Key 2024 Gift and Estate Tax Figures

While all of us (or at least some of us) anxiously await the 2026 “sunset” to see if the current estate and gift tax exemption levels truly do fall back down, there are still some new tax figures to pay attention to in 2024.

• The annual exclusion is up from $17,000 to $18,000.

• The gift and estate tax exemption (and GST exemption) is up from $12.92 million to $13.61 million.

Want to have your mind blown? The inflation adjustments to the estate tax exemption bumped the exemption up by $860,000 in 2023 and by $690,000 in 2024. With portability, you could look at those increases as $1,720,000 for a couple in 2023, and $1,380,000 for a couple in 2024. Now consider this: the estate tax exemption wasn’t over $600,000 until 1998, and didn’t exceed $1,500,000 until 2006 (and portability didn’t start until 2011). That’s how much the estate tax has changed in the last 25 years. The inflation adjustments are now bigger than the exemption itself from 25 years ago. None of this is new information for estate planning attorneys who have been practicing for a while, or for those among us who needed to complete a Form 706 and Ohio ET-2 on pretty much every estate that we handled. But I still find it fascinating.