Gift Tax Exclusion 2026: $19,000 Per Person

$19,000 to each person you choose, with no cap on how many people receive it. The allowance is per giver, per recipient, per calendar year — give $19,000 apiece to 3 people and $57,000 has moved with no form and no tax. A married couple who elect to split gifts can put $38,000 into the same pair of hands.

$19,000, set by IRS Rev. Proc. 2025-32 §4.42(1) under IRC §2503(b). It covers gifts of a present interest — cash, or property the recipient can use straight away. A gift of a future interest, such as one held back in certain trusts, does not qualify for the annual exclusion at all, however small it is.

No. It was $19,000 in 2025 and it is $19,000 in 2026 — the first year with no increase since 2021. That is a rounding artifact, not a policy decision: §2503(b)(2) indexes a $10,000 base and then rounds DOWN to the next whole $1,000, so the published figure only moves when the underlying index clears a full thousand-dollar step. It cleared one for 2025 and then stalled.

$38,000 per recipient. Each spouse has a separate $19,000 allowance, and gift splitting under §2513 lets a couple treat a gift made by one of them as made half by each — useful when the money comes out of one spouse's own account. Splitting is an election, so it does require a Form 709 even though no tax is owed. If each spouse simply writes their own $19,000 check, no form is needed at all.

No. A present-interest gift at or below $19,000 per recipient never enters your taxable-gift total, so there is nothing to report and nothing to track. Reporting starts at the first dollar above the allowance for that recipient, or when you make a gift-splitting or 529 five-year election.

You file Form 709 and almost certainly owe nothing. The excess above the annual allowance is subtracted from your lifetime exclusion — $15,000,000 per person in 2026 — and gift tax only becomes payable once that entire lifetime amount has been consumed. Form 709 is a tracking document, not a bill: far more people file it than ever pay gift tax.

They stack in a fixed order, and the annual one is use-it-or-lose-it. Each recipient's first $19,000 in a calendar year is stripped out before anything is counted, and never touches the lifetime figure. Only the excess is charged against the $15,000,000 lifetime exclusion, which is the same pot that shelters your estate at death — so a large gift is really a pre-payment out of what your heirs would otherwise inherit tax free. A married couple has $30,000,000 between them.

No — they sit outside it entirely, with no dollar cap. IRC §2503(e) excludes tuition paid DIRECTLY to an educational institution and medical expenses paid DIRECTLY to a provider, on top of whatever else you give that person that year. The word directly is doing the work: hand the money to the student or patient to settle the bill themselves and it becomes an ordinary gift subject to the normal allowance.

No. U.S. gift tax is charged to the giver, never the recipient, and a gift is not income — it does not go on the recipient's Form 1040. What the recipient does inherit is the giver's cost basis in gifted property, which matters later if they sell it: an appreciated asset carries its unrealized gain across with it.

$19,000 from you, or $38,000 if you are married and both of you give (or you elect to split). Each child has their own allowance, so a couple with 3 children can move $114,000 in a single year. Paying a child's tuition straight to their college, or their medical bills straight to the hospital, is unlimited on top of that.

The unified rate schedule in §2001(c) tops out at 40% — the same schedule applied at death, which is what makes the exclusion "unified". It is statutory and not indexed, so it does not change for 2026. In practice it only bites after the whole $15,000,000 lifetime allowance has been spent.

April 15, 2027 — the same date as the 2026 income tax return. An extension of time to file your Form 1040 also extends the Form 709 deadline, but it does not extend the time to PAY any gift tax that is genuinely due.