

The suggestion was made as a general solution regardless of your age. TurboTax has issues with Form 5329 this year.

Your RMD is your responsibilty. We're all on the honor system here.

IRS will only poke into your calculations if they decide to audit you for any reason.

Or the IRS computers get smarter  ( AI ?) and examine your returns for discrepancies.

If that happens the penalties will accrue to all years back to the original  year of the omission.

IRS changed the way they explain the age 73 rules. Maybe it is more confusing.

Jan 1 to April 1 of the year after you turn 73 I call a grace period. It is for people who haven't paid attention to their upcoming RBD (required beginning date) which is the year you turn 73 .

OR you can look at it the way IRS explains it.

@Ken5151 

[user17733079838]

I'm in the same boat as others here. I turned 73 in 2025 and paid my entire RMD in 2025. Now Turbotax is telling me that it needs to know the amount that was required to be distributed by Dec 31, 2025 and that I shouldn't report amounts due on April 1 (presumably 2026). So, if I follow the advice given here, I enter $0 because my RMD technically wasn't due until then. Following this logic, next year, it will tell me that it wants to know the amount that was required to be distributed by Dec 31, 2026. So what am I supposed to enter then?
1) Just the RMD that I paid in 2026 or

2) The sum of the amounts that I paid in 2025 and 2026, both of which are technically due by 12/31/2026. Actually, one of them would be overdue.
If TurboTax really needs to know the amount that was required to be distributed before the end of the year, as it says it does, then answer 2 is the only way for us to report it. If, on the other hand, we're all on the honor system here as someone else suggested, then why does TurboTax ask for this information at all.

This part of TurboTax is confusing at best and really needs to be rewritten to clarify if and how you're supposed to report the RMD that you took in the previous year, even if it wasn't required to be taken until April 1st. The quantity of questions about this and the unease people have with the answers given should make that obvious.

[RogerD1]

So yes, you report 0 for your RMD this year because it technically is not due this year.  But it is a smart idea to take it in the year you turn 73 so that you don't withdraw both your RMD for April 1, 2026 and December 31, 2026 and possibly get bumped into a higher tax bracket.  For the RMD you take in 2026, when you enter that in your 2026 return next year, you only need to report the RMD amount due on December 31, 2026 and not the one due on April 1, 2026

The reason that TurboTax asks for your RMD amount is to determine if you may be subject to a penalty for not withdrawing enough RMD and helping you to file for an exception to the penalty if you didn't.  The TurboTax program has no way of knowing your RMD requirement and relies on input from the taxpayer as to whether they withdrew enough funds to meet their RMD requirement.  And the honor system analogy is a good one to use here.