What changed for charitable deductions in 2026: the new rules for donors who itemize and those who don’t

Three changes to the charitable deduction took effect on January 1, 2026, for individual donors. People who take the standard deduction can now deduct up to $1,000 of cash gifts to charity, or $2,000 on a joint return. People who itemize can deduct their gifts only above a floor of 0.5% of their income. And the highest earners face a new cap on the value of all itemized deductions. The rules apply to gifts made in 2026, which donors will report on returns filed in 2027.

Where the rules come from

All three come from Public Law 119-21, the budget reconciliation law signed on July 4, 2025. The Federal Register refers to it as the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act, and the IRS now groups its provisions under the name Working Families Tax Cuts. The charitable changes are in sections 70424 and 70425, the limit for high earners is in section 70111, and each applies to tax years beginning after December 31, 2025. Corporations face a separate new floor, covered in our explainer on corporate giving.

If you take the standard deduction

Under the rules that applied until 2025, taxpayers who did not itemize got no federal income tax benefit for their cash gifts to charity, the IRS notes. Now they can deduct up to $1,000, or $2,000 for married couples filing jointly. The law expanded and made permanent a smaller deduction of $300, or $600 on a joint return, that had applied for tax years beginning in 2021. The standard deduction for 2026 is $16,100 for single filers, $32,200 for married couples filing jointly and $24,150 for heads of household, according to the IRS’s 2026 inflation adjustments.

Not every gift qualifies. The deduction covers only cash given during the year to an eligible charity. It does not cover noncash gifts such as clothing or stock, carryovers from earlier years, gifts to donor-advised funds or gifts to supporting organizations. The 0.5% floor described below does not apply to this deduction.

If you itemize

For itemizers, the law adds a floor. Under the new section 170(b)(1)(I), charitable contributions are deductible only to the extent that their total for the year exceeds 0.5% of the donor’s contribution base. The code defines the contribution base as adjusted gross income computed without any net operating loss carryback.

Gifts that fall below the floor are generally lost rather than carried forward. The law lets amounts disallowed by the floor be carried to later years only from a year in which the donor’s gifts also exceed one of the percentage-of-income limits.

The law also made permanent the higher ceiling for cash gifts to public charities. Before the change, the 60% of contribution base limit applied only to tax years beginning before January 1, 2026. It now has no end date.

The new limit for high earners

Section 70111 rewrote section 68 of the tax code. For an individual, total itemized deductions are now reduced by 2/37 of the smaller of two amounts: the itemized deductions themselves, or the part of taxable income, counting those deductions, that falls above the start of the 37% bracket. For 2026, that bracket starts above $640,600 for single filers and $768,700 for married couples filing jointly. The reduction is applied after every other limit.

In practice, the IRS describes this as a limitation on the tax benefit of itemized deductions for taxpayers in the 37% bracket. For a donor fully in that bracket, a deduction that would have saved 37 cents per dollar saves about 35 cents, since 37% multiplied by 35/37 is 35%. That is our arithmetic, and the exact effect depends on how far a donor’s income reaches into the bracket.

What donors may not know yet

Awareness of the change is low. In a nationally representative survey of 1,790 U.S. adults for the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy’s report What Americans Think About Nonprofits & Philanthropy 2026, only 23.9% of respondents knew about the new deduction for non-itemizers. After it was described to them, 77.7% expected no change in their giving and 19% expected to give more, Jon Bergdoll, the school’s interim director of data and research partnerships, wrote on Candid’s blog.

For donors, the practical points are about timing and form. Cash given directly to an eligible charity is what counts for non-itemizers. Itemizers whose gifts are small relative to their income may find the floor removes part or all of their deduction. Donors near either line can check the rules in IRS guidance or with a tax adviser before year-end.