Estate tax calculator that estimates federal and state estate tax from gross estate, deductions, and exemptions. Free, runs in your browser, no signup.
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$16M estate at $13.61M exemption
What this means for your numbers: The worked example's $2.39M taxable estate owes about $578,000 federally. Portability election on Form 706 could add a deceased spouse's unused exclusion.
Illustrative breakdown using the worked example above. The calculator computes your own numbers with the same formula.
Worked example: a $15 million estate
Take an estate worth $15,000,000 with no prior gifts or portability claims. The 2025 exemption is $13,610,000, so the taxable amount is 15,000,000 minus 13,610,000, which equals $1,390,000.
The top bracket tax on the first $1,000,000 of taxable amount is $345,800. The remaining amount above $1,000,000 is $390,000, taxed at 40 percent, which is $156,000. Adding them gives 345,800 plus 156,000, or $501,800 in estimated federal estate tax.
That $501,800 is only 3.35 percent of the gross estate, which surprises most people: the 40 percent rate applies to the amount over the exemption, not the whole estate. An estate of exactly $13,610,000 owes $0, and one of $14,610,000 owes $345,800, because the first $1,000,000 over the exemption spans the 18 to 39 percent graduated brackets.
What this estimate leaves out
The exemption is portable between spouses. If the first spouse dies in 2025 with only $8,000,000 used, the survivor can file Form 706 within about 9 months and carry the unused $5,610,000 forward, giving a combined exemption near $27,220,000. Skipping that filing burns the credit, since portability is not automatic.
State estate taxes are a separate bill with far lower thresholds. Massachusetts and Oregon tax estates over $1,000,000, Connecticut over roughly $13,990,000 in 2025, and Hawaii and Illinois over $4,000,000. A $5,000,000 estate in Boston owes zero federal tax but a five-figure state bill.
The $13,610,000 figure is also scheduled to change. Under the 2017 tax law it would have fallen to about $7,000,000 per person after 2025; later legislation reset the schedule, so anyone planning a large gift or death between now and 2030 should confirm the current-year exemption on Form 706 instructions rather than reuse this number. Lifetime taxable gifts also share the same exemption and reduce what is left at death.
