When Can You Start Withdrawing From a Roth IRA?

You can withdraw money you contributed to a Roth IRA at any time, at any age, with no taxes and no penalty. Withdrawing the investment earnings is where the rules kick in: to pull earnings out completely tax-free, you generally need to be at least 59½ and to have held a Roth IRA for at least five years. Take earnings out before meeting both, and you’ll typically owe income tax on that growth plus a 10% early withdrawal penalty, unless one of several exceptions applies.

Contributions Come Out First, and They Come Out Free

Roth IRA contributions are made with money you’ve already paid income tax on, so the IRS lets you take those dollars back whenever you want. Age doesn’t matter. How long the account has been open doesn’t matter either, at least not for contributions.

Every dollar leaving a Roth IRA is treated as coming out in a fixed order:

Contributions first. Every withdrawal counts as a return of your original contributions until you’ve taken back every cent you put in.
Conversions second. Once contributions are exhausted, withdrawals come from amounts you converted from a traditional IRA or other retirement plan, earliest conversions first.
Earnings last. Only after contributions and conversions are gone does the IRS treat withdrawals as coming from investment growth.

That ordering is what makes a Roth so flexible. If you’ve contributed $40,000 over the years and the account has grown to $55,000, you can pull up to $40,000 without triggering a dime of tax or penalty. Tax consequences only appear once you dip into the $15,000 of earnings, and even then, only if the distribution isn’t “qualified.”

Qualified Distributions: Age 59½ and the Five-Year Rule

A qualified distribution is completely tax-free and penalty-free, earnings included. Getting there means satisfying two conditions at the same time.

Age 59½

Federal law uses 59½ as the retirement-readiness line for nearly every tax-advantaged account. Once you cross that age, the 10% early withdrawal penalty stops applying to any distribution from your Roth IRA, no matter which layer the money comes from.¹

Reaching 59½ alone isn’t enough to make earnings tax-free. If you haven’t also met the five-year rule, earnings withdrawn after 59½ are still subject to ordinary income tax. You just won’t owe the extra 10%.

The Five-Year Holding Period

The five-year clock starts on January 1 of the tax year for which you made your first-ever Roth IRA contribution. The actual deposit date doesn’t matter. If you opened your first Roth in March 2022 and designated the contribution for the 2021 tax year, the clock started January 1, 2021, and the requirement is met January 1, 2026.²

A few points about how the clock behaves:

One clock per person. Opening additional Roth IRAs doesn’t restart the period. Your earliest Roth contribution sets the clock for all of them.
Backdating counts. Because contributions for a given tax year can be made through the April filing deadline of the following year, a contribution made in early 2027 but designated for 2026 starts the clock on January 1, 2026.
It only matters for earnings. Contributions can always come out without tax or penalty regardless of the five-year rule.

Pull earnings before the five-year period is up, even after 59½, and those earnings are taxed as ordinary income. If you’re under 59½ and haven’t met the five-year rule, you’ll owe income tax plus the 10% penalty on the earnings, unless an exception applies.

Exceptions to the 10% Early Withdrawal Penalty

Several situations let you avoid the 10% penalty on earnings before 59½. These exceptions only waive the penalty. If the distribution isn’t fully qualified, the earnings portion is still subject to ordinary income tax. The recognized IRA exceptions include:

First-time home purchase, up to a $10,000 lifetime cap on earnings withdrawn to buy, build, or rebuild a first home. The limit applies per person, so spouses can each use $10,000 from their own accounts.³
Disability, when you’re unable to perform any substantial gainful activity due to a physical or mental condition expected to result in death or to last indefinitely. Medical documentation is required.⁴
Death. Distributions to your beneficiaries or estate after your death are exempt from the penalty.¹
Unreimbursed medical expenses exceeding 7.5% of your adjusted gross income for the year. You can withdraw up to the amount over that threshold penalty-free.¹
Higher education expenses. Tuition, fees, books, and required supplies at an eligible post-secondary institution for you, your spouse, children, or grandchildren qualify.³
Birth or adoption. Up to $5,000 per event, within one year of the child’s birth or the adoption being finalized.³
Terminal illness, where a physician certifies the condition is reasonably expected to result in death within 84 months. Added by the SECURE 2.0 Act, applying to distributions taken after December 29, 2022.
Health insurance premiums while unemployed, once you’ve received unemployment compensation for at least 12 consecutive weeks.
IRS levy on the retirement account.

