The New Tax Law Gave Wealthy Families Relief. Here’s What It Missed.

Congress permanently raised the federal estate tax exemption to $15 million. For families with international assets or cross-border ties, the harder planning work is only now beginning.

Wealthy families are moving across borders at a pace that wealth advisors and international law firms have not seen before. Henley & Partners, whose annual private wealth migration report is among the most widely cited in the investment migration industry, projects that global millionaire relocations are accelerating, with a 2026 forecast that would exceed any year on record (over 150,000 relocations by some estimates).

They are moving not just for better weather or lower taxes, but because high-net-worth families are increasingly treating their geographic footprint the way they treat an investment portfolio: something to be actively managed, diversified, and protected. And yet, inside many of those families, a dangerous calm has settled in. Congress acted. The estate tax cliff was averted. Surely, the planning can wait.

That assumption is worth examining carefully.

What Congress Actually Did — and What It Left Untouched

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law in July 2025, resolved one of the most closely watched estate planning deadlines in recent memory. Under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, the federal lifetime estate and gift tax exemption was set to revert at the end of 2025 from its elevated level of roughly $13.99 million per person back down to approximately $7 million. For families with significant wealth, that cliff created enormous pressure to act before December 31, 2025.

Congress stepped back from the edge. The new law not only prevented that rollback but permanently raised the exemption to $15 million per individual or $30 million for married couples, effective January 1, 2026, with annual inflation adjustments thereafter. The generation-skipping transfer tax exemption was aligned at the same level, creating meaningful new opportunities for multigenerational planning.

The federal relief is real and should not be minimized. But the word “permanent” in tax law is rarely as permanent as it sounds.

Congress retains the authority to amend or repeal any tax provision in the future, and no serious estate planning attorney should encourage a client to treat the current framework as fixed. Proactive, adaptable planning remains essential. More importantly for globally oriented families, the new law addressed federal exposure while leaving a series of far more complex risks completely unresolved.

The Gaps That Could Cost You More Than the Estate Tax Ever Would

For families with purely domestic circumstances, the higher exemption provides some breathing room. But the moment international assets, foreign spouses, non-citizen heirs, or overseas business interests enter the picture, the landscape shifts dramatically.

The new law made no changes to the estate tax rules for non-U.S. individuals who are not living in the United States. Those individuals remain subject to a U.S. estate tax exemption of just $60,000 on their American assets. A foreign national who owns a vacation home in Florida, holds U.S. securities, or has a stake in an American business could expose their heirs to a 40% tax on values far exceeding that threshold without ever having lived in the United States. Proper advance structuring of those U.S. investments is not a luxury; it is a necessity.

State-level estate and inheritance taxes add another layer of exposure that federal legislation cannot touch. Families in states such as Oregon, Massachusetts, Hawaii, and Washington may face estate taxes at much lower thresholds than the federal exemption, sometimes as low as $1 million. A client who believes their planning is complete because their estate falls well below $15 million may still face a significant state tax bill that erodes the inheritance they intended to leave behind.

For families navigating divorce, remarriage, or blended family structures (increasingly common among the mobile affluent) outdated trust documents and beneficiary designations can create results that bear no resemblance to anyone’s actual intentions. The higher exemption creates an ideal moment to revisit these documents with fresh eyes and current family realities in mind.

The International Dimension That Most Planning Ignores

The wealth migration trend is not simply a lifestyle phenomenon. It reflects a fundamental strategic shift. Sophisticated families are no longer content to anchor their entire legal identity, capital base, and contingency planning inside a single national framework. They are building what might be described as jurisdictional resilience – the ability to live, operate, and transfer wealth across borders without disruption, regardless of what any single government may decide.

Executing that strategy requires legal architecture that most estate plans simply do not provide. When a family holds assets in multiple countries, the interaction of different inheritance laws, tax treaties, and forced heirship rules creates complexity that can unravel even a well-conceived domestic plan. France, for instance, applies forced heirship rules that can override the terms of a U.S. trust with respect to assets located in France. Canada and Australia do not impose estate taxes at all, but they treat death as a deemed disposition that triggers capital gains tax. Understanding where your assets sit, and what legal regime governs them at death, is foundational work that most families have not done.

International asset protection is not about secrecy or tax avoidance. It is about ensuring that the wealth you built survives intact across the borders and generations you intend it to cross.

For North American families with cross-border ties, this planning typically involves a coordinated review of trust structures across U.S. and Canadian jurisdictions, analysis of treaty provisions that govern the interaction of U.S. and foreign tax obligations, and careful consideration of how citizenship, residency, and domicile affect each family member’s individual exposure. Families considering a change of residency, whether to Canada, a Caribbean jurisdiction, or a European country, need this analysis before they move, not after their legal circumstances have already changed.

What Proactive Planning Looks Like Right Now

The current environment is unusually favorable for thoughtful, unhurried planning. The pressure of the December 2025 deadline has passed. Families who acted before the sunset are not penalized; the law protects gifts already made under the prior exemption amounts. Families who did not act now have time to plan deliberately rather than reactively.

That deliberateness is itself an advantage worth using. Trust structures should be reviewed to determine whether they still reflect the family’s current composition, asset profile, and geographic footprint. Dynasty trusts, spousal lifetime access trusts, and directed trusts all carry different governance implications and jurisdictional considerations. An international family’s legal counsel should be coordinating across practice areas, including tax, estate planning, and international law, to ensure that domestic structures do not create unintended exposure abroad, and that foreign structures are properly reported and defensible under U.S. rules.

Asset protection planning, which operates entirely separately from estate tax planning, deserves its own dedicated attention. Creditor protection structures, including properly designed offshore and domestic asset protection trusts, can insulate family wealth from litigation risk, business liability, and relationship breakdown in ways that estate planning alone cannot. For families with operating businesses, real estate portfolios, or concentrated investment positions, this is often where the most meaningful vulnerabilities lie.

And for families navigating the global mobility trend, legal counsel with genuine cross-border expertise is not optional. The interaction between U.S. exit tax rules for long-term residents, foreign country entry tax obligations, and treaty-based planning opportunities is nuanced enough that a misstep can create tax liabilities that dwarf the original savings. The families who navigate this well are those who engage their legal team before they begin to move, not after the moving trucks have arrived.

The Breathing Room Is Real. Use It Wisely.

Congress gave wealthy families something genuinely valuable: time. The immediate urgency has passed, and the planning horizon has lengthened. But time is only useful if it is spent well. The families who look back on 2026 as the year their planning finally caught up with their complexity are those who use this window not to pause, but to build the kind of comprehensive, internationally coordinated legal framework that their wealth requires.

The federal estate tax exemption may be $15 million today. But the risks that matter most to your family – the foreign assets that fall outside every treaty, the state tax that no one mentioned, the trust that still names an ex-spouse as a trustee – are not waiting for Congress to act. They are already there.

Aliant Law’s private client practice works with high-net-worth families and their advisors across jurisdictions to build coordinated, internationally defensible wealth structures. If your planning has not kept pace with your family’s global footprint, the right moment to address it is now.