United States.

The United States imposes federal estate, gift, and generation-skipping transfer tax under IRC Title 26, Chapters 11–13. Following the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (Pub. L. 119-21, July 2025), the basic exclusion is set at $15 million from 1 January 2026, with portability of the deceased spousal unused exclusion under § 2010(c). The headline rate remains 40%.

For non-resident aliens, only US-situs assets are taxed — but with a $60,000 exemption rather than the $15 million available to citizens and domiciliaries. Cross-border planning hinges on the seventeen jurisdictions with which the United States has bilateral estate-tax treaties (Canada among them), the QDOT regime under § 2056A for non-citizen surviving spouses, the foreign-trust reporting regime, and the § 877A exit tax for covered expatriates.

The memoranda in this series address the recurring fact patterns in US cross-border estate planning — including NRA situs analysis, QDOT mechanics, Subchapter J on foreign trusts, PFIC and CFC overlay for foreign investments, the § 2801 transfer tax on gifts and bequests from covered expatriates, and the interaction between US federal tax and state-level estate taxes in New York, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, among others.