If your CPA told you to make large gifts before January 1, 2026, or your estate plan was built around the exemption being cut roughly in half, that urgency is gone: Congress didn’t let the cut happen. Wealth Planning Law Group is a New Orleans law firm handling estate planning, tax, asset protection and business succession for owners of operating businesses in Louisiana and across the country. Todd M. Villarrubia, the firm’s founder, is Board Certified in Estate Planning & Administration by the Louisiana Board of Legal Specialization and holds an LL.M. in Taxation from Emory University.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act set the federal estate and gift tax exemption at $15 million per person, indexed for inflation, with no scheduled sunset starting in 2026. For married couples, that’s $30 million combined. Most estate plans written in the last several years were built around a different number: the exemption was set to roughly halve on January 1, 2026, under the prior law’s sunset provision. If your plan, or your CPA’s advice to you, was timed around that deadline, it’s worth revisiting now, not because the news is bad, but because a plan built for the old rule usually isn’t the right plan for this one.
Louisiana has no estate tax. The exposure is federal
Louisiana has no state estate or inheritance tax. That doesn’t mean Louisiana estates go untaxed: above the $15 million federal exemption, the federal estate tax still applies, at a top rate of 40%. For most Louisiana families, this new number is the entire conversation. An estate under $15 million (or $30 million for a married couple) has no federal estate tax exposure at all under current law. An estate above it still needs the same planning it always did, just against a higher number.
“Permanent” means no scheduled expiration, not untouchable
“Permanent” in tax law means Congress removed the expiration date, not that the number can never change again. The prior exemption was temporary by design: it was set to drop automatically unless Congress acted. The new exemption doesn’t have that built-in drop. It stays at $15 million, indexed for inflation, until a future Congress passes a new law to change it. That’s a meaningfully more stable number to plan around than the one we had, but it’s still a statute, not a constitutional guarantee, which is exactly why an estate plan should be reviewed periodically regardless of what the law says this year.
Five situations worth revisiting now
Your CPA already told you to make lifetime gifts
If your CPA advised large lifetime gifts before the exemption dropped at the end of 2025 — common advice for a Mandeville-area estate in the $10 to $15 million range — the deadline pressure behind it is gone. Under the current $15 million exemption ($30 million for a married couple), an estate at that level may now have no federal estate tax exposure at all.
The gifting question is still worth asking, just without the rush, and it comes with a cost the old advice often skipped past: an asset gifted during life keeps the giver’s original cost basis, while an asset held until death gets a step-up in basis to its value at death. For an estate that isn’t actually over the exemption, gifting now can trade a tax problem that may never materialize for a real capital-gains bill the heirs inherit along with the asset. The firm works directly with your CPA on the trust structure and the valuation work before any gift is made, so the decision accounts for the basis side as well as the estate-tax side, not just the one the original advice was built to solve.
Your trust was built for grandchildren, and nobody checked the GST exemption
A trust built to benefit grandchildren, not just children — common in Covington-area estate plans — carries a second exemption to manage: the generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax exemption, which tracks the same $15 million figure as the regular exemption but is allocated to a trust separately from it. An older trust may or may not have had GST exemption allocated to it correctly in the first place, and that needs to be checked against the trust’s own formula language now that the underlying number has changed, not assumed either way. This is one of the more common things to get wrong, because by the time it’s discovered, the generation-skipping transfer has often already happened.
For families structuring this kind of trust from outside Louisiana, or choosing to use another state’s trust law even though they live here, the firm writes Delaware dynasty trusts and Nevada non-grantor trusts from a Louisiana desk, so the trust sits under whichever state’s law actually serves the family.
You were told to freeze your business interest before the exemption dropped
An estate freeze advised ahead of the exemption drop — the technique that caps the value of a business interest today while future growth passes to the next generation outside the taxable estate — doesn’t cost anything by waiting now. But the opposite question is worth asking for a Metairie business approaching $15 million on its own: freezing it now, while the valuation is lower and the exemption is higher, is still the moment to lock in the benefit.
A freeze only works if the business documents and the estate documents agree with each other: the buy-sell agreement’s valuation formula, the entity’s operating agreement, and the trust receiving the frozen interest all have to say the same thing. That gap usually opens when the business side and the estate side are drafted by different people, with nobody coordinating the two.
Your family is about to sell appreciated land, and wants to give some of it away
Appreciated farmland or acreage that’s heading toward an actual sale rather than just sitting — a situation that comes up often in LaPlace and the River Parishes — raises a decision that used to be rushed by a year-end deadline: under the old rule, families in this position were often advised to move the land into an irrevocable trust or start an installment sale to a grantor trust before the exemption dropped. With that deadline gone, the decision comes back to the actual facts: what the land is worth, how many heirs want different things from it, and what the gain actually costs once it’s sold.
