$15 Million or $60,000. The Difference Is Not Your Money.

For years, estate planning conversations ran on a countdown. The elevated exemption from the 2017 tax law was scheduled to sunset after 2025, roughly cutting in half. A great deal of planning was built around beating that clock.

The clock stopped. The One, Big, Beautiful Bill — Public Law 119-21, signed July 4, 2025 — reset the landscape. For 2026, the basic exclusion amount is $15,000,000 per person.

Which is genuinely good news, and also the reason a lot of plans on file right now are aimed at a problem that no longer exists.

The 2026 numbers

Read that last row again. It is not a typo.

The gap that defines Miami

Federal estate tax does not work the way most people assume. It is not really about citizenship in the abstract — it is about whether the U.S. treats you as a domiciliary. If it does not, an entirely different regime applies to your U.S. property.

An executor for a nonresident who is not a U.S. citizen must file Form 706-NA if the fair market value at death of the decedent’s U.S.-situated assets exceeds $60,000, once you factor in the gift tax specific exemption and adjusted taxable gifts.

$15,000,000 versus $60,000. That is a 250x difference, decided by facts most people never think of as tax facts.

In a city where a very large share of real estate is owned by people who are not U.S. domiciliaries, this is not a technicality. It is the single most consequential number in the room — and it is routinely discovered by the family, after a death, when the options are gone.

What counts as a U.S. asset

The U.S. gross estate of a nonresident may include both tangible and intangible property. Two rules do most of the damage:

• Real property and tangible personal property must be physically located in the United States to be included. The Brickell condo is squarely in.
• Stock of U.S. corporations is included regardless of where the stock certificates are physically located. This is the one that surprises people. Holding U.S. shares through a broker abroad does not move them out of the U.S. estate.

So a family with no green cards, no U.S. tax residency, and no U.S. income tax filings can still be sitting on a U.S. estate tax exposure that begins at $60,000 — through a vacation property and a brokerage position.

What changed for U.S. families

If you are a U.S. citizen or domiciliary, the sunset pressure is off. That does not mean nothing to do. It means the questions changed:

• Plans built for a $7 million world. Formula clauses that fund a bypass trust “up to the exemption amount” behave very differently at $15 million than they did when drafted. Some now sweep essentially the entire estate away from a surviving spouse. That is a drafting artifact, not a decision anyone made.
• Irrevocable steps taken to beat a deadline that vanished. Worth reviewing for what they cost in flexibility and basis.
• Basis versus exemption. With a $15 million exclusion, for many families the estate tax is simply not the binding constraint anymore — and gifting away appreciated assets to save an estate tax you were never going to pay can hand your heirs a capital gains bill instead of a step-up.
• Portability. Still requires an election on a timely filed estate tax return. Still missed.
• The annual exclusion. $19,000 per recipient per year, unlimited recipients, no return required, does not touch the $15 million. Still the most underused tool in the box.

The mixed-citizenship household

One more that Miami produces constantly. The unlimited marital deduction — the rule that lets spouses transfer to each other freely — does not apply when the recipient spouse is not a U.S. citizen. Instead you get an annual exclusion of $194,000 for 2026, or you use a qualified domestic trust (QDOT). Families discover this at exactly the wrong moment.

The takeaway

Two things are true at once. If you are a U.S. family, the deadline that drove a decade of planning is gone, and your documents deserve a fresh read against a world that no longer has a cliff in it. If your family is international — and in Miami, that is most families — the number that matters to you may be $60,000, not $15 million, and almost every solution to that problem has to be put in place while everyone is alive and well.

Neither of those is urgent this week. Both are the kind of thing that only gets more expensive to fix.

This article is general information, not tax or legal advice. Estate planning is fact-specific and involves legal documents we do not draft. Please talk to us, and to your attorney, before acting.