What Montana actually takes from a 401(k) withdrawal, a pension, and Social Security — in dollars, against the state’s own brackets and exclusions rather than a yes-or-no list.
Long-term index-fund growth after expense-ratio drag — and what your state takes from the gains at withdrawal.
When your RMDs start under SECURE 2.0, how much this year's is, and what missing it costs.
2026 limits, employer match, the 60-63 super catch-up, and whether the Roth catch-up mandate applies to you.
A required minimum distribution is ordinary income, taxed at your top bracket and often pushing you into the next one. Here is the federal tax on RMDs from $20,000 to $75,000 at different income levels, why the default 10% withholding usually leaves a bill, how to avoid an underpayment penalty, and the three side effects that make the real rate higher than the bracket.
The required minimum distribution on every common balance at every age from 73 to 95, worked from the IRS table, plus what happens to the account over twenty years of withdrawals at 0%, 5% and 7% returns. The short version: the share you must take rises every year, and at good returns the dollar amount keeps rising with it.
What moving actually saves, on your own income mix rather than a headline rate — and how to establish domicile so the state you left cannot follow you.
Which account to draw first, priced. The three cliffs a withdrawal can cross without warning, the conversion window almost nobody uses, and why the order is the last big decision you can still change.
Montana guide
On the ordinary retirement profile — $34,000 of Social Security and $61,000 of plan distributions — Montana takes $4,007 a year in state income tax.
That is the number people compare, and it is the smallest of three. Property tax adds about $3,801 on the state's $527,848 median home, and insurance another $3,265. The three together come to $11,073, placing Montana 43rd of 50.
A note before you start. This is general education, not tax advice. Every Montana figure comes from this site's own fifty-state income-tax dataset and its retirement tax engine, computed for a single filer aged 70 unless stated otherwise; property tax, median home price and insurance figures come from the site's core state dataset. Rates are for tax year 2026. Property tax is assessed locally in most states, so the effective rate here is a statewide figure rather than your county's.
On Social Security. Montana taxes Social Security, but only the federally taxable portion, and applies no state threshold of its own. Because Montana begins from federal taxable income, whatever survives the federal IRC section 86 computation — provisional income measured against the federal base amounts of $25,000 and $32,000, capped at 85% — is simply what Montana taxes. Recorded as 'taxed' rather than 'taxed-above-threshold' for that reason: there is no Montana threshold to record, and inventing one would misdescribe the mechanism. Montana's own separate Social Security addition, which historically computed a larger taxable amount than federal, was repealed effective 2024-01-01 — the Department lists 'taxable Social Security Benefits addition' among the Schedule I additions repealed. Mca 15-30-2110, which some sources still cite, is repealed; the operative statute is 15-30-2120, whose addition and subtraction lists contain no Social Security item at all. The federal OBBBA senior deduction flows through to Montana and blunts this substantially.
Read the full Montana guide →18 min read · Updated 2026-09-03