Withdrawal Order Calculator
The three accounts, the spending, and the bracket you would fill
Your result will appear here
Fill in the fields on the left and this updates as you type.
Know what this estimate is based on
- Jurisdiction
- General mathematical model
- Scope and limitations
- Long-range scenario, not a guarantee. Small changes in returns, inflation, fees, taxes, and withdrawal timing can materially change the result.
- Source links checked
- Jul 30, 2026
Built and regression-tested by Smart Tools Lab. It has not been individually reviewed by a licensed financial, tax, or legal professional.
How to use
- 01
Enter the three balances — the taxable brokerage account, every pre-tax dollar across traditional IRAs and 401(k)s, and the Roth. The split between them is the whole question: with one account there is no order to choose.
- 02
Enter your age when the withdrawals start, the age you are planning to, and the annual spending the accounts have to fund AFTER tax. The page solves each year for the gross withdrawal that leaves that much in your hand.
- 03
Add the Social Security you expect per year and the age it starts. It is not neutral here — an IRA dollar drawn beside a benefit can drag up to 85 cents of that benefit into taxable income alongside it.
- 04
Set the expected return on all three accounts and the inflation rate. Everything then runs in today's dollars, because the brackets, the standard deduction and the benefit are all indexed in real life.
- 05
The tax fields arrive filled in at the 2026 SINGLE-filer figures: a $16,100 standard deduction, taxable income filled to $50,400 at 12% with 22% above it, and under Advanced options a 0% capital-gains band up to $49,450, 15% above that, distributions forced from 73 and a 26.5 divisor. Every label carries the joint and head-of-household figure — change them if you file another way, and check the 60% cost-basis share against your own brokerage account. Then read the two lifetime totals and the crossover age.
Formula
One year at a time, in today's dollars. Provisional income = your other income + realised gains + half the Social Security benefit; above $25,000 for a single filer ($32,000 joint) half of each further dollar drags a benefit dollar into income, and above $34,000 ($44,000 joint) it is 85 cents, capped at 85% of the benefit. Ordinary taxable income = ordinary withdrawals + the taxable part of the benefit − the standard deduction, taxed at 12% up to $50,400 and 22% above it. Long-term gains stack on TOP of that: free while taxable income sits under $49,450, then 15%. From 73 a required minimum distribution of the traditional balance ÷ the Uniform Lifetime divisor comes out whether the year needs it or not — 26.5 at 73, 12.2 at 90 — and any surplus lands in the brokerage account as already-taxed basis. The circularity, that the tax depends on the withdrawal and the withdrawal has to cover the tax, is solved by bisecting on the year's tax rather than iterating: inside the Social Security torpedo an extra IRA dollar can cost more than a dollar, so the iteration would walk away. The conventional order empties taxable, then traditional, then Roth. The bracket-filling order takes from the traditional account exactly what lands taxable income on the ceiling, covers the rest from the brokerage account, and reaches for the Roth before crossing it. Both fund the identical spending; the answer is the difference in the two lifetime totals.
Example
$400,000 in a brokerage account (60% of it cost basis), $1,200,000 traditional, $200,000 Roth. Retire at 62, plan to 92, spend $80,000 a year after tax, $34,000 of Social Security from 67, 6% returns against 2.5% inflation — 3.41% real. In year one the conventional order sells from the brokerage account, realises a gain that fits under the standard deduction and the 0% band, and pays nothing. The bracket-filling order draws $66,500 from the IRA — $50,400 of taxable income plus the $16,100 standard deduction — pays $6,048 at 12% and $1,248 of gains tax on the top-up sale, $7,296 in all, and looks $7,296 worse. It stays behind until 84. By then the conventional order's untouched IRA has reached $1,402,875 at 73, forcing a first distribution of $1,402,875 ÷ 26.5 = $52,939 and $1,282,488 across the run, against $944,934 for the order that had been drawing it down all along. Lifetime tax finishes at $294,207 conventional against $261,064 filling: $33,143 saved. The leftovers say the same thing from the other end — $864,027 still owing ordinary tax in the conventional order's IRA against $636,735 in the other, which is $1,425,450 of after-tax value against $1,430,238.
Definitions
- Bracket filling
- Deliberately taking enough from a pre-tax account each year to use up a low tax bracket that would otherwise expire unused — here, topping taxable income to $50,400 at 12% — rather than deferring until required distributions force the money out at a higher rate.
- Required minimum distribution
- The amount that must leave a traditional IRA or 401(k) each year from age 73 (75 for anyone born in 1960 or later): the balance divided by the Uniform Lifetime divisor, 26.5 at 73 falling to 12.2 at 90. It is taxed as ordinary income whether or not you need it.
- Social Security tax torpedo
- The band in which each extra dollar of ordinary income drags up to 85 cents of Social Security into taxable income with it, so a dollar taxed at 12% really costs closer to 22%. The thresholds — $25,000 and $34,000 single, $32,000 and $44,000 joint — have not been indexed since 1993.