SECURE 2.0 added a few newer categories as well. Emergency personal expense distributions of up to $1,000 per year are allowed without penalty, though you generally can’t take another within three years unless you repay the first or make equivalent new contributions. Domestic abuse victims can withdraw the lesser of $10,000 (adjusted for inflation) or 50% of their account balance penalty-free, with three years to repay. Federally declared disaster distributions also qualify.

Substantially Equal Periodic Payments

One more exception works differently. Under Section 72(t), you can set up a schedule of substantially equal periodic payments based on your life expectancy and start taking them at any age without the 10% penalty. The IRS allows three calculation methods: required minimum distribution, fixed amortization, or fixed annuitization.⁵

The catch is rigidity. Once the payments start, you can’t change the amount or stop them until the later of five years or reaching 59½. Modify the schedule before that point, even accidentally by taking an extra withdrawal, and the IRS retroactively applies the 10% penalty to every distribution you received under the plan, plus interest.⁵

A Separate Five-Year Clock for Each Conversion

Moving money from a traditional IRA into a Roth through a conversion means paying income tax on the converted amount in the year of the conversion. That doesn’t mean you can immediately withdraw those converted dollars penalty-free. Each conversion starts its own five-year waiting period. Pull converted funds out before that clock runs out while under 59½, and you’ll owe the 10% penalty on the taxable portion of the conversion.²

The rule exists to close a loophole. Without it, someone under 59½ could convert traditional IRA funds, pay the income tax, and immediately withdraw the money to sidestep the early withdrawal penalty they would have owed on a direct traditional IRA distribution.

Details worth tracking:

Each conversion is tracked separately. A 2023 conversion has a different five-year deadline than a 2025 one. The ordering rules require earlier conversions to be withdrawn first.
The penalty applies only to the taxable portion. If your traditional IRA held after-tax (nondeductible) contributions, only the portion included in gross income at conversion is subject to the 10% penalty inside the five-year window.²
Reaching 59½ overrides the conversion clock, because the 10% penalty no longer applies to you.

This conversion clock is separate from the general five-year rule that decides whether earnings come out tax-free. If you’ve done conversions, you’re tracking both.

Inherited Roth IRAs

If you inherit a Roth IRA, the withdrawal picture changes based on your relationship to the original owner and when they died. The original owner’s five-year clock carries over. You don’t start a new one. How quickly the account must be emptied depends on your beneficiary category.

For most non-spouse beneficiaries who inherited a Roth IRA from someone who died in 2020 or later, the SECURE Act requires the entire account to be emptied by the end of the 10th year after the year of the owner’s death.⁶ There’s no required annual withdrawal during those ten years. You could take everything in year ten. The account just needs to be fully distributed by the deadline.

Certain “eligible designated beneficiaries” get more flexibility. This group includes surviving spouses, minor children of the account owner, beneficiaries who are disabled or chronically ill, and beneficiaries not more than 10 years younger than the deceased owner. A surviving spouse can roll the inherited Roth into their own Roth IRA and treat it as if it were always theirs, which is often the most advantageous route.

One piece of good news across all inherited Roth IRAs: if the original owner held the account for at least five years, beneficiary withdrawals of earnings are typically income-tax-free. And the 10% early withdrawal penalty doesn’t apply to inherited accounts, regardless of the beneficiary’s age.¹

You’re Never Forced to Withdraw During Your Lifetime

Unlike traditional IRAs and most other retirement accounts, a Roth IRA carries no required minimum distributions for the original owner. At any age.⁷

That makes the Roth IRA especially useful for people who don’t need the money in retirement and want the balance to keep growing tax-free. You can leave it untouched for decades and pass it to heirs with earnings still shielded from income tax, assuming the five-year rule was met. Beneficiaries will eventually face the distribution rules described above, but nothing forces you to draw the account down while you’re alive.

1
Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Topics – Exceptions to Tax on Early 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
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 72 – Annuities; Certain Proceeds of Endowment and Life Insurance Contracts
5
Internal Revenue Service. Substantially Equal Periodic Payments
6
Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Topics – Beneficiary
7
Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Plan and IRA Required Minimum Distributions FAQs