Per recipient, per donor

2026 Gift Tax Annual Exclusion Calculator

The annual gift exclusion lets one person give a set amount to each recipient every year without filing a gift tax return or consuming any lifetime exemption. For 2026 that amount is $19,000, unchanged from 2025.

The exclusion is counted per recipient and per donor, which is why the arithmetic scales faster than people expect. A married couple giving to four grandchildren can move $152,000 in a single year without paperwork, simply because two donors multiplied by four recipients multiplied by $19,000 beats most people's intuition.

Official 2026 figures used here

How to read the result

Gift splitting is what makes the joint column work. A married couple can treat a gift from one spouse as made half by each, which doubles the per-recipient allowance without requiring two cheques. It needs to be elected consistently, so it is not always as informal as it sounds.

Amounts above the exclusion are not immediately taxed. They consume the lifetime basic exclusion, which for 2026 is $15,000,000, and only gifts beyond that cumulative total trigger gift tax. The annual exclusion is therefore a reporting threshold at least as much as a tax threshold.

A payment for someone's tuition or medical care is excluded from gift tax entirely when paid directly to the institution, with no dollar cap and without using the annual exclusion. That route is separate from the per-recipient figure above and is often the better instrument for larger educational transfers.

Gifts to a spouse who is not a United States citizen follow a different rule: the annual exclusion rises to $194,000 for 2026 because the unlimited marital deduction does not apply to them. Gifts between citizen spouses are generally unlimited and sit outside this calculator altogether.

Reporting is where the annual exclusion actually bites. A gift above the per-recipient allowance generally requires a gift tax return for the year, even when no tax is due, and that return is also how gift splitting is elected and how lifetime exemption usage is recorded. Skipping the filing does not make the gift disappear; it leaves the exemption usage untracked until a later transfer surfaces it.

Questions people ask about this figure

Related calculators