Sales Tax Calculator

Tax and total on a purchase — or the rate behind them.

Taxability varies by product as much as by place: most states tax clothing while a few exempt it, and groceries are exempt in many states but not all. Local rates add points on top of the state figure and can change at a city or county line.

US sales tax is set by state and locality and added at the register, so the advertised price is never the amount paid; five states charge none, and rates within one state can differ by city. Remote sellers collect it under post-2018 rules once they pass a state's threshold.

The United States has no national sales tax or VAT. Sales tax is set by state and locality, added at the register rather than included in the ticket, five states charge none, and rates inside a single state can differ by city. Since 2018 remote sellers must collect it once they pass a state's threshold.

The rate that applies is the one at the delivery address, so the same order can cost different amounts depending on where it is sent.

Sourcing rules decide which rate applies. Goods are generally taxed where the buyer takes delivery and services where they are performed, and a state can require an out-of-state seller to collect once sales pass an economic threshold measured in dollars or transactions.

Sales Tax Calculator sits with the rest of the library's finance work, and it rests on the same point-of-sale arithmetic the way a lender's disclosure or a bank statement does. Its answer is only as good as the assumptions standing behind it.

The quantities it works from — solve for, before tax price, sales tax rate, after tax price and quantity — are the ones a real point-of-sale question actually turns on, and each carries a convention of its own, set out below.

Money questions in America turn on the same few trade-offs: how long a balance is carried, what rate applies to it, and whether the money is being paid down or built up. Inflation sits behind all of them, since a figure that looks generous at today's prices buys less at tomorrow's, and comparisons across decades are made in real, inflation-adjusted terms.

American products also disclose their costs in prescribed ways, from the APR on a consumer loan to the annual percentage yield on a deposit account.