The rules for charitable giving changed for tax year 2026. Three of the decisions people ask about most, run on your own numbers: whether to bunch several years of giving into one, whether to give from an IRA instead of writing a check, and whether to give appreciated stock instead of cash.
New for 2026: itemized charitable gifts only count above one half of one percent of your income. Giving the same amount every year pays that toll every year. Concentrating several years of giving into one pays it once.
From age 70 and a half you can send money straight from a traditional IRA to a charity. It never lands in your income at all, which is different from taking the money out and deducting the gift. The 2026 limit is $111,000 per person.
If you have held a stock more than a year and it has gone up, giving the shares directly can beat selling them first. You skip the capital gains tax and can still deduct the full market value, though a lower ceiling applies to gifts of property.
Every calculator makes assumptions. Most do not tell you what they are. Here are ours, so you can judge whether the answer applies to you.
Where it errs, it errs toward understating the benefit of giving from an IRA, because keeping income lower also helps with Medicare premiums, the taxable share of Social Security, and other thresholds tied to income that are not modeled here. For the bunching and stock comparisons the figures should be close, though a large gift can push you between brackets in ways a simpler estimate would miss. This tool computes your actual tax twice and takes the difference, rather than multiplying a deduction by a tax rate, which is why its answers may be smaller than the numbers other calculators show.
The 2026 brackets, standard deduction, and capital gains thresholds come from IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32. The half percent floor, the deduction for people who do not itemize, the cap on the value of itemized deductions, and the permanent 60 percent ceiling on cash gifts come from Public Law 119-21. The 2026 IRA charitable distribution limit of $111,000 comes from IRS Notice 2025-67.
NYC Honor Foundation is a charity, not a tax or investment advisory firm. This tool produces an estimate to help you ask better questions. Tax outcomes depend on facts this page never sees. Talk to your own tax professional before acting on any of it. Nothing here is a promise of a particular result.
The same financial curriculum behind this calculator is taught to every NYC Honor athlete at no cost to their families, alongside a season of national-level basketball. If it was useful, it was free because someone funded it.