What Would Your State’s Estate Tax Take?

Why the State Number Is the One That Bites

The federal exemption is about $15 million per person, so most families hear “you have nothing to worry about.” Federally, that is true. But a dozen states and D.C. start taxing at $1 million to $7 million, and five states tax the people who inherit. An ordinary estate (a paid-off house, retirement savings, a brokerage account) clears those state thresholds all the time. Florida collects no estate tax and no inheritance tax. Article VII, Section 5 of the Florida Constitution provides that no tax on estates or inheritances may be levied “in excess of the aggregate of amounts which may be allowed to be credited upon or deducted from” the federal tax. That is a cap rather than an outright ban, and because the federal credit for state death taxes ended for deaths after 2004, the cap now sits at zero. Chapter 198 of the Florida Statutes is still on the books and computes to nothing.

How Much Is the Massachusetts Estate Tax on a $4 Million Estate?

The question I get most about this is, “How much would Massachusetts take from a $4 million estate?” About $180,800, which is a little over 4.5% of the estate, and the calculator above shows the arithmetic line by line when you leave Massachusetts selected and run the $4,000,000 default. Massachusetts starts taxing at $2 million, and once an estate crosses that line the tax runs through the old federal credit table on the whole estate, less a $99,600 credit that stands in for the first $2 million. The same estate in Florida owes the state nothing. The part people miss is what puts an ordinary family at $4 million in the first place. A paid-off house, two retirement accounts and a life insurance policy you own get there without anyone feeling wealthy, and the policy counts even though the children receive it outside the estate.

Clients are often confused about whose move matters, and ask me, “Do we both have to be Florida residents before the first death?” The tax is measured at each death against that person’s domicile. When everything passes to the surviving spouse, the marital deduction usually means the old state collects little or nothing at the first death and the full bill lands at the second, so the survivor’s domicile on that day is the one the family is really planning for, and the survivor is often the one least able to move late. A couple who plan to move eventually and a couple who have moved are in different tax positions on the same day.

Moving Is the Plan, Done Properly

The savings above are real only if the move is. Your old state keeps the right to tax real estate left behind, and a sloppy move invites it to claim you never changed your true home at all. The clean version is a Florida declaration of domicile, homestead, new driver license and voter registration, and genuinely severed ties, with your day counts watched in the state you left. Once you are a Floridian, the rest of the toolkit opens up too, with portability of the federal exemption, the community property trust for the double step-up, and basis planning with no state layer on top.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Situations

The Massachusetts retirees. A couple with a $4.2 million estate learns Massachusetts would take roughly $200,000 at the second death. They become Florida residents two winters early, record a declaration of domicile, and the state bill drops to zero. The federal picture never changes; the state one does.

The New York cliff. A widow’s estate sits just above New York’s exemption. Because New York phases out its exemption entirely once an estate exceeds 105% of the threshold, a small overage taxes the whole estate from the first dollar. Her options are gift planning, or a zip code.

Sources of Law

Every figure below is also published as an open dataset, CC BY 4.0, in CSV and JSON, with the statute and source URL stored per jurisdiction.

• Florida: Fla. Const. Art. VII §5 (no estate or inheritance tax). Federal: IRC §2010(c) ($15,000,000 basic exclusion, 2026).
• Washington: RCW ch. 83.100; WA DOR estate tax tables ($3,000,000 exclusion and 10% to 20% rates for deaths on or after July 1, 2026, per 2026’s ESB 6347; deaths in the first half of 2026 use a $3,076,000 exclusion and rates up to 35%). dor.wa.gov (retrieved 2026-07-11)
• Oregon: ORS 118.010 ($1,000,000 threshold, 10% to 16%). Minnesota: Minn. Stat. §§291.016, 291.03 ($3,000,000, 13% to 16%). Illinois: 35 ILCS 405/2 ($4,000,000; interrelated calculation per the Attorney General’s instructions, approximated here). Massachusetts: G.L. c. 65C §2A ($2,000,000 via the $99,600 credit). (retrieved 2026-07-11)
• New York: Tax Law §952 ($7,350,000 basic exclusion for 2026 deaths; 3.06% to 16%; credit phase-out above 105% per Form ET-706-I). Connecticut: CGS §12-391 (matches the federal exclusion; flat 12%; $15 million tax cap). Vermont: 32 V.S.A. §7442a ($5,000,000; flat 16%). Rhode Island: RI Div. of Taxation ADV 2025-27 ($1,838,056 / $87,940 credit for 2026). Hawaii: HRS ch. 236E ($5,490,000; 10% to 20%; Form M-6). Maine: 36 M.R.S. ch. 577 ($7,160,000 for 2026; 8/10/12%). D.C.: D.C. Code §47-3702 ($4,988,400 zero bracket for 2026; up to 16%). (retrieved 2026-07-11)
• Domicile audits after a move: Daniels v. Commissioner of Revenue Services, SC 21150 (Conn. June 16, 2026) (estate of a part-year resident presumed domiciled in the state; the estate carries the burden of proving nonresidency, by a preponderance of the evidence, in a de novo trial; the $13,198,554.60 assessment remanded for a new trial on domicile). Florida declaration of domicile: Fla. Stat. §222.17. (retrieved 2026-09-03)
• Inheritance taxes: Pennsylvania (0/4.5/12/15% by class), New Jersey (Classes A/C/D), Kentucky (KRS 140.070/.080), Nebraska (Neb. Rev. Stat. §§77-2004 to 77-2006; 1/11/15% over per-person exemptions), Maryland (Md. Tax-Gen. §§7-203, 7-309: 10% inheritance on non-exempt heirs + estate tax over $5,000,000, credited against each other). Iowa: repealed for deaths after 2024 (S.F. 619). (retrieved 2026-07-11)

What a Domicile Audit Looks Like After a Move

The common answer to this is not wrong so much as incomplete, and the missing part is the part that costs money. The common answer is that Florida has no estate tax, so a Florida domicile ends the old state’s bill. The missing part is that the old state decides whether you moved, after you have died, in a proceeding where your estate has to prove it and you are not there to testify.

