Sales Tax Calculator

Sales tax is price × rate, and in 2026 the rate you actually pay is a stack of state, county, city and special-district pieces. At a combined 8.25% rate — roughly what a shopper pays in Houston — a $100 purchase carries $8.25 in tax for a $108.25 total. The same $100 costs $107.00 in Miami, $108.88 in New York City, $110.25 in Chicago and $100.00 in Portland, Oregon, where there is no sales tax at all. Across the US, combined rates run from 0% to over 12%, and the national average sits near 7.5%.

This guide covers the arithmetic in both directions, how the combined rate is built, which states charge what, when selling into a state forces you to register there, and why marketplace sellers on Amazon, eBay and Etsy have far less to do than they think.

How to calculate sales tax on any price

There are only two operations, and every figure on this page comes out of them:

Sales tax = price × (rate ÷ 100) Total = price + sales tax

At the 8.25% combined rate used throughout this section, the Sales Tax Calculator returns exactly these numbers:

Pre-tax price	Sales tax at 8.25%	Total to pay
$9.99	$0.82	$10.81
$19.99	$1.65	$21.64
$25.00	$2.06	$27.06
$49.99	$4.12	$54.11
$100.00	$8.25	$108.25
$250.00	$20.63	$270.63
$500.00	$41.25	$541.25
$1,000.00	$82.50	$1,082.50
$2,500.00	$206.25	$2,706.25
$5,000.00	$412.50	$5,412.50
$25,000.00	$2,062.50	$27,062.50

Two details in that table are worth pausing on. The $250 row calculates to $20.625 and lands at $20.63 — tax is rounded to the nearest cent, half a cent up, which is why your own arithmetic and a register receipt occasionally differ by a penny. And the tax scales perfectly linearly: unlike a payment processing fee, there is no fixed component, so the effective rate on a $9.99 item is identical to the rate on a $25,000 one.

The other thing the formula makes obvious is how much rate differences matter on big-ticket purchases. On a $1,250 sofa, a shopper pays $0 in Portland, $87.50 in Miami at 7.00%, $103.13 in Houston at 8.25% and $128.13 in Chicago at 10.25%. That $128 gap on a single item is why furniture and appliance retailers near state lines advertise the way they do.

Sales tax rates by state in 2026

The number below is the statewide rate only. In most states, county, city and district rates stack on top of it, so the rate you charge or pay is almost never the state rate alone. Ranges are approximate and change often — always confirm the exact rate for the delivery address.

State	State rate (2026)	Typical combined with local	Note
California	7.25%	7.25% – 10.75%	Highest state rate in the US
Texas	6.25%	6.25% – 8.25%	Local add-ons capped at 2.00%
Florida	6.00%	6.00% – 7.50%	County surtax applies to the first $5,000 of an item
New York	4.00%	7.00% – 8.875%	New York City is 8.875%
Pennsylvania	6.00%	6.00% – 8.00%	Only Philadelphia and Allegheny County add local
Illinois	6.25%	6.25% – 11.00%	Chicago is 10.25%
Ohio	5.75%	6.50% – 8.00%	County plus transit authority
Georgia	4.00%	7.00% – 9.00%	Atlanta is 8.90%
North Carolina	4.75%	6.75% – 7.50%
Michigan	6.00%	6.00%	No local sales tax
New Jersey	6.625%	6.625%	No general local rate
Virginia	5.30%	5.30% – 7.00%	Includes a 1.00% mandatory local piece
Washington	6.50%	7.00% – 10.60%	Seattle is 10.35%
Arizona	5.60%	5.60% – 11.10%	City rates stack under the TPT system
Massachusetts	6.25%	6.25%	No local sales tax
Tennessee	7.00%	9.25% – 9.75%	Among the highest average combined rates
Indiana	7.00%	7.00%	No local sales tax
Missouri	4.225%	5.00% – 11.99%
Maryland	6.00%	6.00%	No local sales tax
Colorado	2.90%	4.00% – 11.20%	Lowest state rate; home-rule cities set their own
Louisiana	5.00%	8.45% – 12.95%	Highest average combined rate in the US
Alabama	4.00%	5.00% – 12.50%
Arkansas	6.50%	6.50% – 11.63%
Oklahoma	4.50%	4.50% – 11.50%

Notice how badly the state rate predicts the total. Colorado's 2.90% is the lowest in the country, yet Denver shoppers pay 8.81% and some Colorado towns pass 11%. New York's 4.00% is fourth-lowest, but nowhere in the state charges only 4%. Meanwhile Michigan, Massachusetts, Indiana and Maryland charge a flat statewide rate with no local layer at all, so the state rate is the whole story.

