US Gift Tax Calculator

$19,000 per recipient, per year, with no limit on the number of recipients. Give $19,000 each to five children and you have moved $95,000 with no gift tax, no Form 709 and no use of your lifetime exemption. A married couple can give $38,000 to each recipient, either by each giving $19,000 from their own funds or by electing to split gifts. The annual exclusion resets every 1 January and cannot be carried forward if unused.

$15,000,000 per person. The One Big Beautiful Bill increased the basic exclusion amount to $15,000,000 for calendar year 2026, up from $13,990,000 in 2025, and indexed it going forward. It is a unified gift and estate exemption, so every dollar of it you use on lifetime gifts is a dollar less available against your estate at death. A married couple has $30,000,000 between them.

No. US gift tax is charged on the giver, not the recipient, and a gift received is not gross income. There is one important reporting exception: if you receive more than $100,000 in gifts or bequests from a non-resident alien individual or a foreign estate during the year, you must report it on Form 3520. That is a reporting obligation, not a tax, but the penalties for missing it are severe.

Usually yes. Form 709 is required whenever you give any single person more than the annual exclusion in a year, even though no tax is due because the excess is absorbed by your lifetime exemption. The form's job is to track cumulative taxable gifts against that exemption so the running total is available at death. It is also required to elect gift splitting, to allocate generation-skipping transfer exemption, and to report gifts of future interests of any amount.

15 April 2027, the same deadline as your Form 1040. An extension of time to file your income tax return on Form 4868 also extends the Form 709 deadline, or you can extend Form 709 alone on Form 8892. Note that an extension to file is not an extension to pay — if gift tax is actually due, it must be paid by the original deadline to avoid interest and penalties.

40% on the excess over your remaining lifetime exemption. The unified rate schedule is graduated, but because it reaches its top 40% rate at $1,000,000 of cumulative taxable gifts and the exemption is $15,000,000, in practice any individual who has exhausted their exemption is paying a flat 40% on everything above it. Very few people ever pay gift tax at all — the exemption is simply consumed and the bill lands, if anywhere, on the estate.

$194,000 for 2026. Gifts to a US-citizen spouse qualify for the unlimited marital deduction, but that deduction is not available where the recipient spouse is not a US citizen — Congress was concerned that assets could leave the US tax net entirely. In its place there is a much larger annual exclusion, $194,000 for 2026, indexed each year. Anything above that is a taxable gift against your lifetime exemption. Read our guide to the [$194,000 non-citizen spouse exclusion](/resources/blog/us-gift-tax-non-citizen-spouse-2026).

A married couple may elect under section 2513 to treat gifts made to third parties as made one-half by each spouse, which doubles the annual exclusion to $38,000 per recipient and lets one spouse's gift draw on the other's lifetime exemption. Both spouses must consent, and the election applies to every gift either of them made that year — you cannot split some and not others. It requires a Form 709 even where no tax results, which is the main practical cost.

Not if you pay the institution directly. Under section 2503(e), amounts paid straight to an educational institution for tuition, or straight to a medical provider for someone's medical care, are excluded entirely — unlimited amounts, no annual exclusion used, no Form 709. The exclusion is destroyed if you reimburse the student or patient instead of paying the provider, and tuition means tuition, not room, board or books.

Yes. Paying a debt on someone else's behalf, or forgiving a loan you made to them, is a gift of the amount discharged in the year it happens. Making a below-market-interest loan is also a gift of the foregone interest under the section 7872 imputed-interest rules. This is one of the most commonly missed gift events in family financial arrangements, particularly informal loans between parents and adult children.

Almost always. A gift to a trust is a gift of a future interest unless the beneficiaries have a present right to the property, which is why Crummey withdrawal powers exist — they convert the transfer into a present interest so the annual exclusion applies. Gifts of future interests must be reported on Form 709 regardless of amount, and gifts to trusts with skip persons raise generation-skipping transfer tax allocation questions that need to be handled on the same return.

They are protected. Treasury and the IRS confirmed in final regulations that individuals who make large gifts while the basic exclusion amount is high will not be adversely affected if the exclusion is lower at the date of death — the estate tax computation uses the greater of the exclusion in force at death or the amount already used on lifetime gifts. This anti-clawback rule is the reason large lifetime gifting is a genuine planning strategy rather than a timing bet.

US gift tax follows citizenship, so an American in the UK is subject to it on worldwide gifts exactly as if they lived in New York, with the same $19,000 and $15,000,000 figures. The UK has no gift tax as such, but lifetime gifts are potentially exempt transfers for inheritance tax that become chargeable if the donor dies within seven years, and the UK has its own annual exemption of £3,000. A gift can therefore be free in the US and still create a UK exposure, or the reverse.

The UK approaches gifting entirely differently. There is a £3,000 annual exemption, a small gifts exemption of £250 per person, exemptions for gifts on marriage, and an exemption for normal expenditure out of surplus income. Beyond those, gifts are potentially exempt transfers: free of inheritance tax if the donor survives seven years, and tapered in between. The two regimes do not align, so a plan built around $19,000 a year needs checking against the UK rules before it is implemented.

Yes, and the gift tax value is the fair market value on the date of the gift. The important difference is basis: the recipient generally takes your original cost basis on a lifetime gift, so the unrealised gain travels with the asset and is taxed when they sell. Assets left at death normally receive a step-up in basis instead. That trade-off — using exemption now versus preserving the step-up — is the central question in most lifetime gifting decisions.

The late-filing penalty is 5% of the tax due per month up to 25%, with a late-payment penalty of 0.5% per month on top, plus interest. Where no tax is due — which is the usual position — those percentage penalties compute to nothing. The real cost of not filing is different: the statute of limitations on a gift never starts running until the gift is adequately disclosed on a return, so an unreported gift can be revalued by the IRS decades later, at death, when the evidence has gone.

Per person, on both ends. Each giver has their own $19,000 per recipient, and each recipient has their own limit from each giver. So two parents can each give $19,000 to each of three children — $114,000 in total — entirely within the annual exclusions and with no Form 709 required, provided each parent gives from their own funds rather than splitting. If the money all comes from one spouse's account, a split-gift election and a Form 709 are needed to reach the same result.

It applies the 2026 figures exactly: a $19,000 annual exclusion per donee, $194,000 for a non-citizen spouse, a $15,000,000 basic exclusion amount and a 40% rate on the excess. It assumes gifts to third parties are spread evenly between recipients, so if you gave very different amounts to different people, run it once per recipient for a precise answer. It does not model generation-skipping transfer tax, gifts of future interests, valuation discounts on closely held interests, or state-level gift taxes.

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If the gift is substantial, involves a trust or a closely held business, crosses the US/UK border, or goes to a non-citizen spouse, the interactions are worth modelling before the transfer rather than after — a gift cannot be unwound once made, and basis, exemption and inheritance tax consequences all lock in on the day. Book a free 20-minute call with a TaxStone adviser to review the US and UK positions together.