Can You Withdraw From a Roth IRA? Rules, Exceptions, and Penalties

You can withdraw your own contributions from a Roth IRA at any time, at any age, for any reason, with no tax and no penalty. Withdrawing the earnings those contributions produced is the part with strings attached: to pull earnings out completely tax-free and penalty-free, the account has to be at least five years old and you generally have to be 59½ or meet another qualifying condition. Everything else about withdrawing from a Roth IRA is a variation on those two rules.¹

Your Contributions Are Always Available

Every dollar you put into a Roth IRA came out of income you already paid tax on. Because the IRS has already been paid, you can take those contributions back whenever you want. Age doesn’t matter. How long the account has been open doesn’t matter. Your reason doesn’t matter.¹

Say you’ve contributed $30,000 over the years and the account is now worth $42,000. You can pull out up to $30,000 with no tax consequences at all. The other $12,000 is earnings, and that’s where the rest of the rules kick in.

Which Dollars Come Out First

You don’t get to pick which dollars leave the account. The IRS applies a fixed order to every Roth IRA distribution:¹

Regular contributions come out first, always tax-free and penalty-free.
Conversion and rollover amounts come out second, on a first-in, first-out basis. Within each conversion, the taxable portion comes out before the nontaxable portion.
Earnings come out last. This is the only bucket that can produce a tax bill or a penalty.

The order works in your favor. As long as your total withdrawals stay at or below your total regular contributions plus your conversion amounts, no part of a withdrawal is treated as earnings, regardless of your age or how new the account is.

When Earnings Come Out Tax-Free

Once a withdrawal reaches into the earnings bucket, it’s tax-free and penalty-free only if it’s a “qualified distribution.” Two conditions have to be met at the same time.²

The Five-Year Clock

Your Roth IRA has to have been open for at least five tax years. The clock starts on January 1 of the tax year for which you made your first contribution to any Roth IRA. If you opened your first Roth IRA in March 2022 and designated the contribution for tax year 2021, the five-year period began January 1, 2021, and ended December 31, 2025. Opening additional Roth IRAs later or making new contributions does not restart the clock; it runs from your earliest Roth history.²

A Qualifying Reason

Along with the five-year requirement, at least one of the following has to apply:

You’re 59½ or older.
You’re totally and permanently disabled.
The distribution goes to a beneficiary or your estate after your death.
Up to $10,000 in earnings (a lifetime cap across all your IRAs) is used to buy, build, or rebuild a first home.³

Meet the five-year rule and one of these triggers, and everything you withdraw is completely free of federal income tax and penalty.

Conversions Have Their Own Five-Year Clock

If you converted money from a traditional IRA or rolled 401(k) funds into your Roth IRA, a separate five-year clock runs on each conversion. Withdraw a converted amount within five years of that specific conversion and the 10% early withdrawal penalty can apply to the taxable portion of what you converted.⁴

Each conversion starts its own clock. A $50,000 conversion in 2023 clears its waiting period after 2027; a $30,000 conversion in 2025 clears its own after 2029. The conversion penalty stops applying once you reach 59½, even if five years haven’t gone by, and it also doesn’t apply if you qualify for one of the general penalty exceptions below.⁴

Exceptions That Waive the 10% Penalty

If you take out earnings before both conditions for a qualified distribution are met, the earnings are generally taxed as ordinary income and hit with a 10% early withdrawal penalty. Several exceptions waive the 10% penalty, though a waiver of the penalty doesn’t waive the income tax. If the five-year rule hasn’t been met, you can still owe regular income tax on the earnings portion even when the penalty itself is excused.

