The estate tax sunset never came. The exemption is $15 million.

What changed

For years, estate plans were written around a deadline: the 2017 tax law’s doubled exemption was scheduled to sunset after 2025, cutting the exemption roughly in half (to an estimated $7 million per person). The federal tax law enacted in July 2025 cancelled that sunset and instead set the exemption at $15 million per person beginning January 1, 2026, indexed for inflation in later years. The gift tax and generation-skipping transfer tax exemptions track the same number.

What it means for Florida families

Florida has no state estate tax and no inheritance tax, so the federal exemption is the only estate-tax line that matters here. At $15 million per person, the overwhelming majority of Florida estates owe no estate tax at all, and estate planning is no longer about tax for most families. It is about the things that actually go wrong: probate delay and cost, incapacity without documents, blended-family conflict, and beneficiary forms that override the will.

If your plan contains machinery built mainly to dodge the old, lower exemption (some AB-trust structures, for example), it may now be complexity without a payoff, and in some cases it costs heirs a step-up in basis. Worth a review, not a panic.

What to do

Married couples with larger estates should still file for portability when the first spouse dies, preserving the unused exemption. And if your net worth is anywhere near eight figures, coordinated planning still pays. For everyone else, the priorities are the fundamentals: see trust vs will, run the one-minute plan quiz, or review the estate planning checklist.