Annual Gift Tax Exclusion for 2027 (Projected)

A projected $19,000 to each person you choose, with no limit on how many people. Give $19,000 apiece to 4 different people and you have moved $76,000 without touching a form or a lifetime allowance. A married couple who agree to split gifts can double that to $38,000 each, or $152,000 across 4 recipients. These are projections; the IRS confirms the real amount in the autumn.

Probably not — our projection holds it at $19,000 for a third straight year. That is not laziness; it comes out of how the rounding works. Section 2503(b)(2) indexes a $10,000 base and then rounds DOWN to the next whole $1,000, so the published amount only jumps when the underlying index clears a full thousand. It cleared one in 2025 and then stalled in 2026, and on trend it is still short of $20,000 for 2027. It would take an adjustment of about 2.6% or more — well above the roughly 2.27% trend — to force the next step.

Almost certainly not, though you do have to report it. Anything above the per-recipient allowance is subtracted from your lifetime exclusion, projected at $15,340,000 for 2027, and no tax is actually due until that entire lifetime amount has been consumed. What changes is the paperwork: you must file Form 709 for the year of the gift so the IRS can track how much of your lifetime allowance you have used. Very few people ever pay gift tax; many more need to file.

They stack in a specific order, and the annual one is use-it-or-lose-it. Each recipient's first $19,000 in a calendar year is simply ignored — it never enters your taxable-gift total and never reduces the lifetime figure. Only the excess is charged against the lifetime exclusion, which is the same pot that shelters your estate at death. So a gift within the annual allowance is genuinely free, while a larger gift is really a pre-payment out of what your heirs would otherwise inherit tax free.

They sit outside it entirely, with no dollar cap at all. Section 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 pay the bill themselves and it becomes an ordinary gift subject to the normal allowance. Pay the school or the hospital, and it does not count.

A projected $198,000 for 2027. Gifts between spouses are normally unlimited under the marital deduction, but that deduction is switched off when the recipient spouse is not a U.S. citizen, and this separate indexed allowance replaces it. It runs off the same 1997-based index as the ordinary per-recipient allowance, just applied to a base ten times larger — which is precisely why it is a useful cross-check on the projection above.

The unified schedule in §2001(c) tops out at 40% — the very same one applied at death, which is precisely what makes the exclusion "unified". Being statutory and unindexed, it requires no estimate for 2027. In practice it only bites once the whole lifetime allowance has been spent.

Late in 2026, most probably November. Since gifting is measured by calendar year, that still leaves a window before December 31 to adjust what you hand over. We refresh this page as soon as the confirmed amount exists.