Good to know
Three kinds of dollar
A retirement balance sheet is usually written as one number, and for withdrawal purposes it is three. A dollar in a traditional IRA or 401(k) has never been taxed: every dollar out is ordinary income at whatever rate you are in that year, and from 73 it comes out whether you asked for it or not. A dollar in a taxable brokerage account is part cost basis, which is already-taxed money coming back to you, and part gain, taxed at long-term capital gains rates that begin at 0% — genuinely zero — while taxable income stays under $49,450 for a single filer ($98,900 joint, $66,200 head of household), then 15%. A dollar in a Roth is exactly one dollar, with no tax and no required distribution during your lifetime. So the same $80,000 of spending can require wildly different gross withdrawals depending on where it comes from, and the choice of source is the one drawdown lever that changes your tax bill without changing anything about how you live. That is what makes this a real decision rather than an accounting detail. The conventional order — taxable, then traditional, then Roth — exists for a good reason: it defers tax as long as possible and leaves the tax-sheltered accounts compounding longest. Over any single year it wins, every time. The trouble is that it treats deferral as free, and deferral is not free when the deferred account is compounding into a size that a divisor will eventually empty for you, at a rate you do not get to choose, in years when Social Security is already filling the low brackets. The alternative this page prices is not exotic. It takes just enough from the traditional account each year to use up a low bracket that would otherwise expire — $50,400 of taxable income at 12% plus the $16,100 standard deduction, so $66,500 out of the IRA in year one — funds the rest from the brokerage account, and reaches for the Roth before it would cross that ceiling.
What the conventional order stores up
Required minimum distributions are the mechanism that turns a deferral into a bill. From age 73 — 75 for anyone born in 1960 or later — a fraction of every pre-tax account must come out each year: the balance divided by the Uniform Lifetime divisor, which is 26.5 at 73 and falls steadily to 12.2 at 90, so the forced fraction roughly doubles across a retirement. A retiree who has been draining the brokerage account first arrives at 73 with the IRA at its largest. On this page's default run that is $1,402,875, forcing a first distribution of $52,939 and $1,282,488 across the whole run, against $944,934 for the order that had been drawing the account down all along. Missing one is expensive in its own right — the penalty is 25% of the shortfall, reduced to 10% if corrected inside the correction window. Two futures make the leftover pre-tax balance worse than its face value suggests, and neither appears on any single year's return. The first is the widow's bracket. When one spouse dies, the survivor files single from the following year on close to the same income: the brackets and the standard deduction roughly halve while the required distribution does not, so an identical withdrawal is suddenly taxed at a materially higher rate. The second is inheritance. A traditional IRA left to an adult child must generally be emptied within ten years, and those distributions land on top of that child's own peak-earning income — very often at a higher rate than the retiree ever paid. Between them, the two futures mean that the $864,027 the conventional order leaves in the traditional account on the default run is not $864,027; it is that figure less whatever rate somebody eventually pays on it, which is why the page also reports an after-tax value for what each order leaves behind. Shrinking that account in years when your own rate is unusually low is the whole strategy, stated in one sentence.
The torpedo and the free-gains band pull in opposite directions
Two features of the Code make retirement marginal rates behave nothing like the bracket table, and they push the answer in opposite directions. The first is the taxation of Social Security. The benefit is not taxed on its own; it is taxed on what comes out beside it. Provisional income is your other income plus half your benefit, and above $25,000 for a single filer ($32,000 joint) half of each additional dollar drags a benefit dollar into taxable income with it, above $34,000 ($44,000 joint) it is 85 cents, and 85% of the benefit is the ceiling. Because those thresholds were written in 1983, amended in 1993, and have never been indexed since, they now bite an ordinary retiree rather than a wealthy one. Inside that band a withdrawal nominally taxed at 12% really costs closer to 22%, and this is why an iterative solver would fail on the page — the effective marginal rate can exceed 100%, so the compute bisects on the year's tax instead. The second feature runs the other way. Long-term capital gains stack on top of ordinary income, which means the 0% band is only available while ordinary taxable income leaves room underneath the ceiling. Fill that room with IRA withdrawals and you evict your own gains into the 15% band. The default run shows exactly this cost: the conventional order gets $121,851 of gains out entirely untaxed across the retirement and the bracket-filling order gets $0, and the bracket-filling order also pulls slightly MORE Social Security into tax, $722,500 against $713,498. It still wins by $33,143, because the required-distribution effect is larger than both combined. That is the shape of the whole problem. There is no rule of thumb that survives contact with it, because the three effects interact and their relative sizes depend on your balances, your benefit and your horizon. What can be said generally is that the years between retiring and claiming — when ordinary income is near zero and neither the torpedo nor the RMD is running — are the cheapest years of your life to take money out of a pre-tax account, and almost nobody uses them.
