Sutthiphong Chandaeng // Shutterstock

The dust has settled on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the tax landscape for homeowners looks quite a bit different than it did a year ago.

Some provisions expired while others expanded, and a few long-debated rules are now permanent. What’s less clear is who actually benefits from these changes — and who doesn’t.

To make sense of it all, NewHomeSource, a new home listings site with customer reviews, spoke with Keith Schroeder, a Wisconsin-based tax expert who runs The Wealthy Accountant blog, to break down the most important changes for homeowners in 2026.

Note: These changes affect returns filed in 2026 for the 2025 tax year, unless otherwise noted.

SALT deduction increases

“The biggest change benefiting homeowners for 2025 is the state and local tax deduction,” Schroeder said. “Since 2018, SALT was limited to $10,000. That increases to $40,000 in 2025.”

For homeowners in high-tax states, this is the most important headline.

In 2026, the cap rises to $40,400 and will climb 1% annually through 2029 before reverting to $10,000 in 2030.

However, how much you can actually deduct depends on your situation.

“This is not a straight $40,000 for every homeowner,” Schroeder said. “This is a deduction up to $40,000 for combined SALT, including things like income taxes, real estate property taxes, and personal property taxes.”

It’s also important to note that not all homeowners will benefit from the higher SALT cap. Many households take the standard deduction rather than itemizing, meaning the expanded SALT limit may not affect their tax bill at all. Renters and lower-income homeowners are also less likely to see direct benefits from this change.

For homeowners who don’t itemize — or whose deductions don’t exceed the standard deduction — the higher SALT cap may be largely irrelevant.

PMI is deductible again

Private mortgage insurance premiums (PMI) are tax-deductible again starting in 2026. This deduction had expired after 2021 and has now been revived under the new tax law; PMI will now be treated as deductible mortgage interest.

To qualify, adjusted gross income must be below $100,000 for single and joint returns, with the deduction phasing out completely at $110,000. When the deduction was last available, qualified homeowners received an average deduction of about $2,364.

This primarily affects conventional-loan buyers who put down less than 20% and are required to carry PMI. FHA mortgage insurance premiums are treated differently and do not qualify under the same rules.

If you are a first-time buyer stretching a bit and carrying a PMI, this could help. It won’t change the world, but it can take a bit of the sting out of your monthly payment.

The $750,000 mortgage interest limit is permanent

The mortgage interest deduction limit, which dropped from $1 million to $75

panumas nikhomkhai // Shutterstock

For years, video surveillance has been treated as a background system: Install the cameras, switch on recording and assume it will be there if something goes wrong. If nothing obviously breaks, it’s easy to believe everything is working as intended.

Across many organizations, weaknesses in surveillance systems are only discovered after an incident has already happened. Footage is missing. Cameras were offline. Recordings were overwritten. Access is unclear. The system that was supposed to provide answers raises more questions instead.

The problem is not a lack of cameras. It’s the assumption that surveillance can still be managed as a static, “set and forget” system in a business environment that has become far more complex. Videoloft examines why the “set and forget” surveillance strategy may not be enough.

Surveillance is everywhere — and relied on more than ever

Surveillance systems are everywhere. In the United States, the video surveillance market is substantial and expanding rapidly. Estimates by Emergen Research show the U.S. video surveillance market was valued at around $12.5 billion in 2024, and is projected to reach more than $25 billion by 2034, growing at roughly 7.5% annually as organizations invest in visual monitoring technologies.

This scale matters because it changes expectations. Video is no longer viewed as a specialist security tool. People assume video will be available, reliable, and usable whenever an incident needs to be reviewed, but that assumption is exactly where many systems fall short.

Why ‘set and forget’ once worked — and why it doesn’t now

Traditional surveillance systems were built for a simpler operating model. Many organizations worked from a single site. Cameras recorded to local storage. Access to footage was limited to one or two people on location. Surveillance existed mainly as a deterrent, with footage reviewed only if something serious occurred.

In that environment, installing a system and leaving it alone made sense. The demands placed on video were limited, and the consequences of failure were relatively small.

Modern businesses operate very differently.

Video is no longer just security — it’s evidence

Today, incidents are rarely reviewed by a single person in a single location. Footage may need to be accessed by security teams, HR, legal departments or insurers, often days or weeks after an event.

The U.S. Department of Justice research reflects this shift. A major Office of Justice Programs review of 40 years of CCTV research published in 2019 found that surveillance effectiveness depends heavily on how systems are implemented and actively managed, not simply on whether cameras are installed.

In other words, video only has value when footage is available, usable, and accessible when it is needed. A camera that was installed but never checked, or footage that was overwritten

Steve Russell // Toronto Star via Getty Images

If you’re a typical American, you get home from work and start flipping switches and turning knobs — doing laundry, cooking dinner, watching TV. With so many other folks doing the same, the strain on the electrical grid in residential areas is highest at this time. That demand will only grow as the world moves away from fossil fuels, with more people buying induction stoves, heat pumps, and electric vehicles.

