Goodwill Donation Values: Cited Tables for Every Category

Goodwill does not tell you what your donation is worth, and nothing on a Goodwill receipt will do it for you. Under IRS rules, the donor is responsible for determining the fair market value of donated goods: generally, the price a comparable item actually sells for in a thrift store, not what it cost new. As a working answer, most everyday garments land between a dollar or two and about $20 apiece depending on condition, with suits and coats above that; ordinary furniture runs from a few dollars for a kitchen chair to about $205 for a standard sofa in like-new condition. The tables below break that down item by item.

Every dollar figure in this article comes from DeductiBee's valuation dataset, edition 2026.1, which consolidates the donor value guides that charity resale organizations publish themselves, including guides published by Goodwill organizations, and records the source behind every range. The same dataset drives the app, the calculator, and every guide page on this site, so a number you see here cannot disagree with the number you would see anywhere else in the product.

Goodwill does not set the value, you do

Start with the fact most value guides dance around: Goodwill assigns no value to your donation. The attendant at the drop-off door hands you a receipt that documents that a donation happened, and usually roughly what it contained, but not what any of it was worth. That is not a gap in customer service, it is how the rules are built. The charity's job is to confirm the gift; putting a defensible number on it is the donor's job, which is why IRS Publication 561, the valuation publication, is addressed to the donor rather than to the charity.

There is also no such thing as one official Goodwill value for an item, because Goodwill is not one organization. It operates as a network of independent regional organizations, and more than one of them publishes its own donor valuation guide, with genuinely different numbers. Goodwill Industries International has published a sofa range of $30 to $150; Goodwill Northern New England has published $40 to $395 for the same piece of furniture. Both are legitimate published guides, and their ceilings disagree by more than double. Any table that presents a single Goodwill value without saying which guide it came from is quietly making that choice for you.

How these ranges are built

Publication 561 defines fair market value as the price a willing buyer would pay a willing seller, neither being required to act, and both having reasonable knowledge of the relevant facts. For used clothing and household goods it gets more specific: the price buyers actually pay in consignment or thrift shops is an indication of value. If you left three bags at a Goodwill donation door, the thrift shelf is the market your property entered, so the thrift shelf price is the comparable that fits.

DeductiBee's method works entirely inside that guidance. We collect the donor valuation guides that charity resale operators publish, consolidate the printed lows and highs across publishers using the median, and split the resulting span into three condition tiers within the published envelope. No tier is ever extrapolated beyond what a publisher actually printed, and every range carries the ids of the sources behind it. You can browse the whole dataset, with the sources shown next to each range, in the valuation guide.

The three tiers read like this: Like new means unworn or barely used, tags or as good as, and takes the top of the published range. Good means used, complete, clean, and working, the middle of the range. Fair means visible wear but still usable and saleable, the bottom of the range, and generally the lowest condition that can be claimed at all. There is deliberately no fourth tier, for a reason covered below.

Clothing donation values

Clothing is the bulk of what moves through a Goodwill donation door, and it is valued per garment, not per bag. These are representative pieces from the dataset; the ranges are per item, so eight shirts are eight line items.

For ordinary apparel, the published guides price by garment type rather than by label, so a mall-brand blouse and a boutique one read the same. Designer and luxury pieces are the exception: no guide in our registry prices a label premium, so those items take evidence of comparable sales instead of a table range. The full clothing guide covers children's sizes, outerwear, and the designer question in more depth.

Furniture donation values

Furniture carries the widest published ranges of any category, because a sofa can be anything from a student castoff to a nearly new sectional. Check that your local Goodwill actually accepts large furniture before you load the truck: acceptance varies by location, and an item that is not accepted is not a donation.

Complete sets are priced as sets in the published guides, and they add up quickly: a complete bedroom set spans $260 at the Fair floor to $1,035 at the Like new ceiling in the current edition. A donation that size is exactly where the paperwork thresholds start to matter, which is covered further down.

Electronics donation values

The published thrift guides cover electronics unevenly, because electronics depreciate faster than anything else in a donation load and a five-year-old model is not the same item as a current one. Where a guide prints a range, it is here; working order is assumed, since a device that does not power on generally has little or no fair market value.

