Glossary: FSA, the Source Ledger, and a withdrawn Market Pulse article (2026-07-17)

Location: Glossary: FSA, the Source Ledger, and a withdrawn Market Pulse article

What was wrong: The FSA term and the Source Ledger both gave the 2026 dependent care FSA limit as $5,000, or $2,500 for married filing separately. A Market Pulse article published July 7, 2026 gave it as $5,500, or $2,750, and derived every figure in the piece from that number, including a headline saving of about $1,400.

What it now says: The 2026 limit is $7,500, or $3,750 for married filing separately, raised from $5,000 by Public Law 119-21. The FSA term now reads its figures from the reference registry, and its worked example saves about $2,224 rather than $1,480. The Market Pulse article was withdrawn rather than corrected: its $5,500 matched no source in either direction, so its thesis and all of its arithmetic rested on a number we could not trace to any document. Its URL still resolves and now carries this note.

Why it was wrong and how it was caught: The registry cited Publication 503, whose edition prints the 2025 amount. The citation was honest and the document was simply the wrong one for the year we claimed. The deeper cause was a note in the registry saying the figure was statutory and therefore fixed. Statutory amounts do not drift with inflation, but they do change when Congress amends the statute, which is what happened. That belief was encoded as an inflation review trigger, the one watch that can never fire on an act of Congress, so no watch ever looked. A reader who trusted the term would have set aside $2,500 a year less than the law allows, worth roughly $550 to $900 in lost tax savings. Caught in the full-site audit on July 17, 2026.

Primary source: IRS Publication 15-B (2026), Employer's Tax Guide to Fringe Benefits: dependent care assistance exclusion (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p15b.pdf)