Charitable Donations From an IRA: QCD Rules, RMDs, and Reporting

A qualified charitable distribution from an IRA lets you send money straight from your IRA to a public charity and keep it out of your taxable income, up to $111,000 in 2026.¹ You have to be at least 70½ on the day the distribution is processed, and the money has to move directly from your IRA custodian to the charity without passing through your hands.² If you’re 73 or older and subject to required minimum distributions, the transferred amount counts toward your RMD. The exclusion works whether you itemize or take the standard deduction, which is why this strategy usually beats writing a personal check to the same charity.

Who Qualifies

The age test is 70½, measured to the day.² Turn 70 on June 15 and you reach 70½ on December 15; a check your custodian cuts on December 14 does not qualify. Note that 70½ is unrelated to when RMDs begin (age 73), so you can start making QCDs about two and a half years before you owe any required distribution.³

The account has to be an IRA. Traditional IRAs and rollover IRAs are the usual sources, since distributions from them would otherwise be fully taxable. Inherited IRAs work too, as long as you as the beneficiary are at least 70½.⁴ SEP and SIMPLE IRAs qualify only if they are inactive, meaning no employer contribution has been made for the tax year in question. Roth IRAs are technically eligible but rarely make sense, because Roth distributions are already tax-free in most cases.

Employer plans do not qualify. Money in a 401(k), 403(b), or 457(b) cannot be sent directly to charity as a QCD. If those funds are what you want to give, you would need to roll them into a traditional IRA first and then make the QCD from the IRA.

How Much You Can Send

The 2026 cap is $111,000 per person, indexed for inflation and rounded to the nearest $1,000.¹ Married couples get $111,000 each from their own IRAs, for a combined ceiling of $222,000.

The cap covers all your QCDs across all your IRAs for the year. Send $80,000 from one IRA and $40,000 from another and you’ve made $120,000 in QCDs. The first $111,000 is excluded from income; the excess $9,000 is a taxable distribution.

A QCD only pulls from pre-tax dollars. If your traditional IRA contains after-tax money from nondeductible contributions, the QCD is treated as coming out of the pre-tax portion first, leaving your basis intact. That is more favorable than a normal IRA distribution, which forces a pro-rata split between taxable and nontaxable amounts.

Which Charities Can Receive One

The recipient has to be a public charity eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions under Section 170(b)(1)(A) of the tax code.⁵ Churches, hospitals, universities, and established 501(c)(3) public charities generally qualify. Verify the specific organization through the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search, using the Publication 78 database.⁶ If the charity doesn’t show up there, don’t assume the QCD will hold up.

Three types of otherwise-worthy vehicles are specifically shut out of QCD treatment: donor-advised funds, private non-operating foundations, and Section 509(a)(3) supporting organizations. Contributions to those may still be deductible in the ordinary charitable-giving sense, but they will not deliver the QCD income exclusion.

How to Make the Transfer

The mechanics are what determine whether the IRS treats the payment as a QCD or as a taxable distribution followed by a personal gift. The money must go directly from your IRA custodian to the charity. If the custodian sends the funds to you and you write the check, you’ve taken a taxable distribution, and the exclusion is gone.

Contact your IRA custodian and request a qualified charitable distribution. Most custodians have a specific QCD form. You’ll supply the charity’s legal name, mailing address, tax identification number, and the amount. The custodian may mail a check payable to the charity, wire the funds, or mail the check to you for you to forward. That last option is fine as long as the check is made payable to the charity, not to you.

Year-End Timing

To count for a tax year, the QCD has to be completed by December 31 of that year. There are no extensions. Start well before the deadline, ideally by early November, because custodian processing and mail delivery can push a December request into January. If a check is involved, the charity generally needs to receive (and often deposit) it before year-end.

How the Tax Savings Actually Work

The donated amount never enters your adjusted gross income. Compare that with taking a taxable IRA withdrawal, depositing the cash, and writing a check to the same charity. In the second version, the distribution raises your AGI, and you only recover the tax through an itemized charitable deduction, which only helps if your itemized total exceeds the standard deduction. Most retirees take the standard deduction, so a traditional cash gift funded from an IRA provides no offset. A QCD skips that math entirely by keeping the money out of income in the first place.

Satisfying Required Minimum Distributions

Once you’re 73, you have to take an RMD from your traditional IRA each year, and that withdrawal is normally taxable.³ A QCD counts dollar-for-dollar toward the RMD.² If your RMD is $20,000 and you make $20,000 in QCDs, the RMD is fully satisfied and none of it appears as taxable income. You can also split: a $12,000 QCD plus an $8,000 taxable withdrawal covers the same $20,000 RMD, with only the $8,000 hitting income.

