Senior Deduction, NOT Standard Deduction

After last week’s article covering the 2026 tax brackets, standard deduction, retirement account limits, and HSA limits, a bunch of emails came in asking about the “new senior standard deduction.”

There’s no such thing.

There is a new “senior deduction” for people age 65+ for years 2025-2028. But that deduction is entirely unrelated to the standard deduction. They’re separate sections in the Internal Revenue Code (senior deduction is § 151(d)(5)(C), while the standard deduction is § 63(c)); they have separate math, separate rules, etc.

This is important for the sake of understanding what you’re reading. It means that:

• If an article is discussing the senior deduction, it is by definition not referring to the standard deduction.
• If an article is discussing the standard deduction, it is by definition not referring to the senior deduction.
• And if an article is discussing the “senior standard deduction,” the author by definition does not know what they’re talking about.*

And in terms of how your taxes work, the distinction is critical for multiple reasons.

Firstly, the standard deduction itself has a “it’s slightly larger if you’re 65 or over (or blind)” component. It has functioned that way for many years. It still functions that way for 2025. And it will still function that way for 2026 and beyond. That’s not changing at all. And the standard deduction amount is only based on your filing status, age, and blind/not-blind status. It does not phase out based on your income. In contrast, the new senior deduction has nothing whatsoever to do with your vision, and it does phase out based on your income.

The second reason the distinction is important is that, because the new senior deduction is not part of the standard deduction, you can claim it in years in which you itemize (i.e., you can use it even if you aren’t using the standard deduction at all that year).

As far as inflation adjustments, unlike the standard deduction, the senior deduction amount ($6,000 per qualifying person) as well as the income phaseout ranges ($75,000 – $175,000 if single and $150,000 – $250,000 if married filing jointly) are not inflation-indexed. In other words, the dollar amounts will be the same for 2026-2028 as they are for 2025.

*In fairness to the writers, many of the articles about the new deduction were written before the actual text of the law was made public. In other words, they were written at a time when none of us knew what we were talking about, so everything was just based on hearsay. (If you want to get an idea of how reliable such things are, think back to the children’s game of telephone. Now imagine you’re playing that — but with tax law.) Now that we have the actual law to reference, we know that the standard deduction and temporary senior deduction are simply separate things.