The “QLAC”: Move $210,000 of Your IRA Into This One Account and the IRS Stops Counting It for RMDs Until You’re 85.

A QLAC lets IRA owners shelter up to $210,000 from RMD calculations, deferring forced withdrawals on that amount until age 85.

SECURE 2.0 eliminated the old 25%-of-balance cap, replacing it with a single $210,000 inflation-indexed limit per person across all retirement accounts.

Once funded, QLAC premiums are fully illiquid, and without a return-of-premium rider, heirs receive nothing if the owner dies before payments begin.

If you own a traditional IRA and you are staring down required minimum distributions (RMDs), the IRS quietly lets you fence off a chunk of that balance so it stops counting toward your RMD math until you are 85. The vehicle is called a qualifying longevity annuity contract , or QLAC, and under current rules, you can move up to $210,000 of IRA money into one. The premium leaves the balance that the IRS uses to calculate your yearly forced withdrawal, which is the closest thing to a legal RMD delay button that exists inside a retirement account.

What a QLAC Actually Does Inside Your IRA

A QLAC is a deferred income annuity, meaning an insurance contract you buy today in exchange for a guaranteed monthly check that starts on a future date you choose. Held inside an IRA or 401(k), a QLAC gets special treatment: the premium you pay is carved out of the account value used to compute RMDs during the deferral years. You still eventually pay tax. When payments start, they arrive as ordinary taxable income. But between the purchase date and the income start date, that money is invisible to the RMD formula.

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The QLAC framework lives in Treasury Regulation section 1.401(a)(9)-6 and IRS Notice 2014-66, which first authorized the contracts. The SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 , section 202, rewrote the limits: it eliminated the old cap that restricted QLAC premiums to 25% of your retirement balance and replaced it with a single dollar limit indexed to inflation. The reported current-year premium cap is $210,000, and that ceiling applies per person across all of your retirement accounts combined, not per account. The latest permitted income start age under SECURE 2.0 is 85.