What's new in your tax return this year? From Marketplace, I'm Sabri Beneshore, in for David Bruncaccio.

First, a quick update on the Middle East. After President Trump said yesterday morning, shortly before markets open, that talks with Iran were ongoing, Iran said there were no talks.

Iran has continued to attack U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf. Iran and Israel

are still trading fire. Israel continued strikes in Lebanon, where a million people have been

displaced. The price of oil is still hovering around $100 a barrel. It is tax season. And,

thanks to last year's GOP tax and spending law, there are lots of changes to the rules.

As Marketplace's senior Washington correspondent, Kimberly Adams, reports one of the biggest

involves the deduction for state and local taxes. So far this tax season, refunds have been

trending higher. Rachel Snyderman is managing director of economic policy at the bipartisan

policy center. We are seeing that average tax refunds are upwards of about $3,600 or $350 higher than that

same period last year. And one reason for those bigger refunds changes to the the state and local tax deduction or salt deduction.

It used to be taxpayers could only write off $10,000 of their state and local taxes when calculating their federal taxes,

but the one big beautiful bill act boosted that to $40,000, with some limits.

So for folks who file this year, about a quarter of the value of the tax cut that's provided in 2025 will be just from that salt cap increase.

Garrett Watson is Director of Policy Analysis at the Tax Foundation. And of course, that 25% amount is going to be concentrated in folks who are itemizing,

which by our estimate is somewhere around 12 to 13% of filers.

And those filers tend to have higher incomes.

Tim Simons is the founder of the Simons Group Tax Advisory in the D.C. area.

The clients who are above 200,000 and between, I'd say, 200 to 400, and that are itemizing.

Simon's mainly works with higher income clients and says many of them are getting bigger than usual refund checks, thanks to the increased salt deduction.

Probably about 15 to 20 percent of my clients are seeing a significant increase because of that.

But those bigger refunds come at a cost. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center,

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