Give From the IRA After 70½: the QCD
If you are at least 70½, the single most efficient charitable vehicle available to you is not a deduction at all. A qualified charitable distribution under IRC §408(d)(8), “Distributions for charitable purposes” moves money directly from your IRA to a public charity and excludes it from gross income — up to $111,000 per person in 2026, indexed.
Exclusion beats deduction, and the gap widened in 2026. Money that never enters your AGI never triggers anything keyed to AGI: it does not face the new 0.5% floor, it does not consume your 60% or 30% ceiling, it does not push you toward Medicare IRMAA brackets (section “IRMAA: The Stealth Tax with Cliffs”), it does not increase the taxable portion of Social Security (section “The Social Security Tax Torpedo”), and it works whether or not you itemize. A retiree taking the standard deduction gets zero benefit from writing a check and full benefit from a QCD of the same amount.
It also satisfies your required minimum distribution. For a retiree whose RMD exceeds their spending needs, a QCD converts an unwanted taxable event into a gift at no cash cost beyond the gift itself — which makes it the default answer for charitable clients over 73 and often the reason to give from the IRA rather than the brokerage account.
The constraints are narrow and unforgiving:
- The age is 70½, not 73 — a real date, not the calendar year you turn 70.
- The transfer must go directly from custodian to charity. Take receipt of the money first and it is an ordinary taxable distribution followed by an ordinary deduction — which is the outcome you were avoiding.
- The recipient must be a public charity. DAFs, private foundations, and supporting organizations are excluded.
- It comes from an IRA, not a 401(k). Roll to an IRA first if that is where the money sits.
- You get no charitable deduction for it — that is the point; you already got a better benefit by never recognizing the income.
SECURE 2.0 added a once-in-a-lifetime election to direct up to $55,000 of your QCD limit in a single year to a split-interest vehicle — a charitable gift annuity, charitable remainder annuity trust, or charitable remainder unitrust — which lets a retiree convert IRA assets into a lifetime income stream with a charitable remainder. The requirements are technical and the election cannot be repeated; the broader family of charitable trusts lives in chapter “Estate planning”.