Updated August 2, 2026. Quick answer: a QTIP trust is the standard answer to the second-marriage problem: your surviving spouse receives all the income for life, and what remains passes to the people you named — usually children from a first marriage. Your spouse cannot redirect it. The trade-off, which most descriptions leave out, is that the property is pulled back into your spouse’s estate when they die.
The three conditions, from the statute
Income for life, at least annually. The spouse must be “entitled to all the income from the property, payable annually or at more frequent intervals”. Not income at a trustee’s discretion — all of it, as of right.
Nobody can redirect it during their lifetime. The statute requires that “no person has a power to appoint any part of the property to any person other than the surviving spouse” while the spouse is alive. That restriction is the entire point: it is what makes the remainder actually reach your children rather than depending on goodwill that may not survive you.
The executor elects, once. The election “shall be made by the executor on the return” and “once made, shall be irrevocable”. So the decision falls to whoever administers your estate, on a deadline, after you are gone. Naming an executor who understands that this election is theirs to make is part of setting it up.
The trade-off nobody mentions
The reason a QTIP qualifies for the marital deduction is that the tax is deferred, not forgiven. Section 2044 collects:
“The value of the gross estate shall include the value of any property to which this section applies in which the decedent had a qualifying income interest for life.”
26 U.S.C. 2044(a)
So the property sits in your surviving spouse’s taxable estate at the second death — even though they never had the power to give it to anyone but themselves, and even though it is on its way to your children. Whether that costs anything depends on the exclusion, which for 2026 is $15,000,000 per person. For most families the answer is nothing at all; for larger estates it is the number the whole plan turns on.
Portability interacts here too, and the interaction is technical enough that it is worth raising with the person drafting rather than reading about. The exclusion and how it works covers the underlying figures.
What it does and does not solve
Solves: the fear that assets left outright to a second spouse will end up with that spouse’s own children, or a later partner. Under a QTIP that cannot happen — not because anyone is being watched, but because the power to redirect does not exist.
Does not solve: retirement accounts, which run on beneficiary rules a trust does not override — the 401(k) resets on remarriage whatever your trust says. It also does not solve the tension of timing: your children inherit when your spouse dies, which if your spouse is close to their age may be a long wait, and if your spouse is much younger may be a very long one. That is worth saying out loud to everyone involved while you are alive, because it is the part families are most often surprised by.
Does not override: a surviving spouse’s statutory right to elect against the will. What the elective share comes to is a separate calculation, and remarriage is exactly when it bites.
Related
The full set of options for a blended family, and if there is no plan at all, what the state does instead — which is rarely what anyone would have chosen.
QTIP requirements from 26 U.S.C. § 2056(b)(7)(B); the inclusion rule from § 2044(a); the $15,000,000 2026 basic exclusion from IRC § 2010(c)(3) and Rev. Proc. 2025-32. Read August 2026. Trust drafting is legal work and this is general information, not legal advice.
If either spouse is not a US citizen, one default fails silently: there is no unlimited marital deduction for a non-citizen spouse — the statute denies it outright, and most plans are drafted assuming otherwise. Living abroad changes the benefits side too: Social Security usually follows you and Medicare never does.