What Utah 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.
Utah guide
On the ordinary retirement profile — $34,000 of Social Security and $61,000 of plan distributions — Utah takes $4,228 a year in state income tax.
That is the number people compare, and it is the smallest of three. Property tax adds about $2,672 on the state's $534,300 median home, and insurance another $1,810. The three together come to $8,710, placing Utah 34th of 50.
A note before you start. This is general education, not tax advice. Every Utah 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. Utah taxes Social Security, but through a credit rather than an exclusion, and the mechanism changes the answer. Benefits that are taxable federally flow into Utah taxable income and are taxed at the full 4.45%. Utah then hands back a nonrefundable credit under Utah Code 59-10-1042 equal to the state income tax rate multiplied by the Social Security benefit included in state taxable income — 4.45% x benefit for 2026 — which fully offsets the tax on those benefits for filers below the threshold. The credit is then reduced by $0.025 for each $1 of modified adjusted gross income above the thresholds recorded here. The phase-out is gradual, not a cliff, and it is steep: at 2.5 cents of credit lost per dollar of income, the credit is exhausted after $40 of income for every $1 of credit. A single filer whose only taxable benefit is $20,000 has a credit of $890 (4.45% x $20,000) and loses it entirely by roughly $89,600 of MAGI.
Read the full Utah guide →17 min read · Updated 2026-09-03