That’s a challenge for utilities, which are already managing creaky grids across the United States, all while trying to meet a growing demand for power, Grist reports. So they’re now trying to turn EVs from a burden into a boon. More and more models, for instance, feature “vehicle-to-grid,” or V2G, capabilities, meaning they can send power to the grid as needed. Others are experimenting with what’s called active managed charging, in which algorithms stagger when EVs charge, instead of them all drawing energy as soon as their owners plug in. The idea is for some people to charge later, but still have a full battery when they leave for work in the morning.

A new report from the Brattle Group, an economic and energy consultancy, done for EnergyHub, which develops such technology, has used real-world data from EV owners in Washington state to demonstrate the potential of this approach, both for utilities and drivers. They found that an active managed charging program saves up to $400 per EV each year, and the vehicles were still always fully charged in the morning. Utilities, too, seem to benefit, as the redistributed demand results in less of a spike in the early evening. That, in turn, would mean that a utility can delay costly upgrades — which they need in order to accommodate increased electrification — saving ratepayers money.

Active managed charging works in conjunction with something called “time of use,” in which a utility charges different rates depending on the time of day. Between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m., when demand is high, rates are also high. But after 9 p.m., they fall. EV owners who wait until later in the evening to charge pay less for the same electricity.

Time-of-use pricing discourages energy use when demand is highest, lightening the load and reducing how much electricity utilities need to generate. But there’s nothing stopping everyone from plugging in as soon as cheaper rates kick in at 9 p.m. As EV adoption grows, that coordination problem can create a new spike in demand. “An EV can be on its own twice the peak load of a typical home,” said Akhilesh Ramakrishnan, managing energy associate at the Brattle Group. “You get to the point where they start needing to be managed differently.”

That’s where active managed charging comes in. Using an app, an EV owner indicates when they need their car to be charged, and how much charge their battery needs for the day. (The app also learns over time to predict when a vehicle will unplug.) When they get home at 6

By Jack Guy, CNN

(CNN) — Archaeologists in Spain have uncovered an elephant bone from 2,200 years ago, and they believe it belonged to an animal that served as a “war machine” in an army sent to invade the Roman Republic.

After discovering the ankle bone at the Colina de los Quemados archaeological site in the city of Cordoba in southern Spain, researchers used radiocarbon dating to ascertain that it belonged to an elephant that lived around the early fourth to late third century BC, according to a study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Around this time, the city-state of Carthage, in what is now Tunisia, was battling with the Roman Republic for supremacy in the Mediterranean.

The Carthaginians were known to use elephants as “war machines” in their armies, according to the research, and classical accounts suggest the famed commander Hannibal had driven a troop of 37 elephants through modern day Spain and France, ultimately attempting to invade Italy by crossing the Alps during the Second Punic War, which took place from 218 to 201 BC.

The incredible sight of Hannibal’s elephants left its mark on the historical record, but no direct physical evidence of their presence in Western Europe had previously been discovered.

In addition to the radiocarbon dating, which roughly aligns with the timeline of the Second Punic War, researchers said clues to their Hannibal theory also include 12 spherical stone balls used in artillery that they found alongside the bone, which “probably points to a military context.”

Although they acknowledge that the discovery of one bone in isolation does not indicate that the entire animal was at this site, as the bone could have been taken there as a curio or a souvenir, “historical and archaeological record suggest that its association with the events of the Second Punic War, whether direct or indirect, provides the most plausible explanation,” the researchers noted in the study. They cited the presence of projectiles and arrowheads, which may have been left behind following a violent episode.

Prestigious and ‘psychological’ weapons

Battle elephants at this time were “prestige weapons but also psychological weapons,” according to Fernando Quesada-Sanz, the study’s lead author and an archaeologist at the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain.

The animals were “very impressive and frightening for troops not accustomed to facing them,” he told CNN in a statement Thursday.

“They were also particularly useful against cavalry and to disorder enemy infantry lines,” Quesada-Sanz added. “They were even used as spearheads to lead attacks against the palisades of temporary enemy fortifications such as campaign camps.”

Quesada-Sanz said that “this is the first time, as far as we know, that the actual remains of one of the elephants in the Carthaginian army has been found in European soil,” adding that it could be part of one of the 21 elephants that classical sources say Hannibal left in Iberia before he started his march to Italy.

“This find might be a wake up call for the study of collections from old excavations kept in museum storerooms in Spain, southern France or even Italy that could conceivably yield more examples,” he said. “Also, bones from future excavations have to be checked carefully.”

Eve MacDonald, an archaeologist and senior lecturer in ancient history at the University of Cardiff, Wales, and author of “Carthage: A New History,” who was not involved in the study, told CNN that the discovery is significant because it finally provides physical evidence for the long-held belief that the Carthaginians introduced elephants to the Iberian Peninsula dur

* WHAT…Dangerous rip currents and breaking waves due to
elevated surf.

* WHERE…Santa Barbara County Southwestern Coast and Santa
Barbara County Southeastern Coast.

* WHEN…Through this evening.

* IMPACTS…There is an increased risk of ocean drowning. Rip
currents can pull swimmers and surfers out to sea. Waves can
wash people off beaches and rocks, and capsize small boats
nearshore.
Remain out of the water due to hazardous swimming conditions, or
stay near occupied lifeguard towers. Rock jetties can be deadly
in such conditions, stay off the rocks.

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