Retiring in Utah
Every figure below is sourced to Utah’s own publications and dated. Estimates only, and not tax advice.
Retirement tax by state
What your state actually takes from a 401(k) withdrawal, a pension, and Social Security — in dollars, not a yes/no list.
Brokerage account growth
Long-term index-fund growth after expense-ratio drag — and what your state takes from the gains at withdrawal.
Roth vs. Traditional
Decided on the two rates that actually govern it — yours now, and yours at withdrawal, in the state you'll retire in rather than the one you're in.
Contribution limit optimizer
2026 limits, employer match, the 60-63 super catch-up, and whether the Roth catch-up mandate applies to you.
Required minimum distribution
When your RMDs start under SECURE 2.0, how much this year's is, and what missing it costs.
Backdoor Roth pro-rata
What a backdoor Roth conversion would actually cost you in tax — the pro-rata rule most calculators only describe.
Self-directed IRA real estate (UDFI)
The tax a leveraged rental owes inside a self-directed IRA — computed at trust rates, not the rate you'd assume.
Utah at a glance
- 401(k) and IRA withdrawals
- Taxed
- Social Security
- Taxed above an income threshold
- Below the threshold it is exempt, which is why a yes-or-no answer is usually wrong here.
- Top marginal rate
- 4.45%
- A flat rate on all taxable income.
- Tax year
- 2026
- Brackets are legislated and change on a fixed calendar, so the year matters.
- Utah is one of the small group of states still taxing Social Security benefits in 2026, and it is the state where describing that treatment as an income threshold is most misleading: the threshold governs a CREDIT, not an exclusion, so the benefit is nonrefundable, is lost against other credits, and interacts with the retirement and military-retirement credits by mutual exclusion.
- The thresholds in Utah Code 59-10-1042 are FIXED DOLLAR AMOUNTS in statute and are not inflation-indexed. The legislature has raised them by amendment three times (2022, 2023, and 2025); between amendments they erode in real terms every year.
- 'Modified adjusted gross income' for the Social Security credit is a Utah-specific measure, not plain federal AGI: 59-10-1042(1)(d) defines it as adjusted gross income plus any interest income not included in AGI plus any addition to AGI required by Section 59-10-114. A calculator comparing a reader's federal AGI to these thresholds will be slightly low for anyone holding out-of-state municipal bonds.
- Utah has not enacted a state-facilitated auto-IRA employer mandate, so autoIraProgram is deliberately absent from this record rather than unresearched.