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 retirees over 73 and often the reason to give from the IRA instead of the brokerage account.

The constraints are narrow and unforgiving:

• The qualifying age is 70½, not the RMD starting age of 73 — measured from your exact birthday, not the calendar year.
• 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 must originate from an IRA, not an employer 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.
• Sequence it first. The first dollars leaving the IRA in a calendar year are applied to that year’s RMD, in the order they come out. Take the RMD in January and make the QCD in December and the QCD is still excluded from income, but it no longer offsets anything — you have already recognized the full RMD. The QCD must precede any other distribution from the account in that year for the two to interact, which makes January the month to plan it and December the month it is usually botched.

Use the window before the RMDs start. QCD eligibility opens at 70½ while RMDs do not begin until 73 — or 75 for those born in 1960 or later — so there is a two-to-five-year stretch in which you can give from the IRA with no distribution requirement forcing your hand. Giving in that window is strictly better than waiting, and not only because the exclusion is worth the same. Every dollar routed out early is a dollar removed from the balance on which every future RMD is computed, so a charitable retiree who gives $50,000 a year from 70½ to 73 arrives at their first RMD with a materially smaller account and a smaller mandatory distribution for the rest of their life. It works in the same direction as a Roth conversion (section “The Conversion Window”) and costs no tax at all. If you are charitable and past 70½, the question is not whether to use QCDs but why any of your giving is still coming from the brokerage account.

SECURE 2.0 added a once-in-a-lifetime election ( IRC §408(d)(8)(F)) to direct up to $55,000 of your QCD limit in a single year to a split-interest vehicle — a charitable gift annuity, or a charitable remainder annuity trust or unitrust under IRC §664, “Charitable remainder trusts” — 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”.