2027 estate and gift tax exemption: projected numbers

The federal estate and gift tax exemption entered a new era in 2026, and the search interest in “2027 estate and gift tax exemption” reflects planners trying to look one year ahead. The honest framing up front: the 2027 number is a projection, not a published figure. The IRS releases each year’s inflation adjustments in the fall, so the official 2027 exemption will not exist until roughly October or November 2026. What we can do is anchor on the confirmed 2026 figure, explain the indexing method the statute requires, and project the 2027 range responsibly — clearly labeled as such.

The short answer. For 2026, the basic exclusion amount is $15,000,000 per individual ($30,000,000 for a married couple), confirmed by the IRS and made permanent by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). It is indexed for inflation starting in 2027. With the C-CPI-U window now closed, a reasonable projection for the 2027 exemption is roughly $15.46–$15.49 million per person, with $15,490,000 as the central estimate, depending on which divisor and October treatment the IRS ultimately chooses, rounded to the nearest $10,000. The annual gift exclusion is $19,000 for 2026 and has effectively decided at $20,000 for 2027, because the unrounded figure now clears the rounding threshold comfortably. None of the 2027 figures are official until the IRS fall release, expected between mid-October and November 2026. See our IRS 2027 inflation adjustments tracker for the full set of indexed 2027 numbers and what the CPI has already decided.

What OBBBA actually changed

The context that matters is the sunset that did not happen. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act roughly doubled the estate and gift exemption but with an expiration date: absent new legislation, the elevated amount was scheduled to lapse at the end of 2025 and fall back to its pre-2018 level adjusted for inflation — approximately $7 million per person — on January 1, 2026. For two years, estate-planning advice was dominated by “use it or lose it” urgency, pushing high-net-worth families to make large lifetime gifts before the window closed.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, 2025, removed that cliff. It set the basic exclusion amount at $15,000,000 for 2026 and, crucially, did not attach a sunset — the exemption is now a permanent feature of the code, indexed for inflation, unless a future Congress changes it. The IRS subsequently confirmed the $15,000,000 figure for 2026 in its tax-year-2026 inflation-adjustment release, up from $13,990,000 for decedents dying in 2025.

The practical consequence is that the pre-2025 planning urgency is gone. Families that rushed large gifts to “lock in” the high exemption did nothing wrong, but families that waited did not lose the benefit. The exemption is no longer a disappearing resource; it is a stable, inflation-tracked baseline.

How the indexing works — and why the 2027 number is a projection

The exemption is tied to inflation by statute. The basic exclusion amount under IRC §2010(c)(3) is adjusted each year using the chained Consumer Price Index (C-CPI-U), the same chained measure the §1(f)(3) inflation mechanism uses for the broader code. The estate exemption rounds to the nearest $10,000; the annual gift exclusion rounds to the nearest $1,000.

Because the adjustment depends on the C-CPI-U reading for a measurement period that ran through August 2026, the exact 2027 figure is now bounded tightly, even though the IRS still waits until the fall to publish it officially. Projecting from the $15,000,000 base using the statutory chained-CPI method and the full window of data now published puts the 2027 exemption in a $15.46 million to $15.49 million range per person, with $15,490,000 as the central estimate. That range has narrowed now that the window is closed, but it has not collapsed to a single number, because two separate sources of uncertainty remain open: whether the IRS’s calculation treats the missing October 2025 data point — never collected, because of the 2025 government shutdown, and never to be published — by averaging the eleven months that exist or by imputing it from the surrounding months; and whether the agency’s own 2025 base-year average ultimately lands at the originally reported 177.11 or the since-revised 177.206. Averaging the eleven real months against the 177.11 divisor gives $15,490,000; the same average against the revised 177.206 divisor gives $15,480,000; imputing October instead gives $15,470,000 or $15,460,000 depending on the same divisor choice. Anyone quoting a precise 2027 dollar amount today is estimating, and this guide labels it that way deliberately. For the full method and every other indexed 2027 figure it reproduces, see the IRS 2027 inflation adjustments tracker.

The annual gift exclusion — why 2027 rises to $20,000

The annual gift exclusion under IRC §2503(b) is the amount you can give any number of individuals each year without using any of your lifetime exemption or filing a gift-tax return. For 2026 it is $19,000 per recipient, unchanged from 2025. A married couple can combine their exclusions through gift-splitting to give $38,000 per recipient.

For 2027, the base case has changed. The exclusion is built off a $10,000 base tied to 1997, indexed for inflation using the same chained-CPI method that drives the estate exemption, and rounded down to the nearest $1,000. Running that formula against the 1997 base index of 90.886 and the now-closed 2026-window C-CPI-U average of 182.8565 (September 2025 through August 2026, all eleven real months) gives 10,000 × (182.8565 / 90.886) = $20,119 unrounded, which rounds down to $20,000. That is a real step up, not a rounding coin-flip — it would have taken a fall of roughly 6% in the August C-CPI-U reading to pull the unrounded figure back under $19,500 and hold the exclusion at $19,000, and the actual reading landed nowhere near that.

The reason $19,000 held for two years running is worth explaining, because it looks like a pattern and is not. The unrounded 2026 figure came in at about $19,490 — just short of the $19,500 the rounding rule needs to tick up to $20,000. That near-miss, not a lack of inflation, is why 2026 repeated 2025’s $19,000 exclusion. For 2027 the same arithmetic clears that threshold with enough room that $20,000 is now the number to plan around, not $19,000.

What this means for planning

A permanent $15 million exemption changes the calculus for most households in one direction: the federal estate tax is now a concern for a smaller slice of families than the pre-2018 baseline would have made it. A married couple with full portability shields $30 million before any federal estate tax applies in 2026, rising with inflation thereafter.

Three durable takeaways follow. First, portability still requires a filing — the surviving spouse only inherits the deceased spouse’s unused exemption (the DSUE amount) if an estate tax return is filed to elect it, even when no tax is owed. Second, the annual exclusion is still the cleanest gifting tool, because $19,000 per recipient in 2026 (or $38,000 per couple), rising to a projected $20,000 in 2027, moves wealth out of the estate every year without touching the lifetime exemption or triggering a return. Third, state estate and inheritance taxes are separate — several states impose their own estate tax at thresholds far below the federal $15 million, so the federal permanence does not eliminate state-level planning.

For the income-tax side of a household’s picture, the same chained-CPI mechanism drives the annual bracket and deduction adjustments — see how adjusted gross income and modified AGI feed the thresholds that interact with these limits.

What to verify

• The official 2027 figures when the IRS publishes them, expected around October–November 2026. Until then, every 2027 number on this page is a projection.
• Your state’s estate or inheritance tax, which can apply far below the federal threshold and is unaffected by OBBBA.
• Portability filing requirements with an estate attorney if a spouse has died — the DSUE election is easy to miss and cannot always be fixed later.
• The annual exclusion before large gifts, since the per-recipient figure is the line between a no-filing gift and one that uses lifetime exemption.

Sources

• 2026 figures, confirmed: IRS — Tax inflation adjustments for tax year 2026, including OBBBA amendments. Basic exclusion $15,000,000 (up from $13,990,000 in 2025); annual exclusion $19,000.
• OBBBA permanence (no sunset): One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, amending IRC §2010(c)(3).
• Inflation-indexing method (chained CPI, rounding): IRC §1(f)(3) and §2010(c)(3); annual exclusion under IRC §2503(b).
• 2027 figures are projected, not official, pending the IRS fall release. Ranges on this page are estimates based on the $15M base and plausible chained-CPI factors.