I walk clients through that sequence because of a case decided in June 2026 by Connecticut’s highest court, which I read in full, and it is the clearest picture I have of how a two-state life looks to an auditor. A businessman who had lived in Greenwich, then Tennessee, then Texas, owned three homes when he died in 2015. He had a 4,000-square-foot condominium in Greenwich, bought in 1984, plus two more units in the same complex for guests, assistants and health aides, the third one bought in 2014, the year before he died. He had built a 9,700-square-foot beachfront home in Vero Beach in 1991, and he owned a home in Arizona. From 2006 on he split every year the same way, about five and a half months in Connecticut from May to the middle of October, three and a half in Florida from November to the middle of February, and three in Arizona. In 2006, at the suggestion of the man who later became his executor, he recorded a Florida declaration of domicile, took a Florida driver license, registered to vote in Florida and opened a Florida bank account (his bills still went to his business office in Texas). He kept four cars registered in Connecticut and three in Florida, had friends in both places, and used a concierge medical practice that followed him wherever he was. His funeral was in Florida, his obituary ran in the Vero Beach paper, the Greenwich paper and the New York Times, and he was buried at Arlington.

After his death, his executor filed the form Connecticut requires from the estate of anyone who lived there part of the year and claims to have died a nonresident. That form started the audit. The auditors ran twenty-eight factors from the state’s income tax regulations through a weighting chart a supervisor had built from her own reading of the cases, decided he had died a Connecticut resident, and the department’s appellate division agreed. The bill was $13,198,554.60. The executor went to court, where a four-day trial heard ten witnesses and more than 200 exhibits. The trial judge found the personal, social and property ties to the two states roughly equal, and treated the declaration, the license, the voter registration and the bank account as one-time administrative steps that meant little in the man’s daily life, the kind of thing a person can do to avoid tax somewhere else. The five and a half months a year in Connecticut, against three and a half in Florida, decided it. Because the judge required the estate to prove Florida domicile by clear and convincing evidence, a tie went to the state. In June 2026 the Connecticut Supreme Court held that the estate only has to prove it by a preponderance, sent the case back for a new trial on domicile alone, and left the $13.2 million question open eleven years after the death.

In reading that opinion with Florida clients in mind, I have a few take-home points.

The first is the calendar. The declaration of domicile, the driver license and the voter card are where a Florida move starts, and in that courtroom they were the least persuasive evidence in the room, because a court can see that they take an afternoon. Nine years of spending more nights in Connecticut than in Florida was the most persuasive evidence, because nobody does that by accident. The practice pointer is to build the move around the days rather than the documents, which means more than half the year in Florida, and a record of it that does not depend on memory, such as the phone’s location history, the credit card statements and the flight receipts, kept year by year. Avoid a domicile change that consists of the paperwork alone, because in that case the paperwork was discounted and the calendar was decisive.

Second, the audit comes after the death, and the estate carries the burden. Connecticut presumes that a part-year resident died a resident and makes the estate prove otherwise, and the person who could have explained the intent had been dead for years by the time anyone asked. Florida does not audit the people who arrive, so the fight is always in the state that was left, under that state’s rules, and the Connecticut court took until 2026 to say what its own standard of proof was. The practice pointer is that the file proving the move has to be assembled while the client is alive, in the year of the move, with the old state’s factors in front of us, because an executor cannot create it afterward and a trial court will not presume it.

Third, roughly equal loses. Three full homes, friends in both states, cars in both states, and doctors who followed him everywhere added up to a life that a judge could fairly place in either state, and a tie is a loss for the estate. Buying a third Greenwich unit in 2014 told the court that Connecticut was still being expanded a year before he died. The practice pointer is that a move has to make the old state smaller. Selling the old primary home, or shrinking it to a guest apartment, moving the doctors, the advisors and the business mailing address, and moving the club memberships are the facts that make the ties unequal, and unequal is what wins. Had that man spent the November-to-May half of the year in Florida and reduced Greenwich to a single guest unit, his executor would have had a preponderance case in 2015 instead of a Supreme Court appeal in 2026. The Florida side of that plan is inexpensive. The declaration of domicile records at the clerk for about $10, the estate plan that goes with a Florida move is a flat fee from $1,200 for one person and $1,950 for a couple with a will, or $3,200 and $4,500 with a trust, and the domicile review that maps the old state’s factors against your facts is quoted at the consult. Measured against a $13.2 million assessment, the plan is a rounding error.

What the case cannot tell you is the rule in the state you are leaving. Connecticut now requires a preponderance and hears the appeal fresh, and other states set a heavier burden or give their auditors more deference, so the plan is drawn to the old state’s test and not to Florida’s. The case itself is also not over. It went back for a new trial, and nobody can say yet whether that estate pays the $13.2 million.

Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., admitted in Florida since 2012. The case described above is a decision of the Connecticut Supreme Court rather than a matter handled by this firm. Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Updated on September 3, 2026. Reviewed by Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., Fla. Bar No. 99502. Attorney Kevin Klagge represents families, businesses, and international clients in estate and tax planning, business structuring, and international law, with a focus on Florida legal tools. He litigates estate and business issues in court. This calculator is general information, not legal or tax advice, and produces an estimate only; state returns involve deductions, gifts, elections, and multi-state apportionment that change the result. No attorney-client relationship is created.