A Retired Couple Can Sell $98,900 of Gains This Year and Owe the IRS Nothing. These 3 ETFs Are Built for the 0% Bracket

You are retired, your mortgage is gone, and your brokerage account has quietly ballooned during the last decade of stock gains. Here is the part your accountant may have buried in a footnote: in 2026, a married-filing-jointly couple can realize up to $98,900 of long-term capital gains at the 0% federal rate, on top of the $32,200 standard deduction. Sell the right lots, reset your cost basis, and the IRS collects nothing. Three funds are tailor-made for that maneuver because they generate most of their return as price appreciation rather than taxable income: Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (NYSEARCA:VTI), Schwab U.S. Large-Cap Growth ETF (NYSEARCA:SCHG), and Invesco NASDAQ 100 ETF (NASDAQ:QQQM).

How the 0% Bracket Actually Works

Taxable income is what counts, and it is figured after your deductions. Add the standard deduction to the 0% threshold and a retired couple can sit on well over $130,000 of gross income and still owe zero on the long-term gains they choose to harvest. The gain itself stacks into the calculation, though, so realized gains can also drag more of your Social Security into taxable territory and push next year’s Medicare premiums into the IRMAA surcharge zone, which, for joint filers, begins above $218,000 of modified adjusted gross income. The goal is to fill the bracket without overflowing it, and then repeat next January with a fresh cost basis.

VTI: Own the Whole Market, Pay Almost Nothing to Hold It

VTI is the workhorse core. It tracks the CRSP US Total Market Index, holding thousands of stocks across every sector and market cap, and it distributes cash on a quarterly schedule. Trailing twelve-month distributions total $3.90 per share, most of which flows through as qualified dividends taxed at the same favorable rate as long-term gains. Price appreciation is where the real value lies. Shares trade at $381, up 16% over the past year and 242.78% over the past decade. That kind of run creates enormous embedded gains, which is exactly what you want when you are hunting for lots to sell at 0%. Because VTI is diversified across the entire market, you can trim positions without disrupting your overall allocation.

SCHG: Growth Tilt That Barely Pays a Dividend

SCHG is the surgical tool for gain harvesting. The fund tracks the Dow Jones U.S. Large-Cap Growth index and holds roughly $61 billion in mega-cap growth names, led by NVIDIA at 11.01%, Apple at 9.83%, and Microsoft at 7.17% of assets. Growth companies retain earnings instead of paying them out, so SCHG’s trailing twelve-month distribution is just $0.1315 per share, meaning less dividend drag and less income showing up on your 1040 uninvited—which preserves headroom inside the 0% bracket for the gains you actually want to realize. Meanwhile, the growth engine has done its job, returning 93.09% over five years and 459.12% over ten. Every dollar of that appreciation is a candidate for a tax-free cost-basis reset.

QQQM: Concentrated Tech at a Buy-and-Hold Price

QQQM tracks the Nasdaq-100 and is the cheaper, retail-designed sibling of QQQ, built for investors who plan to hold. It is the most concentrated of the three, leaning heavily on the same mega-cap technology names that dominate SCHG’s holdings. The performance record shows why the fund keeps drawing attention. Shares are at $305.20, up 20.97% year-to-date, 24.29% over the past year, and 107.16% over the past five years. The trailing twelve-month distribution runs $1.3053 per share, modest against the price. The ETF wrapper adds another quiet advantage: in-kind creation and redemption allows the fund to flush low-basis shares without triggering capital-gain distributions to shareholders, so the gain you harvest is the gain you choose.

Trade-Offs Worth Naming

These are equity funds, and they behave like equity funds. QQQM’s tech concentration and SCHG’s growth tilt will decline more sharply than a balanced portfolio in a down market, and VTI still moves with the broad market. Realizing gains also increases your provisional income for Social Security taxation purposes and your MAGI for the Medicare IRMAA look-back period, so a couple who fills the entire $98,900 bracket in one year could inadvertently raise the following year’s Part B and Part D premiums. Model the full picture before you sell. Done deliberately, though, this trio lets a retired couple compound in the market, harvest gains at 0%, and step up their cost basis year after year. That is a rare advantage embedded in the tax code, and these are the funds built to use it.

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