The 2026 charitable deduction
for people who do not itemize

What is settled, and what is not

The provision comes out of the 2025 tax legislation that the IRS newsroom now files under “Working Families Tax Cuts”, and which most coverage still calls the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA. Both names refer to the same law.

Settled enough to quote: the IRS has published a statement of the deduction, its amounts, its filing-status split, and the type of contribution it applies to. Not settled: how it is reported on a 2026 return, how it interacts with the rest of the charitable rules in edge cases, and whether the current phrasing survives a full publication revision unchanged.

This site takes the second list seriously. Nothing below is presented as a number to plan around.

What the IRS has actually published

Topic no. 506, Charitable contributions opens by restating the general rule and then adds the change, verbatim:

“Currently, you can only deduct charitable contributions if you itemize deductions on Schedule A (Form 1040), Itemized Deductions (this may be limited). See Publication 526, Charitable Contributions. Beginning with tax year 2026, if you do not itemize, you may deduct up to $1,000 ($2,000 if filing jointly) of your cash contributions to certain qualified organizations.”

Four things are doing work in that sentence, and they are all limits: it begins with tax year 2026, it is capped at $1,000 or $2,000, it is for cash contributions, and the recipient has to be a qualified organization.

The IRS has also described this deduction, in its summary of the individual provisions, as one claimed when calculating taxable income, and specifically not as an above-the-line deduction in determining adjusted gross income. If your return has anything keyed to AGI, that distinction is worth raising with a preparer.

The word that excludes donated goods

Read the quotation again and stop at “cash contributions”.

A donated sofa is not cash. Nor is a bag of clothing, a bicycle, or a laptop. On the face of the published guidance, the 2026 non-itemizer deduction does not cover donated property, and property donations generally continue to run through Schedule A, which means through itemizing.

If fuller guidance broadens this, we will change the page and date the change. Until then the honest summary is: the new deduction is good news for people who write checks, and mostly neutral for people who clear out closets.

What changes for people who do itemize

Two further changes have been described by the IRS, both beginning in 2026, and both aimed at itemizers rather than at the group above.

The first is a floor. In an IRS newsroom transcript on the individual provisions, the description is that itemizers “will have to apply half a percentage point floor to their overall charitable contributions. In other words, they’ll lose the benefit of the first half percentage point of their charitable contributions.”

The second is a permanence. The same transcript states that “the 60% limit on cash charitable contributions made by an individual to a public charity, that 60% limit is now made permanent.”

What to do about it now

Nothing on this page is a reason to stop keeping records, and there are three reasons to keep them more carefully rather than less.

• The itemizing question is arithmetic. Whether Schedule A beats the standard deduction depends on a total you either have or do not. Most people who assume they cannot itemize have never actually added up a year of giving.
• Cash is now worth counting separately. If the deduction applies as published, your cash contributions to qualified organizations are the figure that matters, and they need the same substantiation as always: a bank record or written communication for any amount, and a written acknowledgment at $250.
• States do their own thing. A donation that produces no federal benefit is not automatically worthless on a state return. Confirm your state’s treatment with a professional.

And if your giving is mostly goods rather than money, the practical advice is unchanged: value it properly, document it at the time, and find out in December whether the year was big enough to itemize. The Form 8283 guide covers what happens if it was.