The 2026 federal estate tax exemption is $15 million, and a new law made the increase permanent
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The doubled estate tax exemption was scheduled to be cut roughly in half at the end of 2025. Instead, a law signed in July 2025 raised it further and removed the expiration date entirely. Here is the exact 2026 number, what it replaced, and what the law does not change.
The federal estate tax exemption is $15,000,000 per person for 2026, up from $13,990,000 in 2025 — and for the first time, the increase is permanent rather than scheduled to expire. A law signed in July 2025 canceled a scheduled cut that would have taken the exemption down to roughly half its 2025 size.
The 2026 exemption, and how it compares
Every individual has a lifetime basic exclusion amount that shields gifts made during life and property left at death — combined into one running total — from federal estate and gift tax. For 2026 that amount is $15,000,000 per person, confirmed in the IRS's own 2026 inflation-adjustment announcement. It is up $1,010,000 from the $13,990,000 figure that applied in 2025, and the top rate on transfers above the exemption remains 40%.
| Year | Basic exclusion amount | Married couple, with portability |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | $13,990,000 | $27,980,000 |
| 2026 | $15,000,000 | $30,000,000 |
The law behind the number, and the cut it canceled
The doubled exemption everyone had been using since 2018 came from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and that law wrote in an expiration date: without further action, the exclusion was due to revert to its pre-2018 level — adjusted for inflation, an amount widely estimated at around $7,000,000 per person — for anyone dying in 2026 or later. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Public Law 119-21, signed July 4, 2025, canceled that reversion outright. Section 70106 of the law amended Internal Revenue Code section 2010(c)(3) to set a new base exclusion amount of $15,000,000 for 2026, with no future sunset written into the statute this time — the increase stays in place unless a future Congress changes it.
Is the new number itself adjusted for inflation?
Not for 2026. The $15,000,000 figure is a new statutory baseline written directly into the law, not the product of the usual annual inflation formula — which is why the IRS's 2026 release simply states the new figure alongside the $13,990,000 2025 amount for comparison, rather than showing an inflation calculation between the two. Indexing is scheduled to resume starting with the 2027 exemption, using 2025 as the base year for the calculation, the same way the prior $10,000,000 TCJA base amount was indexed forward each year after 2018. Until an official 2027 figure is released, treat any number you see for that year as an informed estimate rather than a confirmed one.
Portability, and the matching GST exemption
A surviving spouse can claim any unused portion of a deceased spouse's exclusion — a mechanism called portability — bringing a married couple's combined shelter to $30,000,000 for 2026. Portability is not automatic: it requires filing an estate tax return, Form 706, for the first spouse to die within the deadline, even when no tax is owed, purely to preserve the unused amount for later. The generation-skipping transfer tax, which applies to gifts and bequests to grandchildren or more remote descendants, carries its own exemption set at the same $15,000,000 figure for 2026.
Why permanence changes the planning conversation
Before OBBBA passed, estate planning attorneys spent much of 2024 and 2025 advising wealthy clients to use as much of the doubled exemption as possible before it was scheduled to shrink — a "use it or lose it" push built around large lifetime gifts made specifically to lock in the higher number ahead of the 2026 sunset. Once OBBBA removed the expiration date, that time pressure disappeared. A gift that was rushed through in 2025 purely to beat a deadline that no longer exists cannot be undone, but anyone who held off is no longer racing a clock — the $15,000,000 figure is available on an ordinary planning timeline, not an emergency one. That does not mean the exemption is risk-free indefinitely: because it lives in the tax code rather than the Constitution, a future Congress with different priorities could still lower it, just as this one raised it.
Why the exact year matters, in dollars
Take an estate worth $12,000,000 at death in 2026, with no surviving spouse and no prior taxable gifts, taxed at the flat 40% top rate on the amount above the exemption. Under the exemption that actually applies, $15,000,000, the entire estate falls under the shelter and owes no federal estate tax at all. Under the roughly $7,000,000 exemption that was scheduled to take effect before OBBBA canceled it, the same estate would have owed tax on $5,000,000 of value.
| Scenario | Exemption | Taxable amount | Estate tax owed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Actual 2026 law (OBBBA) | $15,000,000 | $0 | $0 |
| Pre-OBBBA scheduled sunset (estimated) | $7,000,000 | $5,000,000 | $2,000,000 |
Same $12,000,000 estate, $2,000,000 apart, purely because of which version of the law was in effect on the date of death. The $7,000,000 figure never actually took effect and is shown only for contrast; it is a widely cited estimate of the pre-2018 exemption adjusted for inflation to 2026, not an official IRS number. Scale the example up or down and the pattern holds: the bigger the estate above whatever exemption applies, the larger the swing between the two scenarios, since every additional dollar above the exemption is taxed at the same flat 40% rate regardless of how large the estate gets.
What this does not change
- Many states charge their own separate estate or inheritance tax, several with exemptions far below the federal figure — this article covers federal law only.
- The 2026 exemption is "permanent" only in the sense that no expiration date is written into the statute; a future Congress can still change it through ordinary legislation.
- If a spouse died before 2026, the portability amount preserved from that death is fixed at whatever the exemption was on that date — it does not retroactively grow to $15,000,000.
- The 2026 annual gift tax exclusion holds at $19,000 per recipient, unchanged from 2025 — a separate figure from the lifetime exclusion discussed above.
Sources
- IRS: Tax inflation adjustments for tax year 2026, including amendments from the One, Big, Beautiful Bill
- GovInfo: Public Law 119-21, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act
- Harter Secrest & Emery: 2026 Outlook — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, permanent estate tax exemptions, and SALT deduction changes
This is general information, not tax, legal or estate planning advice. It covers federal gift and estate tax only; state-level estate and inheritance taxes, and the specific structure of any estate, can change the result substantially, and the $7,000,000 contrast figure is an estimate that never took effect as law. For a decision about your own estate, consult a licensed estate planning attorney or tax professional.