The $15M Estate Tax Exemption Explained

One of our favorite episodes yet! In this episode of The Wealth Cafe, we’ll be talking all about the new and improved estate tax exemption, as well as the common misconceptions around it. Most people think that this exemption is permanent, but “permanent” in the sense of the law means something far different. So, make sure to tune into this informative episode, so that you don’t get caught acting too late on your estate. 

What we’ll cover:

✅ New law affecting estate taxes.

✅ Clawback protection strategy.

✅ Common mistakes to avoid.

✅ How gifting can impact estate tax exemptions. 

So, if you’re serious about passing on your wealth to the next generation make sure to start having necessary conversations with your financial team about how to properly strategize and plan for your specific situation. 

☕️For more tips and advice, make sure to subscribe to the show so you don't miss an episode!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Welcome back to another episode of the Wealth Cafe. I am Caroline Tannis, lead wealth advisor and founder of Tannis Financial Group, and I am so happy to have you here today because today's episode is one that I have been wanting to record, honestly, since the beginning of this year. Now, I want to start by telling you about a conversation I have had probably about a dozen times in the last several months. Now, it usually starts with one of my clients, and they are smart, accomplished, they have a solid estate plan, but she put it together typically a few years ago. And she calls me with some version of the same question and says, Caroline, I heard about the estate tax exemption that it's now going to be $15 million per person and it's permanent. So we're good, right? And I can't stop worrying about this. And I have to stop her when she's right there because of the word permanent. It is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, and it does not mean what most people think it does, especially with all the news and media headlines going around. Now I want to be clear: the new exemption, genuinely, it's good news. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law July 4th, 2025. It raised the federal gift and tax exemption to 15 million per person or 30 million per married couple, and this is effective of January 1st, 2026. It also removed the automatic sunset provision that had been built into the old law, which would have dropped the exemption back down to right around $7 million per person at the end of 2025. That cliff is gone. That is real and meaningful progress, but here is what these media headlines aren't telling you. Permanent in the tax law, it doesn't mean what it means in everyday language. It doesn't mean that it is untouchable, and it doesn't mean that it is protected from future legislation. It does not mean that you can just set it and forget it. And today I want to give you the full picture, what this change actually means and what permanent means in the context of US tax law, and most importantly, why women in this audience who have significant estates should be moving on their plan right now, not just sitting back and assuming that the window will stay open forever. Because here is the thing the opportunity in front of you right now, it's real. The window is genuinely wide open, and women who will look back on 2026 as a turning point for their estates are the ones who treat it as an action window, not just as a reason to sit back and relax. So let's get into it. Let's start with what actually changed, because I want to give you the accurate picture before you get into the important nuances of things. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, regardless of how you put it feel politically, was passed by Congress and signed into law July 4th, 2025. And there were three significant changes that were made to the federal estate tax. The first is that it raised the federal estate and gift tax exemption from $13.99 million per person in 2025 up to $15 million per person in 2026. Now, for married couples, that's going to be $30 million combined. That's a number that you have been hearing about all over the news. Second, it indexed that amount for inflation. So that $15 million baseline, it's going to adjust upward over time. It won't stay flat and erode in terms of real terms. The third is that the generated or permanent headline, it removed the automatic sunset provision that had been built into the Tax and Jobs Cuts Act of 2017. The TCJA had doubled the exemption with a built-in expiration date at the end of 2025. Now, without the one big beautiful bill, the exemption would have dropped back down to that roughly 7 million per person on January 1st of this year. So that's not going to happen. And it also prevented that cliff. And that is genuinely good news. So let's talk about what permanent actually means and why it is so critical. Here's the part that matters most, and the part that most financial news coverage is getting wrong and glossing over because they're more focused on the headline. When legislation calls this change permanent, what that technicality and legally means is there is no automatic expiration date written into the specific law and it's not going to sunset on its own. There's no built-in cliff like the last one we just avoided. That's just all it means, though. This does not mean that it's immune to future legislation. It does not mean Congress cannot change it. It doesn't mean that a future administration can't pass a law that reduces it, restructures it, or could even eliminate things entirely. Congress can actually change the estate tax law at any time. It can be a new administration, it can be a new Congress, a new set of fiscal priorities, and we would have an entirely new estate tax landscape, and regardless of what the laws say today. Now, I want to say this one more time because it is the single most important thing of this episode. Permanent in the tax law means permanent until Congress decides otherwise. So what does permanent mean? And can it actually be changed? Now, the estate has actually changed dramatically over the last 25 years. This $15 million level is historically high. Historically high levels attract political attention and fiscal priorities can shift. Now that's not a prediction, it is a pattern from 25 years of watching the landscape change. Planning on that is a reality, not me trying to be pessimistic. And I want to help you be prepared in case we do see those changes. And I want