Free charitable deduction calculator built for the 2026 rules: the new $1,000 and $2,000 deduction for people who do not itemize, the 0.5% of AGI floor, the 35-cent cap for top brackets, and the New York State and New York City layer. Run three decisions on your own numbers: bunching several years of giving into one, giving from an IRA after 70½ instead of writing a check, and giving 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.
NYC Honor Foundation is a 501(c)(3) public charity. The curriculum behind this calculator is taught to every NYC Honor athlete at no cost to their families.
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.
NYC Honor Foundation is a 501(c)(3) public charity, and a qualifying charity for a gift made directly from an IRA.
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.
NYC Honor Foundation is a 501(c)(3) public charity. Giving shares rather than cash means a transfer between brokerages, so email us before you start and we will walk through it with you.
2026 is the first year of a rewritten set of charitable rules, and a lot of what is published still runs the old math. Four changes matter. If you take the standard deduction, you can now deduct a limited cash gift anyway. If you itemize, the first half percent of your income worth of giving no longer counts. Top-bracket donors get back less per dollar than their bracket suggests. And none of the federal changes tell a New Yorker what happens on the state return. The calculator above applies all four to your own numbers. Here is what each one actually says.
Starting with tax year 2026 you can deduct up to $1,000 of cash giving, or $2,000 on a joint return, while still taking the standard deduction. It is permanent, and it is not adjusted for inflation, so the number stays where it is. It covers cash only, given to a public charity. Gifts to a donor advised fund or a supporting organization do not qualify. The full rule, including what counts as cash, is in the charitable deduction without itemizing.
If you itemize, your charitable deduction now only counts to the extent it passes half a percent of your income. On $200,000 of income that is $1,000, so the first $1,000 you give is not deductible. Give exactly $1,000 and your federal charitable deduction for the year is zero.
The part most summaries leave out: that lost amount usually does not carry forward. It only carries if you also gave past one of the percentage-of-income ceilings in the same year, which most donors never come near. For most people the floor is money gone, not money postponed. The calculator shows you the exact amount the floor takes, which is the number that decides whether bunching several years of giving together is worth it.
From 2026, itemized deductions are cut by two thirty-sevenths of the amount your taxable income runs past the start of the 37 percent bracket, which for 2026 is $640,600 filing single and $768,700 filing jointly. The practical effect is that a donor in the top bracket gets at most 35 cents of federal benefit per deductible dollar. It applies to all itemized deductions, not only giving, and it comes last, after every other limit. Below that bracket it does not touch you at all.
This is the part a national calculator will not tell you. New York lets you itemize on your state return whether or not you itemized federally. So a New Yorker who takes the federal standard deduction can still get state value out of a gift, which is a real decision that federal-only math hides completely.
Two practical points. Your New York itemized total has to beat the New York standard deduction before it is worth electing: for 2026 that is $8,000 filing single and $16,050 filing jointly. And the federal $1,000 or $2,000 deduction for people who do not itemize gives you no New York benefit at all, because of where it sits on the federal return. It does not reduce the income figure New York starts from. The full New York picture, including the standard deduction you have to clear, is in the New York charitable deduction for 2026.
If you are 70½ or older, money sent straight from your IRA to a charity is left out of your income entirely. For 2026 the limit is $111,000. Because the money never enters your income, it steps around the half percent floor, the percentage-of-income ceilings and the top-bracket reduction all at once. In New York it works automatically, with no state election needed, because New York starts from the federal income figure. It has to move directly from the custodian to the charity, and it cannot go to a donor advised fund. The full rules are in the 2026 QCD limit, and the side-by-side against writing a check is the QCD calculator.
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 New York figure is deliberately cautious. Two things about New York are genuinely unsettled: whether the new federal half percent floor applies to the state's own charitable line, and whether the state ceiling is 50 or 60 percent of income. Rather than pick one reading and present it as fact, this page computes both and shows you the range, leading with the lower one. If your accountant reaches the higher figure, that is not a disagreement with this page. It is the same open question, answered by someone who can take responsibility for the answer.
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. The state and local tax cap of $40,400, its phase-down above $505,000 of income and its $10,000 floor come from Internal Revenue Code section 164(b)(7). The $6,000 deduction for people 65 and older, and the fact that it applies separately to each qualifying spouse, come from section 151(d)(5)(C).
The New York figures come from the state's own law rather than from a summary of it: the 2026 rate schedules from Tax Law section 601, the standard deduction from section 614 as published in the 2026 Form IT-2104 instructions, the right to itemize for New York while taking the federal standard deduction from section 615(a), the high income reductions from section 615(f) and (g), and the New York City tax and its 14 percent additional tax from sections 1304 and 1304-B.
The Internal Revenue Service has not yet published any guidance for tax year 2026 on charitable contributions. Publication 526 currently covers 2025 only. Where this page states a 2026 rule, it is citing the statute directly, because there is nothing else to cite.
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.
If you take the standard deduction, the new rule that lets you deduct up to $1,000 ($2,000 on a joint return) anyway is explained in plain English in the charitable deduction without itemizing, 2026. If you are 70½ or older with an IRA, the 2026 QCD limit and rules explain why giving straight from the IRA usually beats writing a check. If your giving hovers near the standard-deduction line, bunching in 2026 is the timing decision to read about. If you file in New York, the New York charitable deduction explains why the state can give you a deduction in a year the IRS does not. The financial curriculum this calculator grew out of is at financial literacy.
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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.