How state, county and city rates stack into one combined rate

The combined rate is a straight sum of every jurisdiction that has authority over the delivery address. Here is how five of them are built, with the tax on a $500 purchase at each:

Location	State	County / parish	City	Special district	Combined	Tax on $500	Total
Chicago, IL	6.25%	1.75%	1.25%	1.00%	10.25%	$51.25	$551.25
Seattle, WA	6.50%	—	3.85%	—	10.35%	$51.75	$551.75
Los Angeles, CA	6.00%	1.25%	—	2.25%	9.50%	$47.50	$547.50
New York, NY	4.00%	—	4.50%	0.375%	8.875%	$44.38	$544.38
Denver, CO	2.90%	—	4.81%	1.10%	8.81%	$44.05	$544.05
Portland, OR	0%	0%	0%	0%	0%	$0.00	$500.00

Chicago is the clearest illustration: the Illinois state rate is 6.25%, Cook County adds 1.75%, the city adds 1.25%, and the Regional Transportation Authority adds 1.00%. Four separate taxing bodies, one line on the receipt.

Louisiana and Alabama routinely clear 10% because their state rates are low and their local rates are not. Louisiana's state rate is 5.00%, but parishes and municipalities layer on 4% to 7% more, pushing typical combined rates past 10% and a handful of jurisdictions close to 13% — the highest average combined burden in the country. Alabama's state rate is only 4.00%, but counties and cities each levy their own general sales tax, and in some cities the local layers total more than 8%. In both states the local piece is larger than the state piece, which is the opposite of how most people assume sales tax works.

This is also why rate lookups by ZIP code are unreliable. ZIP codes were designed for mail routing and regularly straddle city and district boundaries, so a single ZIP can contain two or three different combined rates. Rate determination should use the full street address.

How to find the sales tax inside a total price

If you have a tax-inclusive figure — a receipt total, a gross deposit, a price advertised "tax included" — you cannot simply subtract the rate. You have to divide it out:

Pre-tax price = total ÷ (1 + rate ÷ 100) Tax = total − pre-tax price

Tax-inclusive total	Rate	Pre-tax price	Tax included
$21.64	8.25%	$19.99	$1.65
$50.00	6.00%	$47.17	$2.83
$100.00	7.00%	$93.46	$6.54
$100.00	8.25%	$92.38	$7.62
$100.00	8.875%	$91.85	$8.15
$250.00	9.50%	$228.31	$21.69
$400.00	10.25%	$362.81	$37.19
$1,000.00	8.25%	$923.79	$76.21
$2,000.00	9.50%	$1,826.48	$173.52

Every row round-trips: feed the pre-tax price and the rate back into the Sales Tax Calculator and you get the tax and total in the table.

The mistake to avoid is subtracting the percentage from the total. On a $108.25 receipt at 8.25%, taking 8.25% off the total gives $99.32 — sixty-eight cents adrift, because the rate applies to the pre-tax base, not the tax-inclusive figure. At higher rates and larger amounts the error grows fast: on a $500 tax-inclusive total at 10.25%, the shortcut says $448.75 when the real pre-tax price is $453.51, a $4.76 miss. If percentage arithmetic in either direction is what is tripping you up, the Percentage Calculator handles the general case.

This same division is how you gross a price up. To land on a $100.00 shelf price including 8.25% tax, list the item at $92.38 — the tax comes to $7.62 and the total is exactly $100.00.

Origin-based vs destination-based sourcing: which rate do you charge?