Two things matter before a signature goes on a sale agreement. First, if a family wants to give part of the proceeds to charity, that has to be structured before a binding sale agreement exists, not after: a charitable remainder trust (CRT) funded with the land ahead of the sale can spread the capital-gains hit over time and create an income stream, where the same gift made after the sale is already a cash gift of after-tax dollars. Second, gifting appreciated land during life instead of holding it gives up the step-up in basis the land would otherwise get at death, which is especially costly for a family that isn’t actually near the $15 million exemption yet. The $15 million number gives more room before any of this becomes urgent, but for a family already near or above it, getting the order of operations right, the charity and the basis both, is still the work.
A New Orleans family heading into a liquidity event — selling a business or a significant asset — often wants to formalize its giving at the same time: a private foundation the family controls, with the next generation involved in running it, rather than writing checks every December. A private foundation comes with its own rules, including the specific deduction limits that apply to gifts of appreciated non-cash property and an annual distribution requirement the family has to meet, and it interacts directly with the estate plan: a funded foundation moves assets out of the taxable estate the same way any other charitable gift does, while giving the family more control over how and when the money gets used than a donor-advised fund does.
The firm structures the foundation itself and coordinates it with the family’s trusts and the broader tax plan, so the charitable structure, the sale or gift that funds it, and the estate plan around it get built together rather than layered on separately. Under the current $15 million exemption, a family in this position often has more room than they think before the estate-tax question is urgent, which makes this the right time to set the foundation up correctly instead of rushing it under deadline pressure the way the old law would have forced.
What to actually do next
None of this means a plan built around the old exemption is wrong. It means the number it was built against has changed, and a plan that was timed around a deadline that no longer exists should be checked against the one that replaced it. That’s usually a conversation, not a rewrite: confirming the numbers, the allocations, and the timing still hold, not starting over.
This is also the moment to ask a different question: whether the person who built your plan was ever set up to answer it. If the attorney who drafted your plan handles wills and successions generally, rather than also the tax and business-structuring work a plan like this now needs, that’s exactly the gap worth closing. See our high-net-worth planning page for what a more coordinated plan looks like.
If you want a fast read on where you stand before a full consultation, Roadmap to Zero Taxes is a fixed $1,000 review: three years of tax returns, year-to-date profit and loss, and a high-level plan. For the structural work above, gifting, GST allocation, freezes, pre-sale planning, or a foundation, see our Louisiana estate and tax planning page for how that gets structured.
The fee is set before the work starts, and the first consultation is free. Todd M. Villarrubia holds both the LL.M. in Taxation and board certification in estate planning (Louisiana Board of Legal Specialization), so the tax answer and the trust document come from the same desk.
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Frequently asked questions
Q: Is the $15 million estate tax exemption really permanent, or will it change again? It has no scheduled expiration date under current law, which is what “permanent” means here, as opposed to the prior exemption, which was set to drop automatically. A future Congress could still pass a new law to change it, the same way it could change any tax provision, but there’s no built-in sunset forcing that to happen.
Q: Does Louisiana have its own estate tax on top of the federal exemption? No. Louisiana has no state estate or inheritance tax. The $15 million federal exemption, taxed at a top rate of 40% above it, is the only threshold that matters for a Louisiana estate’s tax exposure.
Q: My estate planning was based on the exemption dropping to about $7 million in 2026. Do I need to redo my plan? Not necessarily redo it, but have it reviewed. The documents themselves are usually still valid; what changed is the number the planning was built around, along with anything timed specifically to beat the old deadline.
Q: What is the generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax, and does the new exemption affect it? It’s a separate tax that can apply when a gift or bequest skips a generation, such as grandparent to grandchild. The GST exemption tracks the same $15 million figure as the regular exemption, but it’s a distinct number that has to be checked against a trust’s own allocation history, not assumed one way or the other.
Q: We’re selling a business and want to set up a private foundation with some of the proceeds. What does that involve? Timing matters: the foundation needs to exist and be ready to receive assets before a binding sale agreement is signed, not after, the same ordering issue that applies to other charitable gifts ahead of a sale. Beyond that, a private foundation is its own separate entity with its own required annual payout and its own tax filing, which gives a Louisiana family more direct control over its grants than a donor-advised fund, at the cost of more ongoing administration. The firm sets the foundation up alongside the trusts and the tax plan for the sale, rather than as a separate project handled afterward.
