Why this exists
The federal exemption is $15,000,000, so most published guidance tells families they have nothing to worry about. State thresholds start at $1,000,000 in Oregon. A paid-off house and a retirement account clear that. There was no machine-readable version of the state rules, and the human-readable versions disagree with one another, so we assembled one and published it.
What is in it
All fifty states and the District of Columbia. Twelve states plus the District of Columbia levy an estate tax, five states levy an inheritance tax, Maryland levies both and credits one against the other, and the remaining thirty four levy neither.
- Estate tax: Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Illinois, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Connecticut, Vermont, Hawaii, Maine, District of Columbia, Maryland
- Inheritance tax: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Kentucky, Nebraska, Maryland
- Neither: the other thirty four, each carried explicitly with the year it repealed if it formerly taxed
Including the states that charge nothing is deliberate. Absence is ambiguous: someone who looks up Texas and finds no row cannot tell whether Texas levies nothing or whether the file is incomplete, and a program cannot tell either. It also answers the question people actually ask, which is which states do not tax this. Florida and Nevada are the two whose answer is structural rather than political, because both state constitutions forbid the legislature from creating such a tax.
The traps, which are the point
New York is a cliff. Once the estate exceeds 105% of the exemption, $7,717,500 in 2026, the exemption disappears completely and the whole estate is taxed from the first dollar. Oregon taxes the entire estate rather than the excess once you reach $1,000,000. Pennsylvania has no exemption at all, and its rate depends on who inherits rather than how much. Washington changed mid-year, so deaths before and after July 1, 2026 use different exclusions and different top rates.
Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Illinois carry no bracket rows on purpose. They compute from the former federal credit table or an interrelated calculation, and inventing rows for them would be a falsehood a program would believe.
How it was checked
Every figure was read from the state’s own department of revenue or its statute, with the citation and source URL stored per record. The repository includes a verification script that recomputes each bracket state across a grid of estate values against an independent implementation, and that also runs a deliberately corrupted copy to confirm the check can actually fail. A test that cannot fail proves nothing.
Every figure, and where it came from
The seventeen jurisdictions that tax death, with the 2026 exemption, the statute, and a link to the source it was read from. Read exemption_kind before subtracting the exemption: Massachusetts and Rhode Island publish a filing threshold paired with a statutory credit, and Oregon and New York apply their tables to the whole estate once the threshold is crossed.
| Jurisdiction | Tax | 2026 exemption | Citation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Connecticut | Estate | $15,000,000 | Conn. Gen. Stat. §12-391 |
| District of Columbia | Estate | $4,988,400 | D.C. Code §47-3702; §47-3701(14) (COLA) |
| Hawaii | Estate | $5,490,000 | HRS ch. 236E; Act 27, SLH 2018 |
| Illinois | Estate | $4,000,000 | 35 ILCS 405/2 |
| Massachusetts | Estate | $2,000,000 | G.L. c. 65C §2A |
| Maryland | Estate and inheritance | $5,000,000 | Md. Tax-Gen. §§7-203, 7-309 |
| Maine | Estate | $7,160,000 | 36 M.R.S. ch. 577; §4119 (indexing) |
| Minnesota | Estate | $3,000,000 | Minn. Stat. §291.016 subd. 3(b)(4); §291.03 |
| New York | Estate | $7,350,000 | N.Y. Tax Law §952(c) (cliff); Form ET-706-I |
| Oregon | Estate | $1,000,000 | ORS 118.010 |
| Rhode Island | Estate | $1,838,056 | RI Div. of Taxation ADV 2025-27 |
| Vermont | Estate | $5,000,000 | 32 V.S.A. §7442a |
| Washington | Estate | $3,000,000 | RCW ch. 83.100; SB 5813 (Ch. 421, 2025 Laws, signed 2025-05-20) |
| Kentucky | Inheritance | $500 | KRS 140.070, 140.080 |
| Nebraska | Inheritance | $100,000 | Neb. Rev. Stat. §§77-2004 to 77-2006 |
| New Jersey | Inheritance | $25,000 | N.J.S.A. 54:38-1 (estate tax); N.J.S.A. 54:34-1 et seq. (inheritance tax) |
| Pennsylvania | Inheritance | $0 | 72 P.S. §9116 |
The thirty four that levy neither
Recorded explicitly rather than omitted, because a missing row is ambiguous. Status distinguishes a statute that was actually repealed from a pick-up tax that merely computes to zero and is still on the books, which is a different legal fact and the one that matters if you are asking whether a tax could return. Nine carry an unverified flag, shown below: those states levy nothing and every source agrees, but the mechanism or the year was not confirmed against a primary source.
Generated from the dataset at commit d163bbe. Figures retrieved 2026-07-11.
Licence and citation
Licensed CC BY 4.0. Use it commercially, modify it, build on it. Attribution is what keeps corrections flowing back, which is how the figures stay right. Cite as: Klagge, Kevin D. “US state estate and inheritance tax, 2026.” StepUpLaw.
Updated 2026-09-01. Compiled by Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., Fla. Bar No. 99502. This is reference data, not legal or tax advice, and using it creates no attorney-client relationship. Real returns involve deductions, lifetime gifts, multi-state apportionment and elections that change the result. Verify against the statute before relying on it for a filing.
More Guides on Estate Tax by State
This guide is part of Estate Tax by State.