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Inheritance tax is where families lose the most money to rules they had never heard of: an allowance that has to be claimed, a gift that never left the estate, a threshold with a cliff edge. These guides work through the UK rules from HMRC's own manuals, alongside the income tax deductions in India and the US that are worth checking each year.
11 articles
HMRC tells agents plainly not to count the residence nil-rate band when working out whether an estate is excepted. Families who count it anyway conclude no form is needed, and forfeit the very allowance they were relying on.
The cap on 100% agricultural and business property relief took effect on 6 April 2026. The figure most coverage still quotes was superseded four months earlier, and the rule that it could not pass to a spouse was reversed with it.
A deed of variation lets the people who inherit redirect what they were left, and section 142 treats the redirection for inheritance tax as though the deceased had written it that way. The window is two years and it does not extend.
The reduced inheritance tax rate is not a gesture: it is arithmetic with a cliff edge. Give just under the 10% threshold and your beneficiaries are worse off than if you had given nothing at all.
It is the most common inheritance tax plan in Britain and one of the few that fails completely. A gift you continue to benefit from is a gift with reservation, and surviving seven years does not rescue it.
Everyone knows about the £3,000 a year. Almost nobody uses the exemption sitting next to it, which has no ceiling at all and no seven-year wait, provided the money comes from income and you can still afford your life.
People 65 and over may claim an extra $6,000 deduction for tax years 2025 through 2028, on top of the existing senior amount. It phases out above $75,000 of modified AGI, and because of where it sits on the return, it does not lower the income figure Medicare uses.
Almost everyone believes a gift made five years before death is 60% exempt. It is not. Taper relief reduces the tax, not the gift, and on most gifts there is no tax to reduce.
"No deductions under the new regime" is the line everyone repeats, and it is wrong. A short list survives, and for a private-sector employee one of them is worth more under the new regime than the old.