Grandparents Can Pay Any Amount of a Grandchild’s Tuition and the IRS Doesn’t Count a Dime of It as a Gift. One Rule: the Check Goes Straight to the School

You can write a tuition check for $10,000, $80,000, or $300,000 and the IRS treats none of it as a gift. No touching your $19,000 annual gift exclusion for 2026. It doesn’t matter if you already maxed out your annual exclusion gifts to that same grandchild. The tuition payment sits in its own bucket, outside the gift tax system entirely. Any of those paid directly to the school still count as a taxable gift subject to the $19,000 annual limit.