New Charitable Giving Tax Deduction Worth Up To $2,000 May Come Soon

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Taxpayers who donate to the causes that are close to their hearts may soon have a new reason to celebrate — and to give: The Senate’s version of the “big, beautiful” tax bill includes a valuable new tax deduction for qualified charitable contributions, worth up to $1,000 for single filers and $2,000 for married filing jointly taxpayers.

The exciting part is this: This tax deduction would be available to taxpayers who claim the standard deduction — you wouldn’t have to itemize to benefit. That could be a big boon for taxpayers who like to support important causes, as well as the charitable organizations to which they give.

Keep in mind that this tax deduction is currently in a draft version of the Senate’s tax bill, which will eventually need to be melded with the House’s version — and there are plenty of reasons why that could prove challenging.

On top of all that, while the House version of the bill also offers an above-the-line deduction for charitable contributions (which means you don’t have to itemize to claim it), it’s worth just $150 for single filers and $300 for married filing jointly couples.

Plus the House’s version of this tax break is temporary, in effect from 2025 through 2028, while the Senate’s more generous version would be permanent starting in 2026.

There’s a lot we don’t know right now, including if or when the tax bill will pass and, if it does, which of these two charitable deductions will be in it, if either of them are.

The charitable contribution tax deduction today is more restrictive

Currently, the only way to secure a tax benefit for making a charitable contribution is to itemize your deductions. (Remember, taxpayers always must choose between claiming the standard deduction and itemizing — you want to choose whichever is larger.)

That means that these days, it tends to be wealthier taxpayers who enjoy a federal tax benefit for their charitable contributions. 

In 2020, 64 percent of tax returns that reported adjusted gross income (AGI) of $500,000 or more claimed itemized deductions. That compares with just 11 percent of returns with $50,000 to $100,000 of AGI and 2 percent of tax returns with less than $30,000 in AGI, according to a report by the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization.

There was a time, briefly, when you could claim a tax deduction for your charitable donations even if you didn’t itemize your deductions. The 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act included an above-the-line tax deduction for charitable giving worth $300 (a $600 tax break for married filing jointly filers was added for 2021). But that popular tax break existed only for 2020 and 2021.

The current tax bill being debated by Congress seems to recognize that getting a tax break for giving to causes — without having to itemize — would help out middle-income taxpayers. And if one of these tax breaks becomes law, it could benefit U.S. taxpayers as well as the charities to which they donate, because it would at least somewhat reverse what happened after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) went into effect in 2018.

The TCJA nearly doubled the standard deduction, which made it much less beneficial for people to itemize their deductions. 

In 2018, about 23 million taxpayers switched from itemizing to claiming the standard deduction, and those taxpayers donated about $880 less, on average, than they otherwise would have that year, according to a 2024 paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private, nonprofit research organization. Overall, the TCJA “decreased charitable giving by about $20 billion annually,” the paper says.

Still, other data suggests that, after the initial drop, charitable donations increased in later years — though that rise in giving was likely concentrated among wealthy people who still find it beneficial to itemize their deductions, according to a report by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a not-for-profit, nonpartisan research organization.

The TCJA, the Center said, may have concentrated “tax incentives for charitable giving more among the wealthy.”