An IRA owner who is 70 and a half (70½) or older can have the account send money directly to a charity, and the Internal Revenue Service says that gift can satisfy all or part of the owner’s required minimum distribution for the year. The arrangement is called a qualified charitable distribution, or QCD. The gift is never counted as taxable income, which is the feature that sets it apart from taking the withdrawal first and donating the cash afterward. For anyone already giving to charity and facing a December 31 withdrawal deadline, the IRS rules decide how much of the required amount a gift can cover.
How a gift to charity becomes the withdrawal
The IRS describes a QCD as an otherwise taxable IRA distribution paid directly from the account to a qualified charity. The money has to travel from the IRA to the charity; a check cashed by the owner and then handed to a church or food bank does not qualify. The IRS answers the central question on its IRA distributions page in plain terms: a QCD can satisfy all or part of the amount of the required minimum distribution from the IRA.
Two different ages are in play, and they are easy to blur. A QCD opens at 70½, but the withdrawal requirement itself begins later. The IRS says required minimum distributions start with the year an account owner reaches age 73, and each later year’s amount must be out by December 31. An owner between 70½ and 72 can still make a QCD, but there is no required withdrawal yet for the gift to cover.
The people the headline rule helps most are therefore IRA owners who are 73 or older, still have a 2026 withdrawal to take, and already give to charity every year. For that group the choice is how to route the gift: as a QCD sent from the IRA before year-end, or as a withdrawal that arrives in the owner’s hands as taxable income. A gift sent by the IRA custodian satisfies the withdrawal obligation and leaves the donated dollars out of income entirely.
For an IRA owner weighing how much of a 2026 required withdrawal a charity gift can cover, The Retirement Tax & Withdrawal Planner is a paid 12-page guide whose four calculators include an RMD schedule for sizing that withdrawal.
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The $111,000 ceiling and the charities that do not count
The yearly cap on QCDs is indexed to inflation. In Notice 2025-67, the IRS said the aggregate amount of qualified charitable distributions that can be excluded from gross income rises from $108,000 to $111,000 for 2026. The same notice lifts the one-time election for gifts to a split-interest entity, such as a charitable remainder trust or gift annuity, from $54,000 to $55,000. The IRS states the cap per individual, not per account.
Not every charity is eligible. IRS Publication 590-B says a QCD cannot go to a donor-advised fund, a private foundation or a supporting organization, and the receiving charity must provide the written acknowledgment the IRS requires. Because the amount is excluded from income rather than counted and then deducted, the usual charitable deduction is not allowed on it. An owner who gives to a community foundation through a donor-advised fund should confirm with the custodian that the gift will not be disqualified.
Account type matters as well. The IRS says a QCD can come from an IRA other than an ongoing SEP or SIMPLE IRA, which rules out the accounts still receiving employer contributions. Traditional IRAs are the usual source, since their withdrawals are normally taxed. Money held in a workplace plan such as a 401(k) is outside the IRA language the IRS uses on its distributions page, so a rollover to an IRA comes first for anyone who wants to give from those savings.
Year-end timing and how the gift is reported
The December 31 date applies to the money leaving the IRA, not just to the owner’s intention to give. A custodian has to process the transfer, and a mailed check has to be drawn on the account and sent to the charity. Custodians set their own processing times and paperwork, so the final week of December leaves little room. A withdrawal that leaves the account in January belongs to the 2027 tax year and does not count toward the 2026 requirement.
Reporting is where the tax treatment shows up. The IRS says the distribution is reported on Form 1099-R, the statement the IRA custodian sends for any withdrawal. On Form 1040 the owner enters the total on the IRA distributions line, writes QCD next to it and, in the IRS’s words, enters zero as the taxable amount if the full distribution was a qualified charitable distribution. A partial gift leaves the remainder taxable.
Several IRAs add a wrinkle. The IRS says an owner must calculate the required distribution separately for each IRA but can withdraw the total from one or more of the accounts. A QCD from any one IRA therefore reduces the overall amount that still has to be withdrawn, so a single gift can cover the requirement for accounts held at different firms, as long as the total reaches the figure the IRS formula produces.
Lining up a charitable withdrawal before December 31
The free starting point is the IRS’s own page, Retirement plans FAQs regarding IRAs: distributions (withdrawals), last updated March 23, 2026, which sets out the QCD answer along with the Form 1040 instructions. The first job is arithmetic: the required amount for each traditional IRA, based on the December 31, 2025 balance, and the total across the accounts. That total is the number a charitable gift is measured against.
The second job is matching that total to the giving already planned. The IRS wording is “all or part,” so a gift smaller than the requirement covers its own share, and the rest of the required amount still has to be withdrawn by December 31 and is taxed as ordinary income. A gift can also be larger than the requirement, up to the $111,000 ceiling for 2026, though the IRS page cited above speaks only of satisfying the required amount, not of carrying any excess forward.
The third job is the paperwork. The check or transfer has to go from the IRA to the charity, the charity has to qualify under the Publication 590-B list, and the written acknowledgment has to be in hand when the return is prepared. A donor-advised fund, a private foundation or a supporting organization fails that test, and the distribution then becomes an ordinary taxable withdrawal for the year.
For sorting out a charitable gift against a required withdrawal, The Retirement Tax & Withdrawal Planner pairs an RMD schedule calculator with a guide to the order in which accounts are drawn down, which helps when several accounts are in play.
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This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by The Money Overview’s editorial team.
