The QCD Limit Hit $111K in 2026: The Retiree Tithing Tool You Need to Know About

Here's a question worth asking your parents, or yourself if you're the one turning 73 this year: when's the last time you actually looked at how the check to your church gets written?

Not whether you give. Whether you give in a way that still makes sense now that the rules changed under you.

Most Christian retirees give the way they've always given. A qualified charitable distribution, or QCD, isn't a new idea. It's been in the tax code since 2006, and permanent since 2015. But the numbers around it moved again in 2026, and one of those moves now works against the old habit without most people noticing. If you're 70½ or older and you're still writing a check from your checking account instead of your IRA, you may be leaving real money on the table. Not more generosity. The same generosity, priced better.

The habit that stopped making sense

For decades, "give to the church" meant one thing: write a check, drop it in the plate, maybe get a deduction if you itemized. Simple. Habitual. Nobody thinks twice about it, which is exactly the problem: a habit formed in one tax environment doesn't automatically know when the environment changes.

Two things changed. First, required minimum distributions. Once you're pulling money out of a traditional IRA whether you want to or not, every dollar of that withdrawal is taxable income. Unless it goes straight to a charity as a QCD, then it's excluded from your income entirely. Not deducted. Excluded. It never counts as income in the first place.

Second, and more recent: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act added a new wrinkle to itemized charitable deductions starting January 1, 2026. If you itemize, your charitable giving now has to clear a floor equal to 0.5% of your adjusted gross income before any of it counts as a deduction. For a couple with $200,000 of AGI, that's a $1,000 floor, meaning the first $1,000 you give essentially buys you nothing on your tax return. It doesn't wipe out the benefit of giving, but it shaves it down, especially for households whose giving sits closer to that threshold. I wrote more about what that floor actually does to your deduction here: The Tithing Tax Deduction Shrank in 2026.

Put those two facts together and you get a strange asymmetry. Regular cash giving from a taxable account just got slightly less efficient. Giving straight from your IRA via a QCD was already more efficient, and none of the OBBBA changes touch it. The gap between "the way I've always done it" and "the way that actually works now" got a little wider, and almost nobody adjusted their habit to match.

What a QCD actually is, in plain English

A qualified charitable distribution lets you direct money straight from your IRA to a qualifying charity (your church counts) without that money ever touching your hands or your tax return as income. You have to be at least 70½ to use one. If you're also subject to RMDs, which generally start at 73, a QCD can satisfy some or all of that year's required withdrawal.

The 2026 limit is $111,000 per person, or up to $222,000 for a married couple, though that top number only works if both spouses are 70½ or older and each gives from their own IRA. The limit is per person, not per household: one spouse can't borrow the other's unused room. That's an indexed number, and it goes up most years, but the practical point for most families giving a few thousand dollars a year to their church isn't the ceiling. It's the mechanism.

Here's the plain version: instead of the custodian sending your RMD to your bank account, and you then writing a check to the church from that account, you have the custodian send the gift directly to the church. Same destination. Same amount. The only thing that changes is the path the money takes, and that path is the difference between the dollars showing up on your tax return as income or never showing up there at all.

Why does that matter more now than it used to? Because under the old deduction math, a taxable withdrawal followed by an itemized deduction could often wash out to something close to the same result as a QCD, assuming you itemized, and assuming your giving was well above whatever floor existed. The 0.5% AGI floor changes that math at the margin. It doesn't erase the deduction, but it means the first slice of your giving buys you less than it used to if you're doing it the old way. The QCD route was never subject to that floor because the money was never income to begin with. There's nothing to deduct because there's nothing to add back.

Not a bigger ask, a smarter same

I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of teaching that can slide into something it shouldn't be. This isn't a pitch to give more. It's not a giving challenge dressed up in tax language. If anything, it's the opposite instinct. If a QCD isn't the right fit for you this year, a donor-advised fund is often the next lever worth pulling, and I've laid out how that works here: Same Tithe, Smarter Strategy.

Scripture doesn't measure generosity by the mechanism. The widow's two coins mattered because of what they cost her, not because of how they were routed (Mark 12:41-44). A QCD doesn't make anyone more faithful than the person writing a check by hand. But stewardship, actually managing what's been entrusted to you with some care, includes paying attention to whether the vehicle you're using still fits the purpose. Jesus tells the parable of the shrewd manager not because shrewdness is the point, but because even a dishonest man knew to use what he had wisely, and the sons of light too often don't bother (Luke 16:1-9). There's something uncomfortable and instructive in that: the world sometimes optimizes its resources more carefully than the church does.

This is where the "enough line" idea actually does some work. A lot of Christian families, especially ones sandwiched between aging parents and their own retirement, live under a low hum of guilt about generosity: a sense that whatever they're giving, it should probably be more, or different, or harder. That guilt is rarely productive and it's usually misplaced. The QCD conversation isn't an invitation to raise the bar. It's permission to stop leaving money on the table for a gift you were already planning to make. You're not being asked to find more margin. You're being asked to stop losing margin you already have to a mechanism that costs more than it needs to.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, especially for the 70½-plus reader, or the adult child helping a parent think through this. Picture a hypothetical couple who've given the same amount to their church for fifteen years, always from their checking account, always after the RMD hit their bank first. Nothing about their generosity needs to change. What could change is the eleven seconds it takes to ask their custodian, "can this come directly from the IRA instead?"

The practical shape of it

If you're 70½ or older and you have a traditional IRA, and you're already giving to your church or another qualifying charity, the questions worth asking are less about whether to give and more about how the gift travels.

Do you have an RMD this year, or will you soon? If so, a QCD can satisfy some or all of that RMD while keeping the amount out of your taxable income. That matters beyond the deduction itself: it can change how much of your Social Security gets taxed and where you land in Medicare's income brackets. Are you someone who no longer itemizes because the standard deduction covers you? A QCD helps regardless, because the tax benefit doesn't depend on itemizing at all: it works the same whether you take the standard deduction or not. And if you're the adult child managing a parent's finances, or just present in the conversation, this is a natural thing to raise before year-end, since QCDs generally need to be completed within the tax year to count for that year. It's also a natural moment to ask the bigger question sitting behind it: whether your parents have an estate plan that actually protects them.

None of this is a recommendation to take a specific action with a specific account, and it isn't a substitute for looking at your actual return with someone who can see the whole picture: your income sources, your Medicare situation, the rest of your giving plan. What it is: a nudge to ask the question before defaulting to the same check you wrote last year, and the year before that.

Want some help thinking this through? I did too. That's part of why I started Openhanded Wealth: to walk with folks like you through decisions that feel complicated, but don't have to stay that way. If you've got questions, reach out. I'm a real person. I'll help you think clearly, and I won't push you into decisions that don't fit. You can also learn more about how I work with clients. You don't have to navigate this alone. Email Me, or Schedule a Call