If I leave money to charity in my will, who gets the donation tax credit?

When a charitable gift is made through your will, the donation tax credit generally belongs to your estate, not to any individual beneficiary — it's your graduated rate estate, or your terminal return, depending on how the gift and timing are structured, that can claim the credit, not a family member who happens to inherit the rest of the estate.

Because a charitable gift by will is deemed to be made by the estate at the time the property is actually transferred to the charity, and the estate has flexibility to allocate the resulting credit across the deceased's terminal return, the return for the immediately preceding year, or the estate's own return for the year of the gift or an earlier year, there's real room to plan which return benefits most from the credit — often the terminal return, where a large deemed disposition gain from death may otherwise be taxed heavily.

Because this allocation is a choice, not an automatic result, and depends on the estate qualifying as a graduated rate estate and the gift being properly documented, an executor should work with the estate's accountant to decide how to apply the credit before the relevant returns are filed, rather than assuming it happens automatically.