to make something clear before we go any further. The fact that permanent doesn't mean what you thought it once was. This is not a reason to panic. This is a reason to go out and act. And right now, this action that is available to you, it is extraordinary. So here's the reframe I want you to carry while listening to this episode. You're not listening to this because the estate planning landscape has all of a sudden become dangerous. You are listening to this because the estate planning landscape, it's just more favorable right now than it has been in modern history. And the women who are taking advantage of this while the window of this is open, they are going to be in a fundamentally different position than those who are just sitting around and waiting for something to happen. So, what does this mean? For those of you who are listening and have estates or could have estates between $5 million and $30 million, this conversation is actually essential. So if you are in that range, and many of you listening typically are, I've seen the comments and those of you writing in and applying for intro calls, you are sitting in the most powerful estate planning window of your lifetime. At $15 million per person, you now have access to an exemption level that allows you to move a significant amount of assets out of your taxable estate to your children, grandchildren, trust structures, or even charitable vehicles in ways that were simply not available even two years ago. Now, the tools that exist for you right now, some of them didn't even exist at this scale 18 months ago. The question is not, oh, should we take advantage of this window? It's how quickly are you, how strategically, and which options should you actually be taking advantage of? Now, for those of you that are my New York or New Jersey friends, this is going to look a little different because we have a lot of listeners in this area. However, it's a little different. New Jersey eliminated its own estate tax back in 2018. So if you are a New Jersey residence, you have no estate tax exposure at the state level. You are in a genuinely good position from the state tax perspective. However, if you are in New York, you could have a spig significant tax burden if you also have a New York connection in your estate, because that tax, that state still has its own estate tax. New York's exemption is approximately 7.6 million, conjust for inflation, and it has what is known a cliff rule. So if your taxable New York estate exceeds that exemption by more than 5%, you lose the entire benefit of that exemption. Now, the tax is calculated on your full estate, not just the amount above that threshold. So a $7.6 million New York estate could have significantly more in estate taxes than a $7.1 million New York estate because you're losing that cliff and you have that exemption. Federal changes do not help you there. It's state level, and that state level planning still matters, and why you need to bring an estate attorney into that conversation. Now we also need to talk about generation skipping. One more dimension of this window that you want to make sure you understand is the generation skipping transfer tax that also rose to $15 million per person. The GST is a tax that applies when you transfer assets directly from you to a grandchild or into structures that will benefit multiple generations. Now, for women who want to build true generational wealth and who are thinking about not just their children, but grandchildren, maybe even beyond, this is an extraordinary moment because you now have the ability to move assets across multiple generations in a tax-efficient way. Under the $15 million exemption, there is a planning opportunity that might not be available in the same form five, 10 years down the road. This is the moment for that conversation right now, here in 2026. All right, let's get a little deeper into this. So there's three layers which I really love to dive into on this show. Now, layer one is the version of the story that most people have heard, the estate of tax exemption being $15 million, and it's the quote unquote permanent, which is probably fine unless you are worth or going to be worth more than that $15 million. Time to move on. As we've established, that version, it's incomplete. It is not wrong about the numbers, it's wrong about the security that it implies, and it's incomplete information at this wealth level, and it is not a small problem. Layer two, and this is where I want to walk through the specific issues that need attention right here, right now in 2026. Given this new landscape, there's a lot of hypotheticals that can happen. There are things that are affecting real estate plans today, and issue one is the clause trap. This one surprises almost every client that I walk through with this. Many wills and trusts that are drafted in prior years, even some of them in recent years, depending on who drafted it, contain what are called formula clauses. These were instructions written into the document that say something like, I leave assets up to the federal estate tax exemption amount to my children's trust, and everything above that amount goes to charity. Now, that language, it was elegant when it was written, and when the exemption was 11 million, it meant that roughly 11 million to the kids' trust, and then the remainder, if any, to the charity. It was clean and it was intentional, but here's the problem. The same language today, under a $15 million exemption, directs $15 million into the children's trust, which may be your entire estate, which means that nothing could end up going to charity that you may have actually intended to benefit. Now, the document is doing exactly what it says, but it may not be doing what you mean for it to do. Now, this is happening to real families right now. Estates were thoughtfully planned and they are producing unintended outcomes because the exemption moved, but the documents aren't moving with it. If your estate plan contains language tied to the federal exemption amount, you and your estate attorney need to go through a review this year. Not eventually, it needs to happen this year. In case something happens to you, you want to honor your legacy. Issue two, portability does not happen automatically. This is when well documented in the estate planning world and it gets missed, surprising, it happens in surprising regularity. So I want to make sure that every woman listening to this show understands it because we tend to outlive our spouses. So when