Taxes

By the Retiree Report Editorial Team · Updated 2026-06-23 · 7 min read

This article is general information, not financial, tax, or legal advice. Consult a licensed professional before acting on it.

Qualified charitable distributions in 2026: skip the RMD tax up to $111,000

If you’re 70½ or older and you give to charity, there’s a way to do it that quietly erases the income tax on money leaving your IRA. It’s called a qualified charitable distribution, or QCD, and for 2026 you can move up to $111,000 from your traditional IRA straight to a charity without that money ever counting as income. Done right, it can also satisfy your required minimum distribution. Best of all, it works whether or not you itemize.

What a QCD actually does

A QCD is a direct transfer. Your IRA custodian writes the check (or sends the funds) to a qualifying charity, and the dollars never touch your bank account.

That’s the whole trick. According to the IRS, a qualified charitable distribution is “an otherwise taxable distribution” that you instead route to charity once you’ve reached age 70½—and because it’s excluded from your income rather than claimed as a deduction, you get the benefit even if you take the standard deduction.

Why does that matter so much? Because a normal IRA withdrawal lands in your adjusted gross income, and AGI is the number that drives almost everything else on your return. A higher AGI can push more of your Social Security into the taxable column, nudge you past the IRMAA income thresholds that raise your Medicare Part B and Part D premiums, and shrink other tax breaks. A QCD sidesteps all of it. The gift simply disappears from your income.

There’s one more piece that makes this popular with retirees. A QCD can count toward your required minimum distribution—the amount the government forces you to pull from a traditional IRA each year. So instead of withdrawing the cash, paying tax on it, and then writing a separate check to your church or food bank, you do it in a single tax-free move.

How much can you give in 2026?

The ceiling climbed this year. AARP reports the QCD limit is rising from $108,000 in 2025 to $111,000 in 2026, an inflation adjustment the IRS set in Notice 2025-67. That cap is per person, so a married couple who each own an IRA can give up to $222,000 combined—but each spouse has to give from their own account. You can’t double up out of one IRA.

A timing detail trips people up, so read this twice. You’re allowed to start making QCDs at 70½, but your RMDs don’t begin until age 73 under the SECURE 2.0 Act. AARP puts it plainly: qualified charitable donations “count toward the required minimum distributions you must take from a traditional IRA starting at age 73.” Between 70½ and 73, a QCD is still tax-free and still strips the gift out of your income—it just isn’t satisfying an RMD yet, because you don’t have one.

One newer option is worth a mention. SECURE 2.0 lets you make a one-time QCD to certain “split-interest” gifts—a charitable gift annuity or charitable remainder trust—and that one-time limit is $55,000 for 2026 (up from $54,000). It’s a narrow tool, it counts inside your $111,000 cap rather than on top of it, and it’s worth a conversation with an advisor before you use it.

Is a QCD better than just deducting your gift?

For a lot of retirees in 2026, yes—and the math got more lopsided this year. Start with the basic comparison.

Here’s why the AGI line is the one that matters. A deduction only helps if you itemize, and most people over 65 take the standard deduction now. Even for those who do itemize, a new rule under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) introduced a 0.5%-of-AGI floor in 2026, meaning the first slice of your charitable giving no longer counts, and the top bracket’s benefit is capped at a 35% rate, Kiplinger reports. A QCD ignores all of that. It never enters your AGI in the first place, so there’s no floor to clear and no itemizing to bother with.

A quick example. Say your RMD for 2026 is $20,000 and you’d planned to give $8,000 to charity anyway. Take the RMD as cash and you owe tax on the full $20,000, then deduct the gift only if you itemize. Route $8,000 of that RMD as a QCD instead, and just $12,000 shows up as taxable income—the $8,000 vanishes. (One caveat: a brand-new $1,000 single / $2,000 married above-the-line deduction for non-itemizers also starts in 2026, but it’s capped low and applies only to cash gifts, so for larger givers the QCD still wins.)

How to set one up without tripping the rules

The mechanics are simple, but the IRS is strict about a few things, and one slip can turn your tax-free gift into a taxable withdrawal. Call your IRA custodian—Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard, your bank, whoever holds the account—and ask for a qualified charitable distribution. The money must go directly from the IRA to the charity. If the custodian sends the check to you and you forward it, you’ve broken the chain and the distribution becomes taxable. (Some custodians issue you a checkbook tied to the IRA; a check you write from that counts as direct, but confirm the timing so it clears within the calendar year.)

The charity has to be an eligible 501(c)(3) public charity. As IRS Publication 590-B spells out, donor-advised funds, private foundations, and supporting organizations don’t qualify for QCD treatment, so a gift to a community foundation’s donor-advised fund won’t work. Keep the written acknowledgment the charity sends you, just as you would for any deductible gift. At tax time, your custodian reports the total on Form 1099-R; it won’t flag the charitable portion for you, so you (or your preparer) note “QCD” next to line 4b on your Form 1040 and report the taxable amount as zero. Funds that come from a traditional IRA are eligible; an active SEP or SIMPLE IRA generally isn’t, and Roth IRAs rarely make sense here since qualified Roth withdrawals are already tax-free.

This isn’t tax advice for your specific situation—balances, other income, and state rules all change the picture, so run it by a CPA or financial advisor before you give. If you’re also weighing a Roth conversion this year, the two strategies interact, and the order you do them in can matter.

What to remember

A qualified charitable distribution is one of the cleanest tax moves available after 70½: up to $111,000 per person in 2026 goes from your traditional IRA to charity with zero income tax, it can satisfy your RMD once you turn 73, and it works even if you never itemize. The catch is in the plumbing—the money has to move directly from the custodian to a qualifying public charity, not through your checking account or a donor-advised fund. Given the new 2026 limits on charitable deductions, giving straight from your IRA is more attractive this year than it has been in a while, but confirm the details with your custodian and a tax professional before the December 31 deadline.