If you take a Roth 401k distribution, contributions and earnings are pro rated.

But if then decide to do an indirect rollover of a portion of the distribution, the earnings are deemed the first dollars rolled over. This means you could roll over the earnings to your Roth IRA and keep the contributions tax and penalty free if you wanted to.

For the portion rolled to your Roth IRA, you must keep track of how this is counted with respect to your Roth IRA. If the earnings were not qualified when you rolled them over they are treated as Roth IRA earnings and that means that they are taxable until you have held your Roth IRA 5 years and reach 59.5. If you rolled your Roth 401k contributions over to your Roth IRA, these dollars are treated as regular Roth IRA contributions, ie they could be distributed tax and penalty free anytime and since these are now Roth IRA assets, the contributions come out before your earnings under the Roth IRA ordering rules.

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