Updated September 4, 2026. Quick answer. The federal gift tax annual exclusion (what you can give any one person in a calendar year without touching your lifetime exemption or filing Form 709) is $19,000 per recipient for 2026, unchanged from 2025. The 2027 figure is not officially announced yet: the IRS sets it every October or November inside the same revenue procedure that sets the standard deduction and dozens of other inflation-indexed amounts, and no institutional forecaster (Bloomberg Tax, Thomson Reuters Checkpoint, Wolters Kluwer, or Milliman) has published a 2027 gift-exclusion projection as of this reading: only an independent blogger’s own calculation, which this page does not repeat as if it were a forecast.
What’s actually settled, vs. still open
Settled: $19,000 per donee is the number in force right now, confirmed directly from the IRS’s own release: “For tax year 2026, the annual exclusion for gifts remains at $19,000.” A married couple can still combine exclusions via gift-splitting to give $38,000 to one person without filing a taxable gift. The exclusion for gifts to a non-U.S.-citizen spouse is a separate, larger figure: $194,000 for 2026.
Open: the 2027 figure. The exclusion is set by 26 U.S.C. §2503(b), which starts from a $10,000 base and adds a cost-of-living adjustment measured against calendar year 1997, then rounds the result down to the nearest $1,000, the same “round down, never up” rule that has occasionally held the exclusion flat year over year, as it did from 2025 to 2026. That rounding rule is exactly why no one, including CMG, states a 2027 number here: whether inflation clears the next $1,000 line by the September cutoff is not yet knowable.
The numbers, year by year
| Year | Annual exclusion per donee |
|---|---|
| 2018–2021 | $15,000 |
| 2022 | $16,000 |
| 2023 | $17,000 |
| 2024 | $18,000 |
| 2025 | $19,000 |
| 2026 | $19,000 (no change) |
| 2027 | not yet announced |
The gift exclusion is about what you give away. An adviser can price what you keep.
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Why this figure also sets the ABLE account limit
26 U.S.C. §529A(b)(2)(B)(i), the statute governing ABLE accounts for people with disabilities, is written to track this exact exclusion: it uses “the amount in effect under section 2503(b)” as its own base. Through 2025 the two figures were identical every year. They split for the first time in 2026: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act changed the ABLE statute's own base year, so the ABLE limit is now $20,000 while the plain gift exclusion stays at $19,000. See the ABLE contribution limit page for that figure and the base-year mechanics behind the split.
Sources
2026 figure: IRS, “IRS releases tax inflation adjustments for tax year 2026,” read at irs.gov on 2026-09-04, quoting Revenue Procedure 2025-32. Statute and rounding rule: 26 U.S.C. §2503(b), read at law.cornell.edu on 2026-09-04. ABLE cross-reference: 26 U.S.C. §529A(b)(2)(B), same reading. No 2027 figure is published by the IRS or by a named institutional forecaster as of this date.
This page is updated the day the official figure is announced, and any projection above will be struck through rather than deleted, so the record of what was projected vs. what actually happened stays visible. See the 2027 numbers hub for every figure this program tracks, projected vs. official. General information, not tax or legal advice.