Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open.

Is there legal reason for restricting someone under 59-1/2 from an in-service rollover from a 401K to an IRA?
I don't think there's a rule -- (I can't comment) but Brick cited IRS rules...but IMO Brick missed one thing -- @ashur668 is not looking for a distribution, but is looking for a rollover. My best guess:  that this part of the ruleset is not well defined, and your (and my) employer have chosen to interpret any withdrawl as a "distribution", even if better characterized a rollover. A few months ago, I went so far as to explore if I could use a loophole -- my company had just gone through a merger; I was hoping I could rollover some or maybe all of my 401k to my IRA (I remember now, it would have been everything before starting roth 401k contributions).  My company asserted this was not permitted, and further asserted that the rumors I had heard were mistaken that when we went through a company spin-off a few years before, that nobody under 59 1/2 was permitted to roll over. I did a quick search and found IRS topic 413  As far as I can tell, this topic is silent on the matter at hand. Topic 413 referred me to IRS Publication 575, where I started looking at the section on rollovers.  I read some of it then got bored. Note that we're one step removed -- we are reading IRS publications and interpretations of IRS rules.  I don't know that anybody here has read the actual tax law.  There may be something in there that prevents companies from rolling over before 59 1/2 that is not well codified in IRS publications.