When a seller in one city ships to a buyer in another, one of two rules decides the rate.

Destination-based sourcing — used by the large majority of states — means you charge the rate at the buyer's delivery address. A Dallas seller shipping to a customer in Chicago charges Chicago's 10.25%.

Origin-based sourcing means you charge the rate at your own location. A handful of states use this for intrastate sales, most notably Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Arizona, Missouri, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, New Mexico and California in part. A Houston shop selling to an Austin customer charges the Houston rate.

Two things make this less confusing than it sounds. First, origin sourcing generally applies only within a state — sales that cross state lines are almost always destination-sourced. Second, California is a hybrid: the state and county portions are origin-based while district taxes are destination-based, which is exactly why California rate determination is notoriously fiddly.

The practical consequence for a small seller is that a single "my rate" figure does not exist. If you ship nationally you are quoting dozens of different rates, which is why automated rate lookup at checkout stopped being optional years ago.

Economic nexus after Wayfair: when you must register in another state

Before 2018, a state could only require you to collect sales tax if you had a physical presence there — an office, a warehouse, staff, inventory. South Dakota v. Wayfair overturned that. States can now require collection based purely on sales volume, and every state with a sales tax has enacted an economic nexus threshold.

State	Sales threshold	Transaction threshold
California	$500,000	none
Texas	$500,000	none
New York	$500,000	100 (both must be met)
Florida	$100,000	none
Pennsylvania	$100,000	none
Washington	$100,000	none
North Carolina	$100,000	none
Colorado	$100,000	none
Illinois	$100,000	200 (either one)
Georgia	$100,000	200 (either one)
Ohio	$100,000	200 (either one)
Most remaining states	$100,000	200 where still in force

The pattern to remember: $100,000 in sales into the state, or 200 separate transactions, measured over the current or previous calendar year. Many states have since dropped the transaction prong, because 200 transactions at a $15 average order value is $3,000 of revenue and never justified the compliance burden.

Physical presence still creates nexus on its own, and it is easier to trigger than sellers expect. Storing inventory in a third-party warehouse counts. So does attending a trade show in some states, or having a remote contractor. For anyone using Amazon FBA, Amazon's own placement decisions can move your stock into states you have never visited — which historically created physical nexus in a dozen states at once.

Crossing a threshold does not tax you retroactively. It obliges you to register, then start collecting from a specified date forward, usually the first of the next month or the next transaction. The real risk is not noticing you crossed it, because the liability accrues whether you collected or not — and if you did not collect, it comes out of your own margin. Run the shortfall through the Profit Margin Calculator once and the incentive to register on time becomes obvious.

Marketplace facilitator laws: why Amazon, eBay and Etsy already collect for you

This is the single most useful thing a marketplace seller can understand, and it saves an enormous amount of unnecessary work.

Every state with a sales tax has passed a marketplace facilitator law. These shift the duty to calculate, collect and remit sales tax from the individual seller to the platform. If your sales run through a marketplace, the marketplace is the party on the hook.

Sales channel	Who calculates and collects	Who files and remits	What you are still responsible for
Amazon (FBA and FBM)	Amazon	Amazon	Reporting gross sales where your state requires it
eBay	eBay	eBay	Same
Etsy	Etsy	Etsy	Same
Walmart Marketplace	Walmart	Walmart	Same
TikTok Shop	TikTok	TikTok	Same
Poshmark	Poshmark	Poshmark	Same
Your own Shopify store	You	You	Registration, collection, filing — everything
Your own site with Stripe or PayPal	You	You	Registration, collection, filing — everything

The line that catches people is the bottom half. Shopify is not a marketplace facilitator. It is software you use to run your own store, and you are the seller of record. Shopify will calculate the right rate at checkout, but registering in each state, filing the returns and remitting the money are yours. The same is true of WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Squarespace and any site where you take payment through Stripe or PayPal.

