Roth IRA Withdrawal Rules

You can withdraw money up to your remaining regular Roth IRA contributions at any age without federal income tax or the 10% early-distribution tax. Converted money and investment earnings follow different rules. Earnings are tax-free in a qualified distribution: the five-tax-year requirement plus age 59½, qualifying disability, death, or a qualifying first-home withdrawal. Start by identifying which kind of money is coming out.

Qualified vs. Non-Qualified Distributions

A qualified distribution is free of federal income tax and the 10% additional tax, including the earnings. It needs both of these:

1. Five tax years: the period starts January 1 of the first tax year for which you made a valid contribution to any Roth IRA of your own. A conversion can start it too. Opening an empty account does not.
2. A qualifying condition: you are at least 59½, meet the IRS disability definition, the payment is to a beneficiary or estate after your death, or it meets the first-home requirements, subject to the $10,000 lifetime limit.

Nonqualified does not mean fully taxable. If those tests are not both met, the ordering rules below determine which part, if any, is income. See IRS Publication 590-B, chapter 2.

How the IRS Ordering Rules Work

For a nonqualified withdrawal, you cannot choose to take earnings first. The IRS groups your own Roth IRAs together and uses the order below. Keep inherited accounts separate unless a qualifying surviving spouse treats one as their own. Earlier withdrawals reduce the contribution and conversion amounts still available.

1. First: remaining regular contributions. The annual contributions you have not already taken back — not your current account balance.
2. Next: conversions and rollover contributions, oldest first. Within each year, amounts taxable when converted come before nontaxable amounts. Each conversion year has a separate potential five-year additional-tax period.
3. Last: earnings. Investment growth is reached after the earlier layers are used up. For a nonqualified withdrawal, income tax and any 10% additional tax are separate calculations.

Can You Withdraw Roth IRA Contributions Without Penalty?

Yes. Ordinary withdrawals up to your remaining regular-contribution basis have no federal income tax, 10% additional tax, age requirement or five-year wait. Keep records: converted money is not a regular contribution, and special procedures apply to excess-contribution corrections.

Access does not restore contribution room. An ordinary withdrawal does not increase your annual contribution limit. Putting money back requires an eligible rollover, a specific statutory repayment provision, or a new contribution for which you qualify. Money left out also loses the opportunity for future growth inside the account.

A withdrawal is not an IRA loan. An IRA cannot lend to its owner, and pledging it as collateral has separate consequences. See Can You Borrow From a Roth IRA? for the distinction.

Early Withdrawal Penalties on Earnings

Earnings in a nonqualified distribution are included in federal income. If you are under 59½, the taxable earnings generally also face a 10% additional tax, often called the early-withdrawal penalty, unless an exception applies. At 59½ or older, an unfinished five-year earnings clock can still mean income tax, but not this age-based additional tax.

Exceptions to the 10% Penalty

IRA exceptions include qualifying first-home costs (subject to a $10,000 lifetime limit), eligible higher-education costs, unreimbursed medical expenses above 7.5% of adjusted gross income, and health-insurance premiums during qualifying unemployment. Death, qualifying disability, certain reservist distributions, an IRS levy and a qualifying series of substantially equal periodic payments can also qualify. Each has its own conditions; an expense’s name alone is not enough.

The IRS exception rules in Publication 590-B explain those limits. Our early-withdrawal guide provides related examples.

What Age Can You Withdraw From a Roth IRA?

There is no minimum withdrawal age for your remaining regular contributions. Reaching 59½ removes the early-distribution additional tax on earnings and conversion principal. It does not remove the five-tax-year requirement for tax-free earnings.

There are no required minimum distributions (RMDs) during the original Roth IRA owner’s lifetime. Beneficiaries have different deadlines; see Inherited Roth IRA Rules.

Withdrawals for Specific Purposes

Home purchase: The first-home exception has a $10,000 lifetime limit per person across IRAs, not a fresh limit for each account. It includes eligibility and spending-deadline rules. An otherwise eligible Roth earnings withdrawal also needs the five-tax-year requirement to be income-tax-free. Ordinary regular-contribution withdrawals do not use this exception. See Withdrawal for Home Purchase.

Education: Eligible higher-education expenses can remove the 10% additional tax, but they do not make nonqualified earnings tax-free. Also check financial-aid treatment below. See Withdrawal for Education.

