When Can I Withdraw From a Roth IRA Without Penalty?

You can withdraw from a Roth IRA without penalty anytime you’re pulling out your own contributions, and you can withdraw earnings without the 10% penalty once you turn 59½, become disabled, or qualify for one of a handful of specific exceptions such as a first home purchase, higher education costs, large medical bills, or a federally declared disaster. Tax-free treatment on earnings is a separate question: that requires both meeting one of those qualifying conditions and having held a Roth IRA for at least five tax years.¹

Your Contributions Come Out Anytime

Every dollar you personally put into a Roth IRA is after-tax money, so the IRS treats a withdrawal of those dollars as a return of funds you’ve already paid tax on. You can take out an amount up to your total lifetime contributions at any age, for any reason, with no 10% early withdrawal penalty and no additional income tax.¹

The catch is recordkeeping. Your custodian reports each year’s contributions to the IRS on Form 5498, but tracking the cumulative total across every year and every account is on you.² As long as your total withdrawals stay at or below your total contributions, nothing is owed. Once you cross that line, you’re into conversion amounts or earnings, and different rules apply.

How the IRS Decides Which Dollars You’re Withdrawing

You don’t get to designate which money leaves the account. Ordering rules do it for you, and they apply across all your Roth IRAs combined. Money comes out in this sequence:³

Regular contributions first. Always tax-free and penalty-free.
Conversion and rollover amounts second, oldest conversion first. Within each conversion, the taxable portion is treated as coming out before the nontaxable portion.
Earnings last. These carry the strictest tax and penalty rules.

The practical effect is that you can withdraw a meaningful amount, contributions plus older conversions, before earnings are ever touched.¹

Age 59½ and the Five-Year Rule

The clean path to fully tax-free and penalty-free withdrawals, contributions and earnings alike, is reaching age 59½ after your first Roth IRA has been open for at least five tax years. Meet both conditions and everything comes out free of federal income tax and the 10% penalty, with no need to justify the spending.⁴

The five-year clock starts on January 1 of the tax year for which you made your first Roth IRA contribution, not the deposit date. If you opened your first Roth in March 2022 and designated it for 2021, your five-year period began January 1, 2021, and ended December 31, 2025. Once satisfied for your first Roth IRA, it’s satisfied for all of them; opening a new account later doesn’t restart it.¹

If you’re over 59½ but haven’t hit the five-year mark yet, contributions still come out tax-free and the 10% penalty on earnings is gone, but the earnings portion is subject to ordinary income tax until the five years are up.¹ And Roth IRAs have no required minimum distributions during the original owner’s lifetime, so you can leave the balance alone indefinitely.⁵

Conversions Have Their Own Five-Year Clock

If you converted money from a traditional IRA or rolled over from a 401(k), each conversion gets its own five-year holding period, separate from the general five-year rule. Withdraw converted amounts before age 59½ and before that specific conversion’s five years have elapsed, and you may owe the 10% penalty on the taxable portion of the conversion.¹

Say you converted $50,000 in 2024 and paid income tax on the full amount. Pulling that $50,000 out in 2026, under age 59½, would trigger the 10% penalty because the conversion’s own clock hasn’t closed. Reach 59½, though, and converted amounts come out penalty-free no matter how recent the conversion.¹ People who convert every year need to track each year separately, though the ordering rules do help by draining the oldest conversion first.

Penalty Exceptions Before Age 59½

Several exceptions waive the 10% penalty on earnings even when you’re under 59½. These exceptions waive the penalty only. Unless the distribution also qualifies under the age-plus-five-year rule, income tax on the earnings portion may still apply. Most exceptions are claimed on Form 5329 with your tax return.⁶

First-Time Home Purchase

Up to $10,000 in earnings, over your lifetime, can come out penalty-free to buy, build, or rebuild a first home. The home can be for you, your spouse, a child, a grandchild, or a parent or grandparent of you or your spouse. The buyer cannot have owned a principal residence in the two years before the purchase, and the money must go toward acquisition costs within 120 days of the distribution. If the deal falls through, you can return the funds to the IRA within that same 120-day window.⁴

Education, Medical, and Health Insurance Costs

The penalty is waived for these expense categories:⁷

Qualified higher education expenses (tuition, fees, books, supplies, required equipment) at an eligible postsecondary institution for you, your spouse, your children, or your grandchildren.
Unreimbursed medical expenses above 7.5% of your adjusted gross income for the year. Only the amount over that threshold qualifies.
Health insurance premiums while unemployed, if you received unemployment compensation for at least 12 consecutive weeks.

