Should Your Living Trust Be the Beneficiary of Your IRA?

Most people who come to me with an existing estate plan have a living trust that somebody set up years ago, and somewhere in the conversation it turns out the trust is also the beneficiary of the IRA. Occasionally that was a deliberate decision. More often nobody thought about it much. The trust seemed like the place where everything was supposed to go, so the retirement account went there too.

I want to explain why that one line on a custodian's form deserves more attention than it usually gets. For a lot of families the IRA or the 401(k) is the largest single thing in the estate, and it doesn't follow the same rules as everything else in the plan.

Your trust doesn't control your IRA

A living trust controls whatever you actually transferred into it. A will controls whatever passes through probate. Your retirement account does neither. An IRA is a contract between you and the custodian, and when you die the custodian pays whoever is named on the beneficiary designation form sitting in its file. Life insurance, annuities and payable-on-death accounts all work the same way, which is why I ask to see beneficiary forms early in a review.

That form beats your will, and it beats your trust. With an employer plan governed by ERISA it can even beat a divorce decree. In Kennedy v. Plan Administrator for DuPont Savings & Investment Plan, 555 U.S. 285 (2009), the Supreme Court held that the plan administrator had to pay the ex-wife whose name was still on the form, even though she had signed away her interest in the divorce. The Court left open whether the estate could go after her afterward to recover the money, which is a separate and much more expensive fight. IRAs aren't governed by ERISA, and state divorce law can sometimes reach them, but the practical lesson doesn't change: read the form.

So the question worth asking isn't about the quality of your trust. It's what you wrote on that form, and whether writing your trust's name there actually helps the people you're trying to help.

If you're married, naming your spouse outright is usually the answer

When the goal is simply to take care of a spouse, naming her directly is generally the better plan, and the reason has to do with a rule most people have never run into.

A surviving spouse who is named as beneficiary in her own name can roll your IRA into her own IRA, or elect to treat it as her own. That gets her several things at once. Her required minimum distributions are calculated on the Uniform Lifetime Table instead of the harsher Single Life Table, so less money is forced out and more of it keeps growing tax-deferred. She can name her own beneficiaries, and a fresh ten-year clock begins at her death instead of continuing yours. She can do Roth conversions, which somebody who merely inherits an IRA cannot do. And she gets her bankruptcy protection back. In Clark v. Rameker, 573 U.S. 122 (2014), a unanimous Supreme Court held that an inherited IRA isn't protected "retirement funds" in the beneficiary's bankruptcy. Your own IRA is protected, fully as to rollover money and up to a dollar cap for amounts you put in directly. An inherited one gets no federal bankruptcy protection at all. Rolling it over turns the second kind into the first. Outside of bankruptcy, state law varies a good deal and has to be checked.

There is a cost, and it matters quite a bit for younger spouses. Once the account is hers, withdrawals before age 59½ carry the 10% early distribution penalty. Held as an inherited IRA there's no penalty at any age. A spouse who might need the money before 59½ will often keep it as an inherited IRA for a while and roll it over later, which is a question of sequencing rather than an either-or choice.

Now here is the rule that decides today's question. The Treasury regulation that governs the treat-as-own election requires the spouse to be the sole beneficiary of the IRA with an unlimited right to withdraw from it, and then it goes on to say that if a trust is named as beneficiary the requirement isn't satisfied even where the surviving spouse is the sole beneficiary of the trust. Treas. Reg. § 1.408-8(c)(1).

I want to be clear about how that reads, because it isn't a drafting problem you can work around — and it isn't a facts-and-circumstances test either. Name the trust and the election is gone. Even a plain revocable trust where your spouse is the only beneficiary and also the only trustee won't do it.

There's a line of IRS private letter rulings that allowed a rollover in narrow situations where the spouse had an unrestricted power to pull the IRA out of the trust and into her own hands. I wouldn't build a plan on them. By statute a private letter ruling may not be used or cited as precedent by anyone, 26 U.S.C. § 6110(k)(3), and only the taxpayer who asked for the ruling gets to rely on it, as a matter of IRS practice rather than law. Getting your own costs a user fee and usually takes six to eighteen months, and deadlines are running the whole time. The bigger problem is that those rulings depend on the spouse having exactly the unlimited withdrawal right that protective trust drafting exists to prevent. Protection and rollover pull against each other, and you don't get to keep both.

One more point, and it applies to 401(k)s and similar qualified plans rather than to IRAs. Federal law requires your spouse's written consent, witnessed or notarized, before anyone other than your spouse can be named as beneficiary. That includes your trust. IRAs have no federal consent requirement, although community property states impose their own.

When a trust is the right answer

There are real reasons, and they aren't unusual.