How the 5-Year Rule Affects Withdrawals

Keep two different tests separate. The earnings clock starts with the first tax year for which a valid contribution was made to a Roth IRA of your own. Each conversion year has a separate potential conversion additional-tax clock.

Inheritance does not start the deceased owner’s earnings clock over. A beneficiary uses that owner’s holding period, generally separate from the beneficiary’s own Roth IRA history. Do not confuse that carried-over tax clock with the deadline for emptying an inherited account.

When an Action Is Treated as a Withdrawal

You can trigger a distribution without requesting an ordinary cash withdrawal. The amount affected depends on the rule:

• Prohibited transaction by the owner or beneficiary: borrowing from the IRA, selling property to it or using IRA property personally can disqualify the account. Under IRC §408(e)(2), the account generally stops being an IRA on the first day of that year, with its value then treated as distributed.
• Pledging assets for a loan: IRC §408(e)(4) treats the pledged portion as distributed, not automatically the whole balance.
• Buying a collectible: IRC §408(m) generally treats the purchase cost as distributed. The rule covers items such as art, antiques and alcoholic beverages; there are specific exceptions for eligible coins and bullion.

A deemed distribution is not automatically fully taxable. Roth qualification, ordering and additional-tax rules still matter. Losing account status is nevertheless serious. Get qualified tax or legal help before a self-directed transaction or attempted repair; do not assume a routine 60-day rollover fixes it. See the IRS IRA FAQs and Publication 590-B.

Newer Exceptions: What Applies to an IRA in 2026?

These provisions can remove the 10% additional tax; they do not automatically remove income tax on nonqualified earnings. They are not needed just to access your remaining regular Roth contributions. Keep the eligibility and reporting records even when self-certification is allowed.

Domestic abuse

For a qualifying distribution in 2026, the limit is the lesser of $10,500 or 50% of the account balance. The distribution must be within the one-year period beginning on the date of qualifying abuse by a spouse or domestic partner. Self-certification is permitted; a court finding is not required. See Notice 2024-55 for conditions and Notice 2025-67 for the 2026 amount.

Terminal illness

A physician must certify an illness or condition reasonably expected to result in death within 84 months. The distribution must be on or after the certification date. There is no separate dollar cap for this exception, but the IRS certification requirements still apply. This is distinct from the disability test.

Emergency personal expenses

One qualifying distribution per calendar year can be covered, up to the lesser of $1,000 or the account balance above $1,000. For example, a $1,500 balance permits at most $500 under this exception. The need must be an unforeseeable or immediate necessary personal or family emergency expense.

For the same account, another qualifying emergency distribution is generally barred during the next three calendar years unless the first is fully repaid or subsequent contributions cover the amount not repaid. Self-certification does not remove these limits. Notice 2024-55, Q&As A-4 through A-6, explains the calculation and repeat-distribution rule.

Qualified disaster recovery

The limit is $22,000 per person per qualified disaster, across eligible plans and IRAs. Your principal home must have been in the qualified disaster area during the incident period, and you must have suffered an economic loss. Not every emergency declaration qualifies.

The distribution window begins with the incident period and ends before the date 180 days after the latest of the incident period’s first day, the disaster declaration date, or December 29, 2022. Confirm the disaster and its dates in Publication 590-B, chapter 3, before relying on the exception.

Birth or adoption

Up to $5,000 per parent per child can qualify during the one-year period beginning with the birth or finalized adoption. For adoption, the adoptee must be under 18 or unable to support themselves because of a physical or mental condition, and cannot be the child of the taxpayer’s spouse. See Publication 590-B.

Repayment is a separate step: qualifying domestic-abuse, terminal-illness, emergency, disaster and current birth/adoption distributions generally have a three-year repayment provision. Eligibility, receiving-account rules and tax-return adjustments matter. An ordinary withdrawal does not gain this treatment just because you later repay it.

Long-term-care premiums: not an IRA exception

The SECURE 2.0 qualified long-term-care distribution provision applies to eligible workplace defined-contribution plans, not IRAs. IRS Notice 2026-33 expressly excludes IRAs and states that the provision applies to distributions after December 29, 2025. Paying these premiums does not, by itself, give a Roth IRA withdrawal this exception. A different IRA exception may apply on its own facts.

Tax-Free Does Not Mean Every Program Ignores It

A qualified Roth withdrawal and a return of remaining regular contributions are excluded from federal gross income. Taxable earnings in a nonqualified withdrawal are not. Programs that start with your tax return can therefore treat those withdrawals differently. Programs with their own income or asset rules need a separate check.