Birth, Adoption, Emergency, and Domestic Abuse

Several life-event exceptions, many added or expanded by the SECURE 2.0 Act, allow penalty-free earnings withdrawals:⁷

Up to $5,000 following the birth or legal adoption of a child.⁸
One emergency personal expense distribution per year of up to $1,000 (or your vested balance minus $1,000, whichever is less). No further emergency distribution is allowed for three calendar years unless you repay the first.
Up to the lesser of $10,000 or 50% of the account balance for a victim of domestic abuse by a spouse or domestic partner. Available for distributions after December 31, 2023.

Federally Declared Disasters

If you live in an area hit by a federally declared major disaster, up to $22,000 can come out without the 10% penalty. You can spread the taxable portion evenly over three tax years and repay the withdrawal to a retirement account within three years of the distribution; a full repayment lets you amend prior returns to recover any tax already paid.⁹

Substantially Equal Periodic Payments

When none of the specific exceptions fit, a series of substantially equal periodic payments (a SEPP, or 72(t) plan) can bypass the 10% penalty. You commit to a fixed stream of distributions based on your life expectancy, calculated using one of three IRS-approved methods: required minimum distribution, fixed amortization, or fixed annuitization.¹⁰

Payments must continue until the later of five years from the first payment or the date you reach 59½. You can’t add money to the account or change the payment amount during that period (outside normal investment fluctuations under the RMD method). Modify or stop payments early and the IRS imposes a recapture tax: the 10% penalty you originally avoided applies retroactively to all prior distributions, plus interest.¹⁰

Disability and Death

The 10% penalty is waived for distributions taken because of total and permanent disability. The IRS defines that as being unable to perform any substantial gainful activity due to a physical or mental condition a physician certifies is expected to result in death or last indefinitely.⁷ If the five-year rule is also met, the distribution is fully qualified and earnings come out tax-free as well.

Distributions paid to a beneficiary or to the estate of a deceased Roth owner are also exempt from the 10% penalty.⁸ If the original owner had satisfied the five-year rule before death, beneficiaries generally receive contributions and earnings free of income tax. If not, beneficiaries still avoid the penalty but may owe income tax on the earnings portion until the five-year period would have closed.

Pulling Out an Excess Contribution

A different scenario, and one that trips up higher earners: contributing more than allowed. For 2026, the Roth IRA contribution limit is $7,500, or $8,600 if you’re 50 or older (a $1,100 catch-up).¹¹ Contribute more than that, or contribute at all when your income exceeds the Roth eligibility thresholds, and the excess is hit with a 6% excise tax for every year it remains in the account.¹²

To avoid that 6% tax, withdraw the excess amount and any earnings it generated by your tax filing deadline, including extensions. If you filed on time without removing the excess, you still have a six-month window after the original due date (extensions not counted) to withdraw it and file an amended return.⁶ Earnings withdrawn alongside the excess are taxable as income for the year the contribution was made, and if you’re under 59½ those earnings may also face the 10% early withdrawal penalty.

1
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 590-B (2025), Distributions from Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs)
2
Internal Revenue Service. About Form 5498, IRA Contribution Information (Info Copy Only)
3
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 U.S. Code 408A – Roth IRAs
4
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 U.S. Code 72 – Annuities; Certain Proceeds of Endowment and Life Insurance Contracts
5
Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Topics – Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs)
6
Internal Revenue Service. Instructions for Form 5329 (2025)
7
Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Topics – Exceptions to Tax on Early Distributions
8
Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 557, Additional Tax on Early Distributions from Traditional and Roth IRAs
9
Internal Revenue Service. Access Retirement Funds in a Disaster
10
Internal Revenue Service. Substantially Equal Periodic Payments
11
Internal Revenue Service. 401(k) Limit Increases to $24,500 for 2026, IRA Limit Increases to $7,500
12
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 U.S. Code 4973 – Tax on Excess Contributions to Certain Tax-Favored Accounts and Annuities