Changes in the Estate Tax Under the Tax Cut and Jobs Act
As part of the sweeping overhaul of the tax code, the threshold for the estate tax has been effectively doubled. The estate tax is levied upon assets that are transferred upon death, for this reason it is colloquially referred to as the “death tax.” For practical purposes, most taxpayers will never pay the estate tax because the tax only applies to large estates and because careful estate planning can help large estates largely avoid the tax. The Estate Tax In 2017, the death tax only applied if the estate was valued at over $5.49 million for single-filers and 10.98 million for married couples filing jointly. At this threshold, the tax was unlikely to apply to a large portion of Americans. According to the New York Times , 2.6 million people died in the United States in 2016. During that same year, only 5,219 estate taxes were filed with the Internal Revenue Service, representing a tax that touched upon only 0.2% of deaths during the year. While the estate tax does