A seven-year-old can't own and manage an inherited IRA, so if you have young children the alternative to a trust is a court-supervised guardianship or a custodial account that hands over the entire balance at an age set by state law — often eighteen or twenty-one, which is younger than most parents have in mind.

Some beneficiaries shouldn't receive a large sum outright. That covers creditors, a marriage that looks shaky, a gambling or substance problem, and diagnoses that affect judgment. Because of Clark, an inherited IRA sitting in your child's own name has no federal bankruptcy protection whatsoever. A well-drafted spendthrift accumulation trust (meaning one where the trustee is allowed to hold retirement money instead of passing it straight through) is the only reliable way to shield it, and even then only as far as your state's spendthrift law goes. Creditors can reach distributions the trustee actually makes, but not the account itself.

Second marriages are the other common case. If you want your spouse supported for life and the remainder to go to children from a first marriage, naming your spouse directly hands her the account along with the power to send it anywhere she likes, including to a future husband. A trust is usually the only reliable way to keep both halves of that promise.

The strongest case is a beneficiary with special needs, where an outright inheritance can cost someone SSI and Medicaid eligibility almost immediately. A trust that satisfies the requirements for what the regulations call an applicable multi-beneficiary trust can stretch withdrawals over that beneficiary's own life expectancy and still accumulate them rather than paying them out. That's one of the few places where long-horizon planning survived the SECURE Act, and the only place you get the stretch and the protection together. It only works if the trust was drafted to those requirements, which an ordinary special needs trust may not satisfy.

Trusts also earn their keep in multi-generational planning: allocating exemption, keeping the account out of a child's taxable estate, controlling where the remainder lands.

What it costs

The tax rates are the first thing. Trusts run on a compressed rate schedule that reaches the top bracket almost immediately. In 2026 a trust hits 37% at $16,000 of retained taxable income, while a single individual doesn't get there until $640,600. If your trustee holds an IRA withdrawal inside the trust rather than passing it along, you can end up paying the top rate on money the beneficiary would have been taxed on at 22%. This is manageable. A trustee who distributes the income, or who uses the 65-day election under 26 U.S.C. § 663(b), pushes the tax out to the beneficiary's own rates. But somebody has to manage it, every year, and that somebody has to understand what they're doing.

The rules are also unforgiving. A trust only "sees through" to the people behind it if it meets four specific requirements, one of which is a deadline: the required trust documentation must reach the plan administrator or custodian by October 31 of the year after your death. If it doesn't, the trust stops being looked through. Where you died before your required beginning date the account must be emptied within five years, and where you died on or after it your family is stuck taking annual withdrawals measured by your own remaining life expectancy. Either way the flexibility you were paying for is gone. Those four requirements deserve their own article, and I've written about them separately.

Then there's administration. Trustee fees, a Form 1041 every year, K-1s going out to beneficiaries, records somebody has to keep.

And the old headline benefit mostly isn't there anymore. Before 2020 a trust could stretch an inherited IRA across a young beneficiary's entire life. The SECURE Act ended that for most beneficiaries, so in most families the money is coming out inside ten years no matter what you do. What a trust buys now is control and protection rather than deferral. If control and protection aren't what you need, you're paying for something you aren't getting.

The move worth considering

If you've decided a trust should be the beneficiary, it's worth asking whether to convert to a Roth while you're alive.

Qualified Roth withdrawals come out income-tax free, so a trust that receives them owes nothing and the compressed brackets never come into play. You pay the tax at your own rate, which you know, instead of leaving your trustee to pay 37% starting at $16,000. Whether the math works for you depends on your current bracket compared to your beneficiaries', on Medicare premium surcharges, on state tax, and on how long you expect the money to sit. It doesn't work for everybody. It's also something only you can do, since a trustee can't convert an inherited account after you're gone.

Where this leaves you

Naming a living trust as your IRA beneficiary is a trade. You give up the simplest and most tax-efficient path in exchange for control your family can't get any other way. Done on purpose, for a reason you can say out loud, it can be very good planning. Done by default, because the trust felt like the natural place to put everything, it's one of the more expensive mistakes I see.

The good news is that we're talking about a one-page form and a conversation, and both are still available to you.

The Law Office of Jacobie K. Whitley works with individuals and families in the District of Columbia and Maryland on estate planning, trusts, and business succession. If you have a living trust and a retirement account and nobody has ever checked how the two fit together, that's worth an hour.

This article covers federal tax law as of August 2026 and is general information rather than legal or tax advice. It doesn't create an attorney-client relationship, and nothing here promises a particular result. The retirement benefit rules are technical and the right answer depends on facts specific to you. Jacobie K. Whitley is licensed in the District of Columbia and Maryland. Please talk to an attorney about your own situation.