Two follow-on points. Whether marketplace-facilitated sales count toward your economic nexus threshold varies by state — some include them, some exclude them, so a seller doing $90,000 on Etsy and $20,000 on Shopify may or may not have crossed $100,000 in a given state. And in several states you must still report those gross marketplace sales on your return and then deduct them, so registration does not always mean zero paperwork. If you sell across several channels, the Marketplace Fee Comparison Calculator is a useful way to see the full cost of each one alongside its compliance load, and how much Amazon takes from a sale breaks down where the rest of the money goes.

What is exempt, and how resale certificates work

Exemptions are set state by state and there is no national pattern, but three categories come up constantly.

Groceries. Around 32 states exempt unprepared food entirely. Several tax it at a reduced rate, and a small number tax it at the full rate. Prepared food, restaurant meals, soft drinks and candy are usually taxable even where groceries are not — which is why a rotisserie chicken and a raw one can be taxed differently in the same store.

Prescription medicine. Exempt in essentially every state that has a sales tax. Over-the-counter medicine is a different question and is often taxable.

Clothing. The most inconsistent category of all. Pennsylvania and Minnesota exempt most clothing outright. New Jersey exempts most of it. New York exempts items under $110 from the state portion, with localities choosing whether to follow. Massachusetts exempts the first $175 of a garment and taxes the rest. Most other states tax clothing normally.

Digital goods, software-as-a-service and professional services are the fastest-moving area. Roughly half the states now tax at least some digital products, and a growing number tax SaaS — a change that catches software businesses which assumed sales tax was a physical-goods problem.

Resale certificates are the other exemption every seller should be using. When you buy inventory that you intend to resell, you should not pay sales tax on it, because tax is meant to be charged once at the final retail sale. You give the supplier a resale certificate — a state-issued form referencing your sales tax permit — and they sell to you tax-free. Buying $40,000 of inventory a year in an 8.25% jurisdiction, that certificate is worth $3,300 you would otherwise have paid and could not fully recover. Two cautions: certificates cover goods for resale only, not office chairs or packing tape you consume yourself, and misusing one is a straightforward audit finding. If you import, note that sales tax is separate from duty and freight — the Landed Cost Calculator covers those.

Filing frequency, deadlines and what late filing costs

Once you register, the state assigns a filing frequency based on how much tax you collect. Higher volume means more frequent filing.

Typical annual liability	Usual frequency	Return due
Under about $1,000	Annual	Once a year
About $1,000 – $20,000	Quarterly	Month after each quarter ends
Above about $20,000	Monthly	Usually the 20th of the following month
Very large collectors	Monthly plus prepayments	Mid-month advance payment

Two rules trip up new registrants. You must file even when you collected nothing — a zero return is still a return, and missing it draws a penalty in most states. And the money was never yours: sales tax you collect is held in trust for the state, which is why failing to remit it is treated far more seriously than a late income tax payment, and why officers of a business can be held personally liable for it in many states.

Penalties are typically a percentage of the tax due per month, capped, plus interest. Using a representative 5% per month capped at 25%, with 8% annual interest, on a $4,000 quarterly liability:

How late	Penalty rate	Penalty	Interest	Total added
1 month	5%	$200.00	$26.67	$226.67
2 months	10%	$400.00	$53.33	$453.33
3 months	15%	$600.00	$80.00	$680.00
4 months	20%	$800.00	$106.67	$906.67
6 months	25% (capped)	$1,000.00	$160.00	$1,160.00
12 months	25% (capped)	$1,000.00	$320.00	$1,320.00

Exact rates vary by state — some add a flat minimum penalty of $50 or more even on a zero return — but the shape holds: the penalty front-loads in the first few months, then interest keeps accruing indefinitely. A dozen states also offer a small vendor discount, typically 0.5% to 2% of tax collected, for filing on time, so punctual filing is mildly profitable as well as cheaper.

