diff --git a/src/transformers/models/convnext/modeling_tf_convnext.py b/src/transformers/models/convnext/modeling_tf_convnext.py
index 405aeff6e0bdd5..0be2d291923812 100644
--- a/src/transformers/models/convnext/modeling_tf_convnext.py
+++ b/src/transformers/models/convnext/modeling_tf_convnext.py
@@ -330,7 +330,8 @@ def call(
             hidden_states = tuple([tf.transpose(h, perm=(0, 3, 1, 2)) for h in encoder_outputs[1]])
 
         if not return_dict:
-            return (last_hidden_state, pooled_output) + encoder_outputs[1:]
+            hidden_states = hidden_states if output_hidden_states else ()
+            return (last_hidden_state, pooled_output) + hidden_states
 
         return TFBaseModelOutputWithPooling(
             last_hidden_state=last_hidden_state,