On March 24, 2026, Washington Governor signed Senate Bill 6347 to, once again, change our estate tax laws. These changes, effective July 1, 2026, represent a partial rollback of the 2025 legislative updates and include the following notable adjustments:
- Decreasing our current estate tax exemption from $3.076 million per person to $3 million;
- Changing the estate rates by rolling back the increase approved by the legislature last year; and
- Discontinuing the annual adjustment to the estate exemption amount based upon inflation. Specifically, Washington law prior to the 2025 estate tax changes defined “the consumer price index as the consumer price index . . . for the Seattle-Tacoma-Bremerton metropolitan area. In 2018, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics eliminated the consumer price index for the Seattle-Tacoma-Bremerton area and instead shifted to calculating the consumer price index for the Seattle-Tacoma –Bellevue” Since the referenced consumer price index no longer existed, the annual inflation adjustment no longer occurred. The 2026 law, once again, references the non-existent Seattle-Tacoma-Bremerton consumer price index, effectively eliminating the annual adjustment for inflation.
The bottom line is that the Washington estate tax scheme, as of July 1, 2026, will be back to where it was before the 2025 changes, except that the estate tax exemption will be $3 million per person instead of $2.193 million, and there will be no mechanism for future inflation adjustments.
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