one spouse dies, the surviving spouse has the ability to use their deceased spouse's unused estate tax exemption. This is actually what is defined as portability. And it can effectively double the amount of assets that you can pack tax-free from the surviving spouse's estate under the current $15 million exemption. Portability can mean an additional $15 million into the protection of the surviving spouse. That's not a small thing, okay? But portability, it doesn't happen automatically. It's a special election that has to be made and it's done on your federal tax return within nine months of the date of death. Nine months, note that. Every taxable gift you make during your lifetime that is above the annual exclusion, which for 2026 is $19,000 per recipient, counts against the lifetime exemption and it's reducing the amount available at death. So if you've been making significant taxable gifts over the years, your remaining exemption might actually be lower than that $15 million figure and that headline number that you've been seeing. So your advisor needs to know your full gifting history and have an accurate picture of understanding where you're at and if you've used any of that $15 million. Layer number three, this is where we're going to get into the real planning. And I want to make the case clearly and directly for why acting right now is essential. Now, there is a specific IRS confirmed protection available to women who act during this high exemption window. And it is one of the most powerful arguments for moving on your estate plan in 2026, at least the one that I know of and have researched well. Now, the clawback protection, this is something that you need to understand. And here is how it works. So let's say, for example, that you fund a trust, a spousal lifetime access trust, or a dynasty trust or something of a similar structure. You have $10 million you put it into it today, and under the current $15 million exemption, that $10 million gift uses $10 million and you have $5 million remaining of your lifetime exemption. Now the future administration comes into power and they reduce the federal tax exemption back down to $7 million per person, which as we have discussed, is well within the possibility because that's what we've seen before. Now the IRS has specifically confirmed that gifts made under a higher exemption are not clawed back into your estate when the exemption decreases. So the $10 million you moved into that trust today, it's protected and it won't get pulled back into your taxable estate and retaxed under the new lower rules. The protection is locked in. So what does that actually mean? It means that the assets that you moved out of your estate today, under today's rules, stay out of your estate, even if the rules change tomorrow, five years from now, 10 years from now. So I want you to sit with that for a second because that's not just a planning strategy. That is a window that will eventually close. Once the exemption drops, if it does drop, the ability to move assets on this scale and with this level of protection, they will be gone and there's nothing you can really do at that point. Now the structure is worth discussing right now, given everything I've described. There are specific strategies that are worth having a conversation about. Let me break down three, but remember, you need to talk to your estate planning team, accountant, and financial advisor to talk about what makes the most sense. The first of which is a spousal lifetime access trust, also known as a SLAT. A SLAT allows a married couple to move assets out of their taxable estate while the spouse retains indirect access to those assets during their lifetime. So it removes an appreciating asset from the estate and it looks at today's exemption levels. And it's one of the most widely used tools by estate planners right now because of the current window that we're seeing. So if you are married and haven't had a Slack conversation, 2026 is a good year to have one. The second of which is a guaranteed retained annuity trust, also known as a GRAT, and a GRAT allows you to transfer an appreciated asset and the appreciation to your heirs with minimal gift tax cost. You retain an annuity payment for the trust for a fixed period, and any growth above that hurdle rate passes to your beneficiaries free of estate tax. And in a high exemption environment, the mathematical exemption of combining grats with other gifting strategies can be significant. The third strategy is what is called a dynasty trust. This is multi-generational structures that can hold assets for the benefit of children, grandchildren, and beyond, potentially for a hundred years or more. That's some generational wealth. Now it depends on the state for this, and the generation skipping tax of 15 million means you can fund these structures at a larger scale right now that may not be available in a lower exemption environment. And for women who are serious about that generational wealth, as I mentioned, you may want to have this conversation and look about, look at what this really means for you and for generations to come. This is when it is essential to bring in your financial team and say, hey, I've heard a little bit about these strategies, but I need to know what are the pros and the cons of each. Each one is going to have its own tax strategies and consequences to it. Each one will have its own estate planning benefits and downsides. What works for you and where you are at? Estate planning, all of these strategies are never a one size fits all. And that's why I don't dive in here and say this is what you should do or have to do. Personal finance, as I always say, it is just that it is personal. So this is your sign, summer is coming, and you need to take this time and spend 2026 and the rest of it planning out and maximizing what should I do or what should we do if we think our lifetime wealth or our estate could be worth above that $15 million threshold or even above a certain threshold where you could see this $15 million sun setting. Take advantage of all of this now. Explore strategies because it is better to have a conversation now while you have this opportunity and this clawback time period available to you rather than wish you had done something with it. If you want to add someone to your financial team or you know somebody who would benefit from hearing this conversation, we would appreciate you sharing this episode. And I look forward to seeing you again on the next episode of the Wealthcast.