Adjusted gross income (AGI) is an income subtotal on your tax return, before the standard or itemized deduction. Modified AGI (MAGI) adds back particular excluded amounts. The add-backs are not identical for every program.

For Social Security taxation, the basic thresholds are $25,000 and $34,000 for a single filer, or $32,000 and $44,000 for married filing jointly. Up to 50% or 85% of benefits can be included in taxable income; those are not tax rates. Married-filing-separately rules can differ. Sources: IRS Publication 915, SSA’s Medicare premium rules, and HealthCare.gov’s income guide.

FAFSA: the account and the withdrawal are different

A Roth IRA balance is excluded from FAFSA assets. But a distribution can count in the income calculation, including the untaxed portion of an IRA distribution. Returning your contributions is not automatically invisible to FAFSA simply because no federal income tax is due. Qualifying rollovers are excluded from this untaxed-income measure.

For the 2026–27 FAFSA, income generally comes from 2024, while reportable assets are measured when the application is signed. Withdrawn money still held in checking or savings can be a reportable asset. Ask the financial-aid office about the applicable year and any special-circumstances review; a college’s separate institutional-aid form may use different rules. Sources: the 2026–27 Federal Student Aid Handbook and its rollover-verification guidance.

How to Report Roth IRA Withdrawals on Your Tax Return

Form 1099-R tells you what came out; it does not necessarily tell you what is taxable. Your custodian generally reports the distribution, but you or your tax preparer must apply the Roth rules using your complete account history. Use the forms and instructions for the year of the distribution.

Reading Form 1099-R Without Guessing the Tax

Q means the payer knows the distribution is qualified. T means a qualifying age, death or disability condition is known, but the payer does not know whether the five-year requirement is met. J reports an early Roth IRA distribution when Q or T does not apply; it does not mean the whole withdrawal is taxable. Special transactions, including certain corrective distributions, use different reporting rules and can have an amount in Box 2a. See the IRS Form 1099-R instructions.

Form 8606 Part III: Use Your Complete Roth History

For a nonqualified Roth IRA distribution, Form 8606 Part III generally calculates the taxable part, even when the withdrawal reaches only regular contributions and the result is zero. Follow its exclusions for rollovers, recharacterizations, certain returned contributions and other specified transactions. Do not file Part III merely to be “extra thorough” when the instructions exclude the distribution.

Keep regular contributions separate from conversion and rollover basis, including amounts taxable when converted. Earlier distributions reduce the basis remaining. Your current custodian may not know about an old account, an earlier conversion or withdrawals elsewhere. Gather Forms 5498, prior Forms 8606 and 1099-R, account statements, and the original Roth funding-year record across your own Roth IRAs.

Income Tax and the Additional Tax Are Separate

A withdrawal qualified by the holding period plus age 59½, death or disability is generally excluded from the Part III calculation, though the gross distribution is still reported on the return. Qualified first-home withdrawals have their own treatment within Part III. Use the applicable year’s Form 8606 instructions rather than assuming every qualified withdrawal follows the same filing steps.

For a nonqualified distribution, apply Roth ordering: remaining regular contributions first, conversions oldest first (taxable portion first within each conversion year), and earnings last. A conversion-principal withdrawal can produce no new income tax but still raise a five-year recapture question. Form 5329 may be needed for the additional tax or an exception. Do not rely on a blank Box 2a or expect the broker to calculate your combined Roth IRA tax result.

Recharacterization Is Not an Ordinary Withdrawal

A recharacterization treats a regular contribution as if you had made it to the other type of IRA from the start. For example, someone whose income turns out to be too high for a direct Roth contribution may be able to recharacterize it as a Traditional IRA contribution.

Have the custodian transfer the contribution plus its attributable net earnings or loss directly between the IRAs, generally by the return due date including extensions, and report it correctly. Do not simply withdraw the money yourself and call it a recharacterization. Whether the resulting Traditional contribution is deductible is a separate question.

The pro-rata rule is not a penalty for making a Roth contribution. It helps determine the taxable share of Traditional/SEP/SIMPLE IRA distributions and conversions when there is after-tax basis. It does not replace Roth withdrawal ordering.

