4 ways business owners could reap big tax savings under OBBBA

Financial advisors and tax professionals with clients who own businesses of any size can help them rake in significant savings under several provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The massive legislation signed into law by President Donald Trump last month tweaked tax rules on business deductions, capital-gains exclusions and estate planning. Those changes will require advisors and their clients to take a fresh look at their strategies, according to Jere Doyle, an estate planning strategist with BNY Wealth, and Holly Swan, the head of wealth solutions in the global client strategy unit of asset management firm Allspring Global Investments.

Outside of the elimination starting next year of certain tax advantages for businesses that buy food for employees, experts say the legislation will generally extend or expand companies' lower payments to Uncle Sam through the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Some companies are already touting the incentives for capital investments, even as they struggle to prepare for the earnings impact of Trump's tariffs. Interestingly, the final law didn't include the House bill's effort to hike the Section 199A deduction for qualified business income, even as it boosted the incentives for qualified small business stock, Swan noted.

"QBI and 199A aren't really the big news that people had hoped they would be," she said, noting that "no one was anticipating" the Senate's changes to the guidelines for qualified small business stock. "The rules have always been great, but they haven't really kept up with the times. And I think the new rules are pretty amazing."

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Business expenses and depreciation

With a few caveats around tax code criteria and expected IRS rulemaking, businesses of all sizes may use words like "amazing" to describe the law's approach to expenditures for research and development and other corporate investments.

In particular, the alterations in Sections 168 and 179 of the code amount to "an incentive for people to buy stuff" in ways that "will boost sales" of heavy machinery, Doyle noted. By raising the possible annual equipment expense deduction to $2.5 million (subject to phaseouts based on income) and enabling the businesses to depreciate capital investments based on their full cost up front rather than in the "straight line" method, those provisions of the law alone could push up the value of many businesses.

"The message is, people can write stuff off sooner, deduct it sooner," Doyle said. "That lowers their taxable income and increases the amount you take home."

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Qualified small business stock

Just as those rules seek to promote economic activity, the legislation bulks up the capital-gains exclusions available for qualified small business stock under Section 1202 as a means of spurring investment, Swan noted.

The legislation beefed up the criteria for eligibility to businesses valued at as much as $75 million with inflationary adjustments from only $50 million, while ratcheting up the available exclusion to $15 million from $10 million, Swan noted. In addition, those exclusions will kick in at 50% of the gain three years after the investment and 75% after four years, on top of the previous 100% level available after five.

"It's really an acknowledgement of the fact that some of these small businesses do sell faster than expected," Swan said. "It's a really big incentive to invest in American small businesses that a lot of people didn't see coming. … So hopefully that will be extremely stimulative for small businesses."

Those provisions offer "a little bit more leeway" in that the "company can be a little bit bigger to qualify," Doyle noted. While the fact that the company must be a C-corporation rather than a limited liability company to get the exclusion still poses some complications for startups, the new treatment of qualified small business stock will be a "huge" boon, he added.

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Snacks and meals for the team not tax-friendly anymore

On the other hand, the need to raise revenue to pay for at least part of the huge cost of the legislation led to the outright elimination of a deduction for most employer-provided meals and snacks that the 2017 law had previously reduced to 50% of the amount of the price of the food.

That provision didn't receive as much attention as, say, the tense negotiations on the deduction for state and local taxes. But Swan has received several calls from advisors about it, she said.

"I had viewed it as a non-issue," Swan said. "I just think we're all going to bring in our own snacks, but I was shocked by how many people called me."

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Section 199A deduction for qualified business income

The final legislation also made permanent the current 20% deduction available to the owners of qualified pass-through businesses. Economists had frequently criticized the questionable impact to job creation and disproportionate benefits of the deduction for the wealthiest taxpayers.

Regardless, the combination of the extension of the qualified business income deduction and the Senate's removal of a part of the House version of the bill that would have "done a big scale-back" of a so-called pass-through entity tax workaround for state and local taxes will likely prove advantageous to business owners in New York, California and Illinois, Swan said.

"People with pass-through entities who live in those high-tax states can still benefit," she said. "I end up getting a lot more questions about PTET than I do about QBI."

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Estate taxes

While they may be applicable to many non-business owners as well, other provisions of the law that expanded the opportunity zone credit and exemptions from the estate tax could affect many entrepreneurs and their families, Doyle noted.

"We encouraged people to do things before the end of the year because that exemption was supposed to sunset," he said. "They've got certainty around what the exemption is going to be."