A Donation Value Guide You Can Actually Print

Below is a donation value guide you can print and take with you: fair-market-value ranges for the most commonly donated household items, split into Like new, Good, and Fair condition. Every range is drawn from valuation guides that charity thrift operators publish themselves, consolidated across publishers, and the tables are compact enough to print from your browser on ordinary letter paper. The donation value chart has a print button and a CSV download. To check a single piece first, look up one item's value.

These are the same numbers behind DeductiBee's app and its donation value guide, where every row also shows which publishers backed it. Nothing here is invented or recalled from memory: if no charity publishes a range for an item, that item is not in these tables. Plenty of printable guides circulate online, and some never say where their numbers came from, so it seemed worth building one that does.

One honest note before the tables. A printed list is a perfectly good tool for a small drop-off: two bags of clothes, a box of books, done in an afternoon. Where paper runs out is accumulation: photos of what you gave, a running total across the year, and the IRS paperwork that kicks in once your noncash donations pass $500. The end of this page covers what to write down at the donation and when a list stops being enough.

How to read these tables

Each item shows three condition bands. The bands come from the printed low-to-high ranges in published charity valuation guides, consolidated across publishers by median and then split by condition, so no band ever exceeds what a charity actually printed. Here is what each tier means:

• Like new: unworn or barely used, with tags or as good as. The top of the published range.
• Good: used, complete, clean, and working, with no notable damage. The middle of the range, and the honest answer for most of what most people donate.
• Fair: visible wear but still usable and saleable. The bottom of the range.

There is no Poor column on purpose. Since 2006, clothing and household items generally must be in good used condition or better to be deductible at all, so an item below Fair typically should not be claimed. And these are thrift-market prices, not replacement prices: IRS Publication 561 points to what buyers actually pay in consignment and thrift shops as an indication of a used item's value, which is the market a bagged donation actually enters. If a number here reads lower than what an item cost, or lower than an older tool once suggested, that is the difference between a retail price and a resale price, not a mistake.

Two more reading notes. First, these values describe the typical item: a plain cotton sweater, an ordinary coffee table. An unusual brand or an unusually well-kept piece can justify a different figure, and the record that justifies it is a photo and a sentence, not a bigger number alone. Second, the dataset behind this page is refreshed as a dated annual edition, so the printed copy you make today is a snapshot: fine for this year's drop-offs, worth reprinting next season.

Clothing

Clothing is the bulk of most household donations, so it gets the most rows. Values assume ordinary mall and department-store brands; designer labels are a separate category with their own ranges in the full guide.

Women's clothing

Men's clothing

Children's clothing

Furniture

Furniture is where individual items get large enough to matter on their own, and where condition honesty matters most: a sofa with a torn cushion is a Fair sofa no matter what it cost new.

Kitchen, housewares, and linens

Kitchen items are small individually and add up fast in volume, which is exactly why a per-item list helps: a box of dishes is easier to value plate by plate than to guess at as a box.

Electronics

Electronics values assume the item works. A charity thrift operation typically cannot sell broken electronics at all, and an item that does not work is generally not in saleable condition to begin with.

Books, media, toys, and everything with wheels

What to write down at the donation

A value guide answers one question: what is this worth. Your records need to answer four more: what did you give, to whom, when, and in what condition. Whether you track on paper or in an app, capture these at the drop-off, not from memory a week later:

1. The charity's name and address. The organization must be a qualified one for the donation to be deductible, and its name goes on your records and, above $500 in total noncash giving, on Form 8283.
2. The date. The donation is generally deductible in the year you actually deliver the goods, so a December 31 drop-off and a January 2 drop-off land in different tax years.
3. An item list with counts and condition. Not "3 bags of clothes" but "12 women's blouses, Good; 4 pairs of jeans, Good; 2 coats, Like new." The count-times-value math is only defensible if the count exists.
4. Photos before you hand things over. A few wide shots of the items laid out, plus close-ups of anything valuable. A photo is the cheapest evidence of condition you will ever collect, and it cannot be taken after the fact.
5. A receipt, if anyone is at the donation door. Many drop-offs are unattended, and for smaller donations your own reliable written records generally suffice, but take the receipt when it is offered. Here is what a donation receipt should include.
6. For big-ticket items, how and when you got them. Form 8283 can ask for the acquisition date, how you acquired the property, and your approximate cost for higher-value items, and none of those are answers you want to reconstruct in April.

When a printed list is enough, and when it is not

For a single small drop-off, a printed guide plus the checklist above genuinely is enough. The IRS thresholds are what change the picture as the year accumulates:

Notice what the $500 line does to a paper system. Three or four ordinary drop-offs in a year clear it easily: one look at the clothing table above shows a couple of bags of adult clothing in Good condition can reach $150 or more on its own. Once you cross it, the loose pages have to become an itemized federal form with per-donation detail, and that is the point where most people either under-claim to avoid the paperwork or dread doing it. If you are there, start with how to fill out Form 8283.

What an app adds to the paper workflow

This is not an argument against printing this page. It is an honest account of where the paper workflow hands off. An app earns its place at exactly three points:

• Photos live with the items. The pictures you took at the drop-off attach to the donation record itself instead of drifting in a camera roll, so condition evidence and claimed value stay in one place.
• The year total maintains itself. Every drop-off adds to a running total, so you know in October, not April, whether you have crossed $500 and what the year is actually worth.
• The paperwork generates instead of transcribes. DeductiBee fills the Form 8283 PDF from your records, along with CSV and TXF exports, rather than leaving you to hand-copy a worksheet into tax software line by line.

DeductiBee's free tier covers 20 new items a year, and importing old records and exporting your raw data are free forever, so a paper-plus-app hybrid costs nothing to try: print this page for the car, photograph at the door, enter the list when you get home. And if you want a value for something these tables skip, the donation value calculator covers the full catalog, every range built from the same cited dataset as this page.

However you track, the order of operations is the part to keep: value the items honestly by condition, write everything down at the donation, and let the totals tell you when the IRS paperwork starts. A printed page handles the first two on a quiet Saturday. The third is where it helps to have something that counts.