Roth conversions made on or after January 1, 2018, cannot be recharacterized. A market decline or change of mind does not undo a valid conversion. Sources: the IRS recharacterization FAQs and Publication 590-A.

Flexible Access During Life; Different Rules for Heirs

Access to contributions gives a Roth IRA flexibility, but it does not make every withdrawal tax-free or replace a cash reserve. Investments can lose value, and taking money out reduces what remains invested for retirement.

After the owner dies, many individual non-spouse beneficiaries must empty an inherited Roth by December 31 of the tenth year after death, with no annual required distributions in years 1–9 under that rule. Spouses, eligible designated beneficiaries and beneficiaries that are not individuals can follow different rules. Earnings are not automatically tax-free at inheritance: the deceased owner’s five-tax-year requirement still matters. See Publication 590-B and Inherited Roth IRA Rules.

Roth IRAs in Divorce

A properly executed transfer incident to divorce under IRC §408(d)(6) can move an IRA interest to a spouse or former spouse without treating the transfer as a taxable distribution. The receiving spouse treats the transferred interest as their own IRA.

Use the qualifying divorce or separation instrument and the custodian’s transfer process. An IRA transfer does not use the workplace-plan QDRO tax exception, and withdrawing cash yourself to pay an ex-spouse is not the same transaction. Preserve contribution, conversion and holding-period records. See Publication 590-A, transfers incident to divorce.

Bankruptcy and Creditor Protection

Federal bankruptcy law protects qualifying retirement funds, subject to conditions and exceptions. For cases filed from April 1, 2025, through March 31, 2028, the inflation-adjusted cap on certain IRA exemptions is $1,711,975 per person in aggregate, not per account. It is not a universal ceiling on every retirement dollar.

11 U.S.C. §522(n) and its dollar-adjustment note exclude specified employer-plan rollover contributions and their earnings from that cap. Do not assume every IRA-to-IRA rollover or Roth conversion receives that exclusion, or that an IRA has become an ERISA-covered plan. State protection outside bankruptcy and inherited-account treatment are separate questions.

Before cashing out retirement money to pay creditors, ask a qualified attorney which protection actually applies. Exemptions, account tracing and potentially avoidable transfers depend on the facts; a general guide cannot promise protection.

Medicaid, SSI and SNAP: Check the Specific Program

These programs do not all use the same definition of income or assets. A federal tax-free withdrawal is not a benefits-eligibility guarantee. Before moving money, ask the administering agency how it treats the account, this particular payment, and cash left afterward.

• Medicaid: MAGI-based eligibility, used for many children, parents and adults, has no asset test and generally follows the tax-based income framework. Tax-free Roth amounts generally do not enter that income calculation; taxable earnings can. Age-, disability- and long-term-care-based pathways use different rules, including state-specific resource treatment. See Medicaid’s eligibility policy.
• SSI: An accessible IRA owned by the applicant can be a countable resource. Periodic retirement payments and an ordinary cash-out of an already-counted resource are not necessarily treated alike: converting a resource to cash is not new income just because it moved accounts. Availability, payment form and whose account it is matter. See SSA’s retirement-fund rules and resource-conversion rule.
• SNAP: Roth IRA balances are excluded resources under the federal rule. Regular retirement payments can count as income; a nonrecurring lump sum follows a different rule and can become a countable resource. State categorical-eligibility policies may change which resource test applies. See 7 CFR §273.8 and §273.9.

Corrections and updates

September 19, 2026 — broader withdrawal review: We corrected FAFSA asset and distribution treatment; qualified the Social Security, Medicare, ACA, Medicaid, SSI and SNAP explanations; and separated income tax from the 10% additional tax throughout the page. We updated the domestic-abuse amount, emergency and disaster conditions, and clarified that the long-term-care premium provision is not an IRA exception. Elena’s example now compares equal before-tax cash with explicit 2026 assumptions and recalculated taxes. We also corrected recharacterization, inherited-account, deemed-distribution and creditor-protection overstatements and aligned the FAQs. Correction record.

September 19, 2026: Earlier reporting guidance said Box 2a showed the taxable portion of a routine Roth IRA withdrawal and that the broker calculated tax using the ordering rules. We corrected the generally blank Box 2a treatment, explained the limits of distribution codes and the taxpayer’s recordkeeping responsibility, and clarified when Form 8606 Part III is used or excluded. This update concerns the reporting section, not a full review of every withdrawal topic on this page. Correction record.