For most of the last several years, estate planning conversations in California carried an implicit deadline: the elevated federal estate tax exclusion was scheduled to sunset and roughly halve, and a lot of urgency was built on top of that.
That did not happen. The exclusion for 2026 is $15,000,000 per person. To be precise about the mechanism, because “the sunset was repealed” is the loose version you will hear: P.L. 119-21, §70106, enacted July 4, 2025, amended IRC §2010(c)(3) to set a new permanent $15,000,000 base for 2026, indexed for inflation after that. It replaced the temporary increase rather than repealing a sunset clause. The practical effect is the same; the sentence people repeat is not accurate.
One naming oddity worth knowing so you are not caught out: the IRS calls this same statute “the OBBBA” in Rev. Proc. 2025-32 and “the Working Families Tax Cuts Bill” on its estate tax page. Cite it as P.L. 119-21, §70106 and you are unambiguous.
If you are reading planning material — a newsletter, a webinar, an article, a page on somebody’s site — that still warns the exclusion halves in 2026, that content predates the change. It is not a subtle update. The premise is gone.
I am raising this on a real estate site because the sunset was used, repeatedly, as a reason to move quickly on transferring a family home. For the overwhelming majority of families I work with, federal estate tax was never the binding constraint — and now it is even less so.
What actually binds a California family home
In practice the decisions that move real money on a long-held Bay Area house are not federal estate tax at all. They are:
- The basis step-up at death — and whether the property is community property or joint tenancy, which decides whether that step-up is 100% or half.
- Proposition 19, and specifically the one-year occupancy requirement that ended the old “keep it and rent it for the low tax base” default.
- The §121 exclusion, which has not been indexed since 1997 and no longer covers a typical long-held Bay Area gain.
Those three, in various combinations, decide nearly every case. A $15,000,000 per-person federal exclusion rarely enters it.
The federal deadlines that are still real
Repealing the sunset did not change the mechanics, and these still matter when an estate is large enough or a return is being filed:
- §2032, alternate valuation: six months after death, and available only if it decreases both the gross estate and the estate tax. It is not an option you elect just because values fell.
- §2518, qualified disclaimer: nine months, measured to receipt of the interest.
- Form 706: nine months, with an automatic six-month extension available via a timely Form 4768. That extends the filing, not the payment.
- Portability, filed late: Rev. Proc. 2022-32 allows a portability-only election within five years of death. This is a genuinely useful rescue and it is under-used.
That last one is worth repeating to any surviving spouse who was told they missed a deadline: if no 706 was filed and the only purpose would be portability, five years is the window.
What I would do with this
Nothing urgent — which is the point. If a plan was built around beating a 2026 deadline, it is worth asking the attorney who drafted it whether the structure still makes sense now that the deadline evaporated. Irrevocable transfers made to beat a sunset that never arrived are worth reviewing, particularly where they gave up a step-up in basis to do it.
I am a broker, not an attorney or a CPA, and this is squarely their territory. What I can tell you is what the house does in each scenario, with real numbers — and that is usually the input the attorney is missing. The sell-or-inherit comparison models the house side of it.