WASHINGTON, D.C. — A sweeping trio of federal tax actions unveiled this week is poised to reshape how businesses invest, retirees plan, and military families file their returns, delivering faster tax relief and clearer rules under the One, Big, Beautiful Bill.
The Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday issued Notice 2026-11, locking in a permanent 100 percent additional first-year depreciation deduction for eligible business property acquired after January 19, 2025. The move allows companies to immediately write off the full cost of qualifying investments instead of spreading deductions over years, a shift designed to accelerate capital spending and boost economic activity.
Under long-standing tax law, businesses generally depreciate equipment, machinery, and other assets over fixed schedules. The new guidance cements full, upfront expensing for qualified property and specified plants planted or grafted after the cutoff date, while allowing taxpayers to continue relying on existing bonus depreciation regulations during the transition.
The notice also lays out a series of elections businesses can make, including opting for partial expensing instead of the full 100 percent deduction, applying the deduction to specified plants, or excluding certain qualified sound recording productions. Those productions, newly added by the legislation, are treated as acquired when principal recording begins and placed in service upon initial release or broadcast, provided recording starts in a qualifying tax year.
A day later, Treasury and the IRS followed with Notice 2026-13, updating safe harbor explanations used by retirement plan administrators to reflect years of tax law changes. The revised guidance affects how participants are informed about rollover distributions, early withdrawal penalties, required minimum distributions, and survivor rules, giving plan administrators updated templates they may tailor to their specific plans.
The updates replace prior guidance issued in 2020 and are intended to reduce confusion for retirees navigating increasingly complex distribution rules.
The week’s tax announcements culminated Friday with a decision that directly affects America’s military families. Treasury and the IRS confirmed that one-time supplemental housing payments issued to service members in December 2025 — dubbed the “Warrior Dividend” — are not taxable income.
Congress appropriated $2.9 billion under the One, Big, Beautiful Bill to supplement the basic allowance for housing, resulting in $1,776 payments to roughly 1.45 million eligible active-duty and reserve service members. Federal tax law excludes qualified military benefits from gross income, and officials said the supplemental housing payments fall squarely under that exemption.
Taken together, the actions signal an aggressive push to deliver immediate tax relief, encourage investment, and simplify compliance — while underscoring the administration’s emphasis on putting cash back into the hands of businesses, retirees, and uniformed service members.
More information on the tax provisions is available at IRS.gov under One, Big, Beautiful Bill provisions.
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