Long-Standing Exceptions

These have been in the code for years:⁵

First-time home purchase, up to a $10,000 lifetime cap on earnings, for buying, building, or rebuilding a first home.³
Qualified higher education expenses (tuition, fees, books, supplies) for you, your spouse, your children, or grandchildren at an eligible postsecondary school.
Unreimbursed medical expenses above 7.5% of your adjusted gross income for the year.
Health insurance premiums after receiving unemployment compensation for at least 12 consecutive weeks.
Substantially equal periodic payments calculated over your life expectancy. Once started, they have to continue for at least five years or until you reach 59½, whichever is later; stopping or altering them early retroactively imposes the penalty on all prior distributions.⁶
Distributions taken because the IRS levied the account.
Qualified reservist distributions for military reservists called to active duty for at least 180 days.

Exceptions Added by SECURE 2.0

SECURE 2.0 added several more exceptions for distributions after December 31, 2023:⁵

Terminal illness, when a physician certifies a condition expected to result in death within 84 months.⁷
Emergency personal expenses, one per calendar year up to the lesser of $1,000 or the amount by which the balance exceeds $1,000, repayable within three years. Without repayment, no further emergency withdrawal is allowed until the three-year window ends or you repay.⁸
Domestic abuse survivor distributions, up to the lesser of $10,000 (inflation-adjusted) or 50% of the balance, repayable within three years and self-certified.
Qualified birth or adoption, up to $5,000 per parent within one year of the birth or finalized adoption, repayable within three years.

If You Inherited the Roth IRA

Different rules apply when the account isn’t originally yours. A surviving spouse can roll an inherited Roth IRA into their own Roth, at which point it’s treated as their account under the ordinary rules. A non-spouse beneficiary who inherits from someone who died in 2020 or later generally has to empty the account by the end of the tenth year after the year of death. Withdrawals of the original owner’s contributions are tax-free to the beneficiary; earnings are also tax-free if the original owner’s account had already met the five-year aging requirement, but earnings can be taxable if the account was younger than five years at the owner’s death.⁹

Making the Withdrawal

Most custodians let you request a distribution through their online portal. You pick the dollar amount, choose a delivery method (electronic transfer or a mailed check), and decide whether to have federal income tax withheld. Electronic transfers usually land in two to three business days.

The request form will ask you to categorize the withdrawal, for example as a normal distribution, an early distribution, or an exception-based one. The category drives the distribution code your custodian puts on Form 1099-R, and that code tells the IRS whether the 10% penalty is in play. If you’re claiming a penalty exception, confirm the custodian is using the correct code so you don’t have to argue about it later on Form 5329.

Reporting the Withdrawal

Your financial institution issues Form 1099-R for the year of any distribution, showing the total amount withdrawn and how much may be taxable.¹⁰ Even a tax-free withdrawal of your own contributions produces a 1099-R, so the form itself isn’t a signal that tax is owed.

If any part of the withdrawal is earnings that aren’t part of a qualified distribution, you complete Part III of Form 8606 with your return. That form applies the ordering rules and figures out how much, if any, of the distribution is taxable.¹¹ If you owe the 10% early withdrawal penalty, or you’re claiming an exception the 1099-R doesn’t already reflect, you use Form 5329.⁵ Filling either form out correctly comes down to knowing your total contribution basis: every regular contribution you’ve ever made plus every conversion amount. That figure decides whether a given withdrawal reaches into the earnings bucket at all.

1
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 590-B (2025), Distributions from Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs) – Section: Ordering Rules for Distributions
2
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 408A – Roth IRAs
3
Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 557, Additional Tax on Early Distributions From Traditional and Roth IRAs
4
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 590-B (2025), Distributions from Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs) – Section: Distributions of Conversion and Certain Rollover Contributions Within 5-Year Period
5
Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Topics – Exceptions to Tax on Early Distributions
6
Internal Revenue Service. Substantially Equal Periodic Payments
7
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 590-B (2025), Distributions from Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs)
8
Internal Revenue Service. Notice 2024-55 – Certain Exceptions to the 10 Percent Additional Tax
9
Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Topics – Beneficiary
10
Internal Revenue Service. Form 1099-R 2025 – Distributions From Pensions, Annuities, Retirement or Profit-Sharing Plans, IRAs, Insurance Contracts, etc.
11
Internal Revenue Service. Form 8606 – Nondeductible IRAs (2025)