The easiest way to claim your donation tax credits from IRD

During the early days of getting to know my partner, I casually brought up the topic of donation tax credits. I asked her if she had made any charitable donations in the previous four financial years.

When she said she had, to ✨UNICEF✨ no less, I knew I was onto a winner. 

We located the 3-year old donation receipts in her email trash, logged onto myIR, uploaded the receipts and within 2 weeks, there was $93 in her bank account. Yep, the IRD allows you to claim 33.33% on donations you have made to charity. My partner’s original donations totalled $280.

I don’t want to say it was the reason she fell in love with me, but it was the reason she fell in love with me.

How to claim donation tax credits

If you’ve donated anything to charity in the last 4 tax years, you can find love, too. The IRD taketh, but if you read all the way to the end of this article, the IRD giveth away. Follow these steps to claim donation tax credits:

1. Locate any donation receipts for charitable donations you made over $5 in the previous 4 tax years. As of writing, that means these years:
   ✅ April 2023 to 31 March 2024
   ✅ April 2022 to 31 March 2023
   ✅ April 2021 to 31 March 2022
   ✅ April 2020 to 31 March 2021

You can claim donations made in the current financial year from April 1^st 2025. This just means you won’t get the donation tax credits until you file your tax return.
If you’ve lost your donation receipt, you can contact the organisation you donated to and they will recreate it for you.

2. Check if the charity is on the IRD’s Approved Donee Organisations list
   • Scroll down to ‘What you can claim’ and click ‘Approved Donee Organisations’
3. Upload your donation receipts using myIR.
4. Enjoy free money from the IRD! 💰💰💰

Most user-friendly tax system in the world?

Whenever I show people how to do this, they cannot believe how easy it is. Most tax systems in the world make it feel really hard to do anything. I love the New Zealand tax system for its simplicity.

And yet, every year, the IRD reports that $250 million goes unclaimed. Besides donation tax credits, the IRD holds other unclaimed money. You can check if your name is on Santa’s list here.

Happy donation tax credit claiming!

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The video version of this article can be found here.

Art by Sierra Truong

Thanks to Cynthia Gao, Cathy Zeng and Emily Zhu for reading drafts of this.

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