If you are 73 or older, the IRS forces you to pull money out of your traditional IRA every year.
That withdrawal is called an RMD, and it lands on your tax return as ordinary income whether you need the cash or not.
There is a workaround buried in the tax code that lets you send that money straight to charity instead.
It is called a qualified charitable distribution, or QCD, and it keeps the withdrawal off your taxable income entirely.
Once you hit 70½, you can direct up to $108,000 per year (2025 limit, indexed annually) from your IRA directly to a qualified charity.
The money moves trustee-to-trustee and never touches your checking account.
The catch that trips people up: if the check is made out to you first, even if you hand it to the charity the same day, it does not count.
The distribution has to go straight from the IRA to the organization.
Why this beats a normal charitable deduction for many retirees is the standard deduction.
A single filer 65 and older gets roughly $16,550 in 2025.
A married couple both 65-plus gets about $33,100.
If your giving does not push you past that line, itemizing gets you nothing extra.
The money is excluded from income before you ever reach the deduction math, so even non-itemizers come out ahead.
It can also help with two costs that quietly eat retiree budgets: Medicare premiums and Social Security taxes.
Both are tied to your adjusted gross income.
Lower AGI can mean a smaller IRMAA surcharge on Part B and Part D, and less of your Social Security benefit getting taxed.
A QCD can satisfy your required minimum distribution for the year.
So if you were going to write charity checks anyway, you can route the RMD through the QCD and wipe out the tax hit on money you were never going to spend.
And if you are 70½ but not yet 73, you can still make QCDs even though you have no RMD yet.
That matters for anyone trying to trim taxable income in the years before required withdrawals begin.
The paperwork is smaller than you would expect.
Your IRA custodian reports the distribution on Form 1099-R.
You or your tax preparer report the excluded amount on your return, and you keep a receipt from the charity.
QCDs apply only to IRAs, not 401(k)s or 403(b)s while you are still working.
Donor-advised funds and private foundations do not qualify as recipients.
And the $108,000 cap is per person, so a married couple with two IRAs could each use their own limit.
Distributions must be made by December 31 — there is no grace period like the April deadline for IRA contributions.
If you want it to count for this tax year, the transfer has to clear before the calendar flips.
A short opinion: this is one of the few tax breaks that rewards people for being generous rather than for being clever, and it is drastically underused.
Final Thoughts
If you are charitably inclined and over 70½, it is worth a 20-minute call to your IRA custodian before December.