Estate Planners Ponder Their Profession’s Future At Heckerling

[Special thanks to Joel C. Dobris (Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law) for bringing this article to my attention.]

U.S. federal estate planning has changed both dramatically and permanently (or at least, as one wag put it, until Congress reconvenes) thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (‘OBBBA”) that went into effect on July 5, 2025, but it is not yet entirely clear post-OBBBA what the industry is now going to become. 

Effective January 1, 2026, the lifetime unified gift and estate tax credit is now set at the equivalent of $15 million per taxpayer (effectively $30 million for a married couple), with indexing thereafter, and this means that the overwhelming percentage of U.S. taxpayers no longer need to do creative or aggressive tax planning in connection with their potential federal estate tax liabilities. The estimates differed at Heckerling, but it appears that the number of U.S. families with greater than $30 million in total assets is somewhere between 0.25% to 0.4%, and maybe as high as 0.7%, but it’s probably around 200,000 families.

That said, the show must always go on, and 2026 Heckerling offered a diverse menu of topics that was surprisingly interesting, in the absence of a greater over-arching theme. After all, even if the federal estate tax is largely gone, estate planning will go on—the one certitude you can still count on in life is death, even if not always taxes.

The OBBBA provision that sets the lifetime unified gift and estate tax credit equivalent at $15 million ($30 million for married couples), together with the decision by Congress not to eliminate the step-up in tax basis to fair market value on death under Code Section 1014(b), has effectively turned traditional estate planning its head: rather than trying to move assets out of the taxable estate of the senior generation, the goal now is to keep all the assets in the estate (at least up to $30 million), and possibly even move assets upstream rather than downstream. For instance, healthy children can consider gifting highly appreciated assets to their parents, rather than the other direction, so that the assets can be stepped up to full fair market value on the death of the parent, then passed back to the kids (or maybe to grandchildren), thus making income tax liabilities magically disappear. In short, running assets through an estate rather than around it is the official new “hot” idea. Similarly, a SLAT might be drafted so that it also qualifies for a QTIP election (a “QTIPable SLAT”) so that the donor spouse can “wait and see” whether to utilize the donor spouse’s lifetime gift tax exemption or to qualify the transfer for the estate tax marital deduction.  Alternatively, a SLAT might grant the beneficiary spouse a general power of appointment over some or all of the trust assets and thus intentionally include those assets in the beneficiary spouse’s estate on death. In short, there are lots of new, creative ideas brewing on how best to take advantage of Code Section 1014(b) in the context of an estate plan.

For more information see Joseph B. Darby III “Estate Planners Ponder Their Profession’s Future At Heckerling,” Financial Advisor, February 17, 2026.