The First-Dollars-Out Rule

The first dollars distributed from your IRA in a given year are treated as satisfying that year’s RMD. If you take a regular taxable withdrawal in February and then try a QCD in November, the February withdrawal has already absorbed part of your RMD. The QCD is still excludable from income, but the earlier withdrawal was unnecessary and now sits in your taxable income for no reason. Do the QCD first.

Downstream Effects on Social Security and Medicare

Keeping the QCD amount out of AGI can ripple through other calculations. A lower AGI can reduce the share of Social Security benefits that gets taxed, since that formula is driven by combined income. It can also help you stay under the Medicare IRMAA thresholds that raise Part B and Part D premiums when modified AGI crosses certain lines. For a taxpayer sitting just above one of those cliffs, a well-timed QCD can save more than the income tax on the distribution alone.

The Deductible Contribution Offset

This is the rule that catches people. Since the SECURE Act removed the age cap on traditional IRA contributions, retirees with earned income can keep contributing past 70½. But any deductible IRA contribution you make after age 70½ reduces the QCD amount you can exclude in the same or a future year, until the offset is fully used up.

Suppose you contribute $7,000 to a deductible traditional IRA at 71 and then try to make a $30,000 QCD at 72. Only $23,000 qualifies for the income exclusion; the remaining $7,000 is treated as a taxable distribution. If QCDs are central to your retirement tax planning, weigh the value of a current-year contribution deduction against the exclusion you’ll lose later.

Using a QCD to Fund a Charitable Gift Annuity

Under SECURE 2.0, you can make a one-time QCD to fund a charitable gift annuity. The 2026 limit for this election is $55,000, and it counts against your overall $111,000 QCD cap for the year.¹ A gift annuity pays you (or your spouse, or both jointly) a fixed income stream for life in exchange for the donation. Several conditions apply to the QCD version:

Payments must be at least 5% of the funded amount annually.
The only permissible income beneficiaries are the IRA owner, the spouse, or both.
The annuity must be non-assignable.
Payments have to begin within one year of funding; deferred annuities are out.
The election is once in a lifetime, though you can split the $55,000 across multiple annuities within that one year.

Spouses can combine their individual elections to fund a joint annuity of up to $110,000.

QCDs From Inherited IRAs

If you inherited a traditional IRA, you can make QCDs from it as long as you personally are at least 70½.⁴ The original owner’s age doesn’t matter. This is useful when required distributions from the inherited account, whether under the 10-year rule or a life-expectancy schedule, would otherwise push you into higher income. The $111,000 annual cap still applies across all your IRAs, own and inherited combined.

Reporting the QCD on Your Return

Your custodian reports the distribution on Form 1099-R, with Box 1 showing the gross amount.⁷ Beginning with the 2025 tax year, Code Y in Box 7 identifies the distribution as a QCD, paired with Code 4, 7, or K depending on the circumstances. Older 1099-Rs, or forms from custodians who haven’t adopted the new code, may just show Code 7. The exclusion is still yours to claim; the burden of showing it sits with you.

On Form 1040, put the full distribution from Box 1 on line 4a. On line 4b (the taxable amount), enter the total minus the QCD portion, and write “QCD” next to line 4b.² If the entire distribution was a QCD, line 4b is zero. That notation is how the IRS knows a portion of your IRA distribution was a qualified charitable transfer, so it isn’t optional.

For any QCD of $250 or more, get a written acknowledgment from the charity stating the amount and confirming you received no goods or services in return.⁸ Request it soon after the gift, because charities can be slow to issue letters, and keep it with your permanent tax records.

1
Internal Revenue Service. 2026 Amounts Relating to Retirement Plans and IRAs, as Adjusted for Changes in Cost-of-Living
2
Internal Revenue Service. Seniors Can Reduce Their Tax Burden by Donating to Charity Through Their IRA
3
Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Plan and IRA Required Minimum Distributions FAQs
4
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 590-B, Distributions From Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs)
5
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 170 – Charitable, Etc., Contributions and Gifts
6
Internal Revenue Service. Search for Tax Exempt Organizations
7
Internal Revenue Service. 2025 Instructions for Forms 1099-R and 5498
8
Internal Revenue Service. Charitable Organizations – Substantiation and Disclosure Requirements