IRS splits SECURE amendment deadlines; discretionary date still binds

When the IRS issued Notice 2024-2, it gave plan sponsors one deadline, Dec. 31, 2026, for every amendment tied to the SECURE Act of 2019 and SECURE 2.0 of 2022. Guidance the agency released Sept. 17 narrows that reading: required amendments run on a separate clock, one that starts when a provision first appears on the IRS's annual Required Amendment List rather than a single date written to cover all of them.

The test is mechanical, if easy to misread: a required amendment must be adopted by the end of the second calendar year after the year it becomes effective or is adopted, whichever is later. Under that formula, the Roth catch-up requirement in Section 603 of SECURE 2.0, expected to land on the 2027 Required Amendment List, gets an adoption deadline of Dec. 31, 2029, three years past the general date in Notice 2024-2. Stakeholders can generally assume that required provisions not yet published will appear on a future list, with the deadline computed from that later publication, and Treasury and the IRS expect the Sept. 17 guidance itself to be folded into the upcoming 2026 list.

The relief is narrower than it looks: required amendments now move on a rolling schedule, while optional ones remain stacked at a single date. Discretionary amendments keep the Dec. 31, 2026 date, with guidance on discretionary provisions already adopted appearing in Part C of the required amendments list for the year the change is applicable. The bulletin reads like broad relief, and sponsors who treat it that way are the ones positioned to file discretionary amendments in early 2027 against a deadline that expired in December 2026.

The guidance as reported settles when documents get adopted, and it says nothing about when payroll, withholding, or recordkeeping mechanics must be live. Roth catch-up is the clean example: its adoption date is slated for the end of 2029, while the operational date for the catch-up itself is not addressed in the bulletin at all. Sponsors that fold the two together are reading relief into a document whose stated scope is paperwork.

The document to track from here is the 2026 Required Amendment List, which is expected to carry the Sept. 17 guidance and, under the formula the agency just restated, will set adoption dates for everything that follows it. Sponsors whose document calendar was built around a single 2026 year-end should rebuild it around that list, and keep the discretionary filing on the schedule that still reads Dec. 31, 2026.