Is a stock gift taxable?

First, the thing most people have backwards

Gift tax in the US is the responsibility of the person giving the gift, not the person receiving it. Receiving a gift is generally not taxable income to the recipient.

That surprises people, because the phrase "gift tax" sounds like something levied on the gift as it arrives. It is not. If anyone has a reporting obligation, it is normally the giver — and even then, most gifts generate no tax at all.

The annual exclusion

The IRS lets you give up to a set amount per recipient per calendar year without it counting toward your lifetime gift-tax exemption and without filing a gift-tax return. For 2026 that annual exclusion is $19,000 per recipient.

It is per recipient, not a total. You could give $19,000 each to several different people in the same year and still be within the exclusion for each of them. A married couple can each give their own $19,000 to the same person.

Go over the exclusion for one recipient and you are generally required to file IRS Form 709. Filing is not the same as owing — the excess normally counts against a large lifetime exemption rather than producing a tax bill. Most people who file Form 709 pay nothing.

Beestow enforces its own per-recipient annual cap that mirrors the IRS annual exclusion, so a single buyer cannot exceed it for the same recipient through the platform in one calendar year. That is a platform limit designed to keep you inside the exclusion — it is not a substitute for your own reporting, and it cannot see gifts you have made through other channels.

If you transferred actual shares

When you give someone shares out of your brokerage account, the recipient generally takes on your cost basis and your holding period. Nothing is taxed at the moment of the gift.

The tax event comes later, when the recipient sells. At that point they may owe capital gains tax calculated from your original purchase price, not from the value on the day you gave it to them. If you give away heavily appreciated stock, you are handing over the embedded gain along with the gift — which is sometimes exactly the intention, and sometimes an unwelcome surprise for the recipient.

• No tax at the moment of transfer.
• The recipient inherits your cost basis and holding period ("carryover basis").
• Capital gains are calculated from your purchase price when they eventually sell.
• Losses have their own, different rules — another reason to ask a professional before gifting shares that are underwater.

If you gave a market-linked gift

A Beestow gift is not a securities transfer, so the carryover-basis rules above do not describe it. No shares change hands: the recipient holds a prepaid gift whose value references a stock's market price, and when they redeem, they receive cash.

Beestow's Terms set out the position directly: redeeming a gift may have tax consequences for the recipient, and any amount a recipient receives above the gift's original value may be taxable income to them. Beestow provides a record of each redemption to help with the recipient's own reporting, and does not provide tax advice.

On the giver's side, a market-linked gift is still a gift, so the annual exclusion discussion above applies in the ordinary way.

We are deliberately not going further than that. The precise treatment of a given redemption depends on facts we do not have about your situation and the recipient's, and a marketing page is the wrong place for a confident answer. Take the redemption record to a tax professional.

Gifts to children, and custodial accounts

Gifting to a child does not change the annual exclusion — it is the same per-recipient amount.

What does change things is a custodial account. Assets in a UGMA or UTMA account legally belong to the child, income generated inside it may be taxable to the child, and the balance can affect later financial-aid calculations. Those consequences follow from the account structure rather than from the gift, which is one reason a custodial account is a bigger decision than a single gift.

The short version

For the overwhelming majority of ordinary gifts — a birthday, a graduation, a wedding — nobody files anything and nobody owes anything at the moment the gift is given.

• Receiving a gift is generally not taxable income to the recipient.
• The giver, not the recipient, has any gift-tax reporting obligation.
• Under $19,000 per recipient in 2026, there is generally nothing to file.
• Over it, you generally file Form 709 and still typically owe nothing.
• Transferred shares carry your cost basis to the recipient; a market-linked gift does not work that way, and per Beestow's Terms any amount received above the gift's original value may be taxable income to the recipient.
• None of this is tax advice, and the exclusion amount changes over time — confirm the current figures and your own position with a professional.

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