If you have donors over 70½, some of them could give from their IRA this year and pay less tax than if they wrote you a check. Most of them won’t. Not because they don’t care, and usually not because they’ve never heard of a qualified charitable distribution (QCD). They won’t because nobody made it easy.
Most nonprofits treat QCDs as a sentence in the year-end appeal: “Did you know you can give from your IRA?” That’s a mention, not a plan. A QCD has more steps than a check, a hard deadline, and a strange habit of arriving without the donor’s name on it. If you want more of them this year, the work is less about awareness and more about removing friction for a small group of people who already love your organization.
(As always: I’m a fundraiser, not a tax advisor. Have your CPA review any tax language before it goes out.)
What a QCD is, in plain terms
A QCD lets an IRA owner who is 70½ or older send money directly from the IRA to a qualifying charity. The distribution isn’t counted as taxable income. For 2026, the limit is $111,000 per person, according to the Congressional Research Service, and each spouse can give from their own IRA. For donors old enough to take required minimum distributions, a QCD counts toward that requirement.
A few rules matter for your messaging:
- The money has to go straight from the IRA custodian to your organization. If the donor withdraws it and then writes you a check, it isn’t a QCD.
- Fidelity notes the deadline is December 31 with no extensions, and donor-advised funds, private foundations, and supporting organizations can’t receive QCDs.
- The donor doesn’t take a charitable deduction for a QCD. The benefit is that the money never shows up as income. The IRS says donors need a written acknowledgment from you before they file their return.
Why 2026 makes QCDs more worth talking about
The tax law passed in 2025 changed the math for charitable giving starting this year. We covered the details in what to tell your year-end donors about the new charitable deduction, but two pieces matter here.
First, itemizers can now deduct only the charitable gifts above 0.5% of their adjusted gross income, and top-bracket donors see their deduction’s value capped at 35%. A QCD isn’t an itemized deduction, so neither limit touches it.
Second, people who take the standard deduction can now deduct cash gifts up to $1,000 ($2,000 for married couples). That’s good news, but it means the QCD advantage is smaller for a donor giving $500 a year than it used to be. Where QCDs still stand out is for donors giving more than that, and for anyone who cares about keeping their adjusted gross income lower. A deduction lowers taxable income after AGI is calculated. A QCD keeps the money out of AGI in the first place, which can affect things like Medicare premiums and other income-based thresholds.
Here’s a simple hypothetical. Imagine a married couple, both 75, who take the standard deduction and give your organization $3,000 a year by check. Assume they’re in the 22% federal bracket. In 2026, they can deduct $2,000 of that under the new rule, which saves them about $440. If they give the same $3,000 as a QCD from the required distribution they’d have to take anyway, none of it counts as income, which saves about $660. That’s a $220 difference, plus a lower AGI. It won’t change why they give. It might change how.
Most eligible donors aren’t using it
FreeWill, which processes QCDs for nonprofits, surveyed more than 230 organizations for its latest QCD report. Three-quarters said fewer than 10% of their eligible older donors made a QCD. A third said more than half of their donor base was already past 70½. That’s vendor data, not a national study, so I wouldn’t treat the exact numbers as precise. But the pattern is worth taking seriously: lots of eligible donors, very few using the option.
Picture a historical society with 1,400 donors. If 40% are 70½ or older, that’s 560 people. If fewer than 10% give through QCDs, that’s 56 or fewer. You don’t need a planned giving officer to close that gap. You need a short list and a clear set of instructions.
Who to ask first
Start with the donors who already know how. Pull last year’s gift records and look for checks issued by IRA custodians like Fidelity, Schwab, or Vanguard. Those donors have done a QCD before. A friendly reminder in early November (“Many of our friends give through their IRA each year. If that’s part of your plan, here’s what you’ll need.”) is often all they need.
Next, look at donors you know are 70½ or older. If you don’t track age (FreeWill found 31% of nonprofits don’t), use reasonable proxies: donors who have given for 15 years or more, people who’ve mentioned retirement, donors who still give by check. You’ll include some people who aren’t eligible. That’s fine as long as the message reads as useful information, not an assumption about their age.
Leave out donors you know give through a donor-advised fund. They can’t use a QCD for that gift, and the DAF giving process deserves its own instructions.
Ask in November, not on December 30
A QCD isn’t a click. The donor has to contact their custodian, fill out a form or make a call, and wait for the custodian to cut a check or send a transfer. Fidelity specifically tells IRA owners to allow time for processing and mailing. A December 30 email about QCDs is mostly a reminder of what they missed.
I’d put QCD information in a November mailing to your older donors and in one or two emails before Thanksgiving. In early December, send a short reminder to the people who haven’t acted. After about mid-December, I’d stop promoting QCDs as new information and only answer questions.
Give donors everything the custodian will ask for
The single most useful thing you can do is make a one-page “Giving from your IRA” sheet (and a matching web page) that includes:
- Your exact legal name as it appears in IRS records
- Your EIN
- The mailing address where checks should go (not a P.O. box that only gets checked weekly in December, if you can help it)
- A contact name and phone number at your organization
- A line asking the donor to let you know when they’ve submitted the request
That last line matters more than it looks. Custodian checks sometimes arrive with the IRA owner’s name buried in a memo line, or with little detail at all. If the donor tells you it’s coming, you can match it, record it correctly, and thank the right person.
Here’s sample language for a reply device or email:
“If you’re 70½ or older, you can give directly from your IRA through a qualified charitable distribution. The gift doesn’t count as taxable income and may count toward your required minimum distribution. Ask your IRA administrator to send the gift to [Legal Name], EIN [number], [address]. Please let us know it’s on the way so we can thank you properly. Requests need to be completed by December 31, so we recommend contacting your IRA administrator by early December.”
Thank and receipt it differently
A QCD donor needs a written acknowledgment that shows the amount, the date, and that they received no goods or services in return. Don’t call it a tax-deductible gift, and don’t send a premium or event ticket in exchange. Note that it was a QCD. If your receipts are already doing extra work for you, as they should be (here’s why your gift receipt may be the most-read letter you send), add a QCD version to your templates now, before the checks start showing up.
Then flag these gifts in your database. A donor who gives through a QCD once is likely to do it again next year, and you’ll want that same list next October.
Where to start this week
Don’t build a planned giving program before December. Pull last year’s custodian checks, build your one-page IRA instructions, and write the QCD version of your thank-you letter. That’s maybe two hours of work, and it gives your most loyal donors an easier way to do something many of them already want to do.
If you’re still putting the rest of your year-end campaign together, Finish Strong: The 90-Day Year-End Fundraising Plan is a workbook that walks you through planning and running it from October through December on a 13-week calendar. The worksheets stack into a complete year-end plan, and there are AI prompts throughout to help you move faster.