Phones and tablets appear in the guides as broad classes: a cell phone spans $25 to $100 and a tablet $25 to $150 across the three tiers in the current edition. For anything where the specific model drives the price, recent comparable sales of that model in that condition are the better evidence, and many electronics in our dataset are deliberately custom-entry for exactly that reason. Sign out of your accounts and erase any device before it leaves; that is not a tax rule, just the right order of operations.

Kitchen and housewares donation values

This is the long tail of a house clean-out, and the category people most often skip because the per-item numbers look too small to bother with. They are small, and there are usually dozens of them, which is why housewares are so often the largest line on a completed donation list.

Books and media follow the same per-item logic: a hardcover book runs $1 to $3 across the three tiers, a paperback $0.75 to $2, and a DVD or CD $2 to $5. A hundred paperbacks is still a hundred line items, and the count is what makes the number.

The condition rule: good used or better

Since 2006, clothing and household items generally must be in good used condition or better to be deductible at all, per Publication 526. The main exception is a single item claimed at more than $500 with a qualified appraisal attached, which almost never applies to a bag drop. Torn, stained, broken, or incomplete items are generally not a deduction, whatever the charity chooses to do with them after accepting the bag.

That rule is why the tables above have no fourth column. A "poor" tier would be a column of numbers you are generally not allowed to claim, and printing one anyway would invite exactly the entries that do not survive scrutiny. If a Goodwill sorter would pull the item off the line rather than price it for the shelf, leave it off your list.

Receipts at the Goodwill drop-off

For a donation worth less than $250, a dated receipt from the attendant plus your own itemized list is generally the record you need. For any single donation of $250 or more, the rules require a contemporaneous written acknowledgment from the organization that describes the property, and Publication 1771 is explicit that the acknowledgment does not have to value noncash goods: describing them is the charity's job, valuing them is yours. Ask at the door if the standard slip does not describe what you gave.

Unattended donation bins are the weak point here: there is nobody to hand you anything. A drop at an attended donation center gets you a receipt; a drop in a parking-lot bin gets you nothing, and reconstructing the record in April is much harder than collecting it in the moment.

When Form 8283 kicks in

If your total deduction for all noncash contributions for the year comes to more than $500, you generally must file Form 8283 with your return, per its instructions. Regular Goodwill donors cross that line more often than they expect: two or three solid bag drops at defensible per-item values will do it. Crossing it is not a problem, it is a form.

The threshold that changes the work is $5,000: a deduction of more than $5,000 for an item or a group of similar items generally requires a qualified written appraisal and Section B of the form. "Group of similar items" is the phrase to respect, because all the clothing you donate during the year is generally treated as one group, across every drop-off and every charity. The $250, $500, and $5,000 thresholds post walks through each trigger and what it requires.

One dataset, visible sources

Whatever tool you use to value a Goodwill run, apply one test to it: can it show you where each number came from? A range without a source is an assertion, and an assertion is what you are left holding if a figure is ever questioned. The two Goodwill sofa guides above differ by hundreds of dollars at the ceiling, so "it was in a guide somewhere" is not, by itself, much of an answer.

Uncited tables are common in this space. Deductible Duck, one of the ItsDeductible replacements, attributes its values to "eBay auctions and thrift store valuations" without per-range sourcing, and its guides describe their own ranges as "examples of the kind of ranges donors use." Its pages also disagree with each other: jeans appear at $4 to $20 on one of its charity guides and $4 to $12 on its clothing guide, with no explanation of the difference. That is not a scandal, but it is exactly the failure mode a cited dataset exists to prevent.

DeductiBee's answer is structural rather than editorial. One generator pass over one source registry emits the app's bundled data, the guide pages, and the calculator, so the same jeans cannot be worth two different amounts in two places. Every range carries its source ids, single-source values are flagged as such, and items no publisher prices get an honest blank with guidance instead of an invented number. If you want to see what a specific load is worth before you drop it off, run it through the donation value calculator: the numbers there are these numbers, because there is only one set.