The five states with no statewide sales tax

Five states levy no general statewide sales tax, remembered by the acronym NOMAD:

State	Statewide rate	Local sales tax?
New Hampshire	0%	No
Oregon	0%	No
Montana	0%	Only local resort taxes in a few tourist towns
Alaska	0%	Yes — boroughs and cities average roughly 1.8%
Delaware	0%	No, but a gross receipts tax applies to sellers

Alaska is the one that misleads people. There is no state sales tax, but well over 100 local jurisdictions levy their own, and Alaska municipalities have banded together into a single remote-seller programme with a $100,000 threshold — so a mainland seller can genuinely owe Alaska sales tax. Delaware's gross receipts tax is not a sales tax and is not charged to the customer; it is levied on the seller's revenue, so it quietly reduces margin instead of appearing at checkout.

Missing from the list, but worth noting: these states usually recover the revenue elsewhere. Oregon has among the higher state income tax rates in the country, and New Hampshire has high property taxes. If a move is on the table, compare the whole picture with the Take-Home Pay Calculator rather than the sales tax rate alone.

Sales tax vs VAT: what actually differs

Outside the US, most countries use value-added tax instead. The difference is not the rate, it is where the tax is collected.

How it works	US sales tax	VAT
Collected at	The final retail sale only	Every stage of the supply chain
Shown in the price	Added at checkout	Usually included in the shelf price
Business purchases	Exempt via resale certificate	Paid, then reclaimed as input tax
Typical rate	0% – 12% combined	17% – 27% in Europe; 20% in the UK
Who sets it	Each state, county and city	National government
Rate variation within a country	Thousands of combined rates	Usually one standard rate plus reduced rates

Sales tax is a single-stage tax charged once, at the end. VAT is multi-stage: each business in the chain charges it on sales, reclaims it on purchases, and remits the difference, so the tax rides along the whole chain but only the final consumer bears the full amount. This is why VAT is quoted tax-inclusive and sales tax is quoted tax-exclusive — a €120 price in Germany already contains €19.16 of 19% VAT, while a $120 price in Texas becomes $129.90 at the register.

For US sellers shipping to the UK or EU, VAT is a real obligation with its own registration thresholds and import rules, and it is charged on top of duty on the customs value. Work those numbers with the VAT Calculator, and if you are pricing for an international catalogue, how to price products for profit covers building tax into the number rather than discovering it afterwards.

Common mistakes

Subtracting the rate from a tax-inclusive total. Taking 8.25% off a $108.25 receipt gives $99.32, not $100.00. You have to divide by 1.0825. The error scales with both the rate and the amount, and it is the single most common sales tax arithmetic mistake.

Using the state rate instead of the combined rate. Quoting New York at 4% understates New York City by 4.875 points — on a $2,000 order that is $97.50 you either did not collect or did not budget for. Only a handful of states have no local layer.

Assuming Shopify collects and remits like Amazon does. Marketplace facilitator laws cover marketplaces. Shopify is your store, you are the seller of record, and registration and filing are entirely yours. Sellers who move from Etsy or eBay to their own Shopify store frequently inherit a compliance obligation they did not have before and do not notice for a year.

Looking rates up by ZIP code. ZIP codes cross taxing boundaries. One ZIP can contain two or three combined rates, and an audit uses the street address, not the ZIP.

Forgetting that shipping is taxable in many states. On an $80 item with $12 shipping at 8.25%, tax on the item alone is $6.60, but tax on the full $92 is $7.59. Across a thousand orders that is $990 of tax you either failed to collect or paid yourself.

Treating collected tax as revenue. It sits in your bank account, so it inflates every dashboard you look at. It is not income, it is money held in trust, and spending it is the fastest way to turn a cash flow problem into a personal liability. Book it as a liability the day you collect it, and remember that a threshold you crossed without noticing still comes out of your own margin, with penalties on top.

Related calculators

• VAT Calculator — the tax-inclusive equivalent used across the UK and EU
• Percentage Calculator — add, remove or reverse any percentage, tax or otherwise
• Profit Margin Calculator — see what uncollected tax does to a margin
• Marketplace Fee Comparison — platform fees alongside who handles tax on each channel
• Landed Cost Calculator — duty, freight and import taxes on goods you bring in
• Discount and Margin Calculator — price after a markdown, before tax is applied
• Amazon FBA Profit Calculator — full unit economics for a marketplace-facilitated channel