Sales Tax by State: 2026 Rates and Nexus Rules

A sales tax rate table answers the easy question: how much tax applies to a taxable sale in a given state. The rates below are current as of July 1, 2026, per the Tax Foundation’s midyear 2026 compilation, and include both the state rate and the average of local rates layered on top, because in states like Louisiana and Alabama the local layer roughly doubles the bill.

The harder question is whether you have to collect at all, and that is a nexus question. Since the Supreme Court’s Wayfair decision, economic activity alone, typically $100,000 of sales into a state, creates a collection obligation with no physical presence required. The rate table tells you how much; the nexus rules, covered in depth in our sales tax nexus guide, tell you where. This page gives you both layers in one place.

State rate, average local rate, and combined rate for every state as of July 1, 2026. No state-level rate changed between January and July 2026, though local rates move constantly.

New Hampshire, Oregon, Montana, Alaska, and Delaware, the NOMAD states, levy no state-level sales tax. Alaska is the asterisk: it permits local sales taxes, which average 1.82% statewide and run higher in many boroughs, and Alaska localities have banded together to enforce economic nexus collection on remote sellers.

For sellers, "no sales tax state" describes where the customer is, not where you are. A Delaware LLC selling nationwide collects tax in every state where it has nexus; incorporating in a NOMAD state changes nothing about collection obligations elsewhere. The states without sales taxes typically make up the revenue through higher property, income, or excise taxes, so relocation math should look at the whole tax picture.

Physical presence, an office, employee, inventory, including inventory a marketplace stores for you, still creates nexus everywhere it exists. Economic nexus stacks on top: after Wayfair, most states require collection once your sales into the state cross a threshold, and $100,000 of annual sales is the norm. California, Texas, and New York set theirs at $500,000, with New York also requiring 100 transactions.

The old 200-transaction test is fading: as of August 2026, seventeen states have eliminated transaction-count thresholds entirely, including Illinois from January 1, 2026 and Kentucky from August 1, 2026, while roughly 18 jurisdictions still run one. That trend helps small sellers of low-priced goods, who could previously trip nexus on volume with trivial revenue. Threshold details, measurement periods, and registration timing rules live in our sales tax nexus guide.

The sequence after crossing an economic nexus threshold matters more than most sellers realize, because doing it out of order creates its own problems. The order is: determine the date nexus began under that state’s measurement rules, register effective from an appropriate date, then begin collecting, then file on the frequency the state assigns. States differ on how quickly collection must start after crossing, some by the next transaction, others by the first of a following month, so the registration form’s "effective date" question deserves real thought rather than a guess.

Two sequencing errors show up constantly. Collecting before registering is illegal in most states; tax collected without a permit is still owed to the state, and holding it unregistered is the kind of fact pattern that turns a compliance issue into an enforcement one. Registering with an effective date that casually predates your real nexus, or postdates it to dodge back liability, creates a mismatch the state can see the moment it compares your registration to your marketplace or payment data.

If you discover nexus late, resist the instinct to quietly register as of today and move on. Most states offer voluntary disclosure agreements that cap the lookback period, commonly to three or four years, and abate penalties in exchange for coming forward before the state finds you. A seller with two years of uncollected exposure in a state usually does materially better under a VDA than under a plain registration that invites questions about the missing years. Evaluate exposure state by state first, then choose the door to walk through.

Every state with a sales tax now has marketplace facilitator laws: Amazon, Etsy, eBay, and similar platforms collect and remit on marketplace orders themselves. That covers those channels, but your direct-to-consumer site, wholesale-turned-retail sales, and invoiced sales remain yours to handle, and marketplace sales still often count toward your economic nexus thresholds even though the platform remits the tax.

Product taxability is the other layer the table cannot show. Groceries, clothing, digital goods, and services each get different treatment state by state: several states exempt groceries entirely, others tax them at reduced rates, and services range from broadly taxed to mostly exempt. SaaS is its own patchwork. Before applying a combined rate from the table, confirm the product is taxable in that state at all.

Multichannel sellers need their bookkeeping to answer one question cleanly per state: which sales were marketplace-collected, which were direct sales you collected on, and which were exempt or nontaxable. In practice that means separate revenue streams per channel in the ledger, marketplace payouts booked gross with the facilitator-collected tax identified rather than netted invisibly, and a monthly tie-out of direct-channel collected tax to the liability account and to the returns filed. When those three lines reconcile, a state inquiry is an afternoon of exports; when they do not, it is a reconstruction project on the state’s timeline.

Audits themselves follow a predictable script. The state samples a period, ties reported sales to bank deposits, payment processor records, and marketplace reports, and tests exemption claims against the certificates on file. The classic findings are uncollected tax on direct-channel sales in a state where only marketplace sales were considered, exempt sales with missing or expired resale certificates, and use tax never accrued on the business’s own untaxed purchases. Every one of those is a bookkeeping habit, not a tax mystery.

The exposure math explains the urgency: uncollected tax comes out of your margin, with penalties and interest, across every year in the lookback. A business running 10% margins that owes back tax at a combined 8% rate has roughly forfeited the profit on those sales, and states increasingly find remote sellers through marketplace data, payment records, and each other. The defense is unglamorous: monitor thresholds quarterly, keep certificates current, and reconcile monthly, so the audit letter, if it comes, arrives at a business with nothing to reconstruct.