The levers next door
This page changes only where the spending comes from, and it deliberately never takes more from the IRA than the year actually needs — because a withdrawal you do not spend has to go somewhere, and where it goes is a different decision. That decision is the Roth conversion, and it is the same idea with the constraint removed: it moves pre-tax money into a Roth without you needing to spend it, so it works precisely in the empty-bracket years when your spending is already covered from the brokerage account. If the bracket-filling result looks good here, the conversion version is usually better, because it can fill the bracket in a year when a withdrawal would have had nowhere to go. Three more mechanisms sit just outside the model and can change the answer. Qualified charitable distributions: from age 70½ — note that this is earlier than the RMD age, and the gap is the planning point — up to $111,000 a year can go from an IRA directly to a charity, counting toward the required distribution and never entering income at all, which is strictly better than taking the distribution and deducting the gift. The IRMAA surcharge: Medicare premiums step up in brackets based on your return from two years earlier, and it is a cliff rather than a slope, so a single dollar of extra income can cost four figures in the year it lands. State income tax: several states exempt retirement income entirely, several tax it in full, and the difference can invert the ranking of two orders that federal tax alone would separate by a few thousand dollars. Finally, treat the absolute totals on this page as estimates and the DIFFERENCE between the two orders as the result. The tax ladder here uses two rates and charges the lower one from the first taxable dollar rather than running a 10% band underneath, which overstates the tax in a low-income year by a few hundred dollars — but it overstates both orders identically, so the figure you would act on is untouched.
Frequently asked questions
Which account should I withdraw from first?
The conventional advice is taxable, then traditional, then Roth, and over a single year it is unbeatable. Over a lifetime it usually is not. On the default run — $400,000 taxable, $1,200,000 traditional, $200,000 Roth, spending $80,000 a year from 62 to 92 with $34,000 of Social Security from 67 — taking just enough from the IRA each year to fill the 12% bracket costs $261,064 of lifetime tax against $294,207 for the conventional order. That is $33,143 saved on identical spending, with nothing about your life changed except which account each dollar left from.
Why does the conventional order look better at first?
Because it defers everything. In year one of that run the conventional order pays $0 of tax and the bracket-filling order pays $7,296 — selling from a brokerage account realises a sliver of gain that fits inside the standard deduction and the 0% band, while an IRA dollar is ordinary income from the start. The gap only closes at 84, where the crossover falls, and it closes because the conventional order's untouched IRA has grown to a size the required distributions then empty on the IRS's schedule rather than yours. Anyone who tests a withdrawal order over five years has measured only the half where the wrong answer looks right.
What does "filling the bracket" mean in practice?
Taking exactly enough from the traditional account to bring taxable income up to the ceiling you chose, and no more. In year one of the default run that is $50,400 of taxable income plus the $16,100 standard deduction: $66,500 out of the IRA, taxed at 12% for $6,048, with a further $1,248 of capital-gains tax on the brokerage sale that tops the year up — $7,296 in all. The rest of the spending comes from the brokerage account, and the Roth is reached for before the year would cross the ceiling, which is the opposite of the conventional order's instinct to save the Roth for last.
Does bracket filling always win?
No, and the page is built to show you when it does not. Plan to 75 instead of 92 and the conventional order wins by $25,186, with no crossover at all inside the run — there is not enough time for the forced distributions to land. Fill to the top of the 22% bracket instead — a $105,700 ceiling, 22% inside it and 24% above — and the advantage collapses to $3,328, because you are paying 22% now to avoid 24% later. Shrink the traditional balance to $300,000 and the saving rises to $36,031 on a much smaller total bill. Bracket filling pays when there is unused low-bracket room and a large pre-tax account; take either away and it stops paying.
The bracket-filling order taxes MORE of my Social Security. How does it still win?
It does two things that look like losses. Over the default run it pulls $722,500 of benefits into taxable income against the conventional order's $713,498, and it gets $0 of capital gains out at the 0% rate against $121,851 — because filling the bracket with IRA money uses up the room that made those gains free. It wins anyway, on required minimum distributions: $944,934 forced out across the run against $1,282,488, because it has spent years shrinking the balance the divisor is applied to. That is the whole trade, and it is why a single year's tax return cannot decide it.
What is missing, and what if I do not file single?
The tax fields open on 2026 single-filer figures because the engine has numeric fields only and there is no filing-status control; every label carries the joint and head-of-household figure, and filers 65 and over get an additional standard deduction on top. Not modelled at all: state income tax, which several states waive on retirement income entirely; the Medicare IRMAA surcharge, a cliff two years behind your return; the 3.8% net investment income tax; the dividends a brokerage account pays tax on every year whether you sell or not; and qualified charitable distributions, which satisfy an RMD without ever touching income. Read the difference between the two orders as the answer, not the totals.