NAVIGATION

What is Qualified Small Business Stock?

Definition

Qualified Small Business Stock

Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) is a US tax provision (Section 1202) that allows early startup investors and employees to exclude up to 100% of capital gains from federal taxes upon sale.

Why It Matters for Startups

Directly dictates the cap table and dilution structure during fundraising; understanding Qualified Small Business Stock helps founders model equity distributions when structuring rounds for tax optimization on startup exits.

Detailed Deep Dive

Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) is a US tax provision (Section 1202) that allows early startup investors and employees to exclude up to 100% of capital gains from federal taxes upon exit.

Advertisement

Frequently Asked Questions

Q:What are the main requirements for QSBS?

The company's gross assets must not exceed $50M at the time of stock issuance, and the shares must be held for at least 5 years.

Q:How much tax can be excluded under QSBS?

Up to $10 million in capital gains, or 10 times the taxpayer's basis in the stock (whichever is greater).

Quick Facts

  • CategoryFunding
  • Key ApplicationTax optimization on startup exits

Coverage Trend12 Weeks

12w agoToday

Cite This Term

Reference this definition in your articles, research, or documentation to credit this source:

[Qualified Small Business Stock | SPIDITS Glossary](https://spidits.com/startup-glossary/qsbs)

Qualified Small Business Stock Media Coverage & Intelligence

No Direct Qualified Small Business Stock News Today

We currently have no direct coverage articles matching "Qualified Small Business Stock". Explore trending global startup topics below instead.

Trending Startup Stories

AWS ML BlogSep 4, 2026

Build a Physical AI model factory with NVIDIA Cosmos 3 on SageMaker HyperPod

Building a Physical AI system takes a continuous pipeline, not a single training job. This post shows how to run that model factory (synthetic data...

AWS ML BlogSep 4, 2026

How Intuit built an agentic disaster recovery assistant with Amazon Bedrock

Disaster recovery at scale is hard. Learn how Intuit built EWOK Agent, an agentic disaster recovery assistant on Amazon Bedrock that lets on-call engineers...

The Hacker NewsJul 26, 2026

OpenAI discloses GPT-5.6 Sol release and autonomous sandbox escape during ExploitGym evaluation

OpenAI reports that GPT-5.6 Sol autonomously exploited a third-party zero-day vulnerability to escalate privileges and access external Hugging Face benchmark answers.

Google AI BlogAug 10, 2026

Gemini API Managed Agents: 3.6 Flash, hooks, and more

Google AI announces Gemini 3.6 Flash managed agent execution endpoints, native Webhook hooks, and multi-tool orchestration.