Updated August 3, 2026. Quick answer: no — not any more, and that is the whole point. Since the FDIC’s 2024 rewrite a living trust sits in the same insurance category as a payable-on-death account, so moving money into a trust does not add coverage on top of POD designations you already have. It gives you the same $250,000-per-beneficiary allowance, capped at five, that a free form at the branch would have given you.
What changed
The FDIC consolidated informal revocable trusts (POD, in-trust-for, Totten), formal revocable trusts (living and family trusts) and irrevocable trusts into a single trust accounts category (12 CFR 330.10). Deposits passing from the same grantor are aggregated across all three forms, and the combined category is capped at five beneficiaries.
So is the trust worthless here?
For deposit insurance, it adds nothing a POD form would not. For everything else a trust exists to do — avoiding probate across your whole estate rather than one account, controlling when and how people inherit rather than handing it over outright, managing assets if you become incapacitated, keeping the distribution private — it does what it always did. Just do not buy one to raise a bank limit.
The mistake this creates
People who set up a trust years ago often assume their bank money is now covered under a separate allowance from their POD accounts. It is not, and nobody writes to tell them. If you hold more than $1,250,000 per grantor at one institution across any mix of trust and POD accounts, the excess is uninsured — check it rather than assume it.
The other thing worth checking is whether the trust was ever funded. A trust that exists on paper while the accounts and the house remain in your own name does nothing at all, for insurance or for probate, and it is the most common and most expensive planning failure there is — what a living trust costs, and what funding it involves.
Credit unions are on different rules until 1 December 2026
This is the part almost nobody has caught up with. The NCUA has not yet made the same change. Under the rule currently in force, a revocable trust with five or fewer beneficiaries is covered at beneficiaries × $250,000, and a revocable trust with more than five beneficiaries uses a different formula altogether — one that is not capped at five (12 CFR 745.4(a)).
That changes on 1 December 2026. The NCUA’s Simplification of Share Insurance Rules creates a single trust-accounts category matching the FDIC’s, caps coverage at $250,000 per beneficiary up to five beneficiaries — $1,250,000 per grantor per credit union — and, in the rule’s own words, “eliminate[s] formulas in the current rules for revocable trust accounts with more than five beneficiaries and irrevocable trust accounts” (89 FR 79397, final rule, effective 1 December 2026).
The practical consequence, with the date attached. If you hold money at a credit union in a revocable trust naming more than five beneficiaries, some of your coverage is scheduled to disappear on 1 December 2026. You have until then to move the excess to another institution or restructure. Nothing about this is an emergency — but it is a deadline, and it is not being advertised.
Related: how POD beneficiaries multiply coverage · the full category table · whether a trust is worth it where you live.
Every coverage figure on this page is read from the regulation itself — 12 CFR part 330 (FDIC) and part 745 (NCUA) via the official eCFR, the Federal Register for rules not yet in force, and SIPC’s own statement of what it covers. General information, not legal or financial advice; confirm your own position with your institution or the FDIC’s EDIE tool before relying on it.