Gift Tax Calculator
Work out whether a gift is taxable, how much the annual exclusion covers, and what is left of your lifetime exemption. 2024 to 2026 figures.
Changing your currency elsewhere on the site will not affect this page.
The gift tax is a US federal tax on transfers of money or property you make while alive. It exists to stop people from emptying an estate by giving it away before death. Almost nobody actually pays it. Two exclusions do the work, and between them they cover any gift most families will ever make.
Key numbers:
| Year | Annual exclusion, per recipient | Lifetime exemption, per person |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | $19,000 | $15,000,000 |
| 2025 | $19,000 | $13,990,000 |
| 2024 | $18,000 | $13,610,000 |
The top rate is 40%, and it only bites on amounts past the lifetime exemption.
Step 1, the annual exclusion. Gifts up to the annual figure per recipient per calendar year are ignored completely. No tax, no form, no record to keep. You can give that much to as many different people as you like, every year, and none of it is reportable. A couple with three children and six grandchildren can move over $340,000 a year this way without touching anything else.
Step 2, gifts above it. The excess counts against your lifetime exemption and you file Form 709. You almost certainly owe nothing. The form is a running tally, not a bill.
Step 3, past the lifetime exemption. Now it is real. Everything beyond it is taxed at a flat 40%. The statutory table does start at 18%, but those brackets run from the first dollar of lifetime transfers and top out at $1,000,000, which the exemption credit consumed long ago. At the point where you owe anything at all, 40% is the rate.
Unlimited exclusions, no filing needed:
| Transfer | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Gifts to a US citizen spouse | No limit whatsoever |
| Tuition | Must be paid directly to the institution |
| Medical expenses | Must be paid directly to the provider |
| Gifts to qualifying charities | Fully deductible |
| Gifts to political organizations | Exempt |
The word “directly” is not decoration. Write the check to the university and the whole amount is excluded. Write it to your grandchild so they can pay the university, and it is an ordinary gift that eats your annual exclusion.
Gift splitting. Married couples can treat a gift from one of them as coming half from each, doubling the exclusion per recipient. It needs a Form 709 with both spouses’ consent even though no tax is owed. Gifts to a non-citizen spouse are the one exception to the unlimited marital deduction: those get their own annual cap, $194,000 in 2026.
Worked example: In 2026 you give your daughter $75,000 toward a house.
- Annual exclusion: $19,000, gone before anything is counted
- Reportable: $56,000
- That reduces your lifetime exemption from $15,000,000 to $14,944,000
- Tax owed today: $0. File Form 709 and carry on
The estate tax connection, which is the part people miss. The gift and estate exemptions are one pool, not two. Every dollar of lifetime exemption you spend giving things away is a dollar your estate cannot pass tax-free later. Gifting early still helps, because future growth on the gifted asset happens outside your estate, but the exemption itself is not doubled by using it in life.
Older articles warn that the exemption was about to fall back to roughly $7 million when the 2017 tax law expired. That reversion was cancelled: the 2025 law set the basic exclusion at $15 million and indexes it from there, so the cliff people planned around no longer exists.
How we build and check this calculator
This calculator runs entirely in your browser, so the numbers you enter stay on your device. The math behind it is written by hand and tested against worked examples and standard references before the page goes live.
SuperGlobalCalculator is independently built and maintained. See how we build and verify our calculators.