Sales Tax Calculator
Add tax to a price or reverse-calculate the pre-tax amount. Select your US state for the 2025 rate or enter a custom percentage.
Pre-tax Price
$100.00
Tax (7.25%)
$7.25
Total Price
$107.25
State-level rate only. Local/county taxes may add 0–4% depending on your city.
How to Use the Sales Tax Calculator
1. Choose Your Mode. Select "Add Tax to Price" when you have a pre-tax amount and want to know the final total a customer pays, or "Remove Tax from Price" when you have a receipt or total and need to work backward to find the original pre-tax amount.
2. Enter the Price. In Add Tax mode, enter the pre-tax price of the item or service. In Remove Tax mode, enter the total amount actually charged, tax included — the calculator will separate the two for you.
3. Select a US State or Enter a Custom Rate. Choose the state where the sale is taxed to pull its 2025 state-level rate automatically, or select Custom Rate to enter your own percentage.
4. Read Your Results. The calculator shows the Pre-tax Price, Tax amount in dollars, and Total Price.
Sofia runs a small online candle business out of Columbus, Ohio, and had been charging every customer Ohio's state rate regardless of where they lived, assuming sales tax always followed her own business location. A customer in Texas asked why her invoice showed an Ohio tax rate instead of her local Texas rate, and Sofia realized she didn't actually know the rule. She used the calculator to check both states' rates side by side — Ohio's, where her business is based, and Texas's, where this particular customer lived — and then looked into which one actually applied to interstate sales. What surprised her was learning that for sales shipped across state lines, most states require charging tax based on the buyer's location, not the seller's, even though Ohio happens to use origin-based rules for sales to customers within Ohio itself. She corrected her checkout process to charge Ohio's rate only to Ohio customers and the destination state's applicable rate for everyone else.
Key Terms
Add Tax to Price (Mode)
Calculates the final total a buyer pays by applying a tax rate on top of a known pre-tax price.
Remove Tax from Price (Mode)
Works backward from a known total to isolate the original pre-tax amount and the tax portion separately.
State Rate
The base sales tax rate set at the state level, ranging from 0% in states like Oregon to over 7% in California.
Custom Rate
A manually entered percentage, useful when accounting for a combined state-plus-local rate.
Combined Rate (State + Local)
The actual rate a shopper pays at checkout once city, county, and special district taxes are layered on top of the state rate.
Which State's Rate Do You Actually Charge When You Sell Online?
If you sell anything online and ship across state lines, this calculator's state dropdown raises a question that trips up a lot of small sellers: when a rate needs picking, whose location actually decides it — yours, or your customer's?
Most Interstate Sales Use the Buyer's Rate, Not the Seller's
For sales shipped to a customer in a different state than your business, the near-universal rule is destination-based sourcing: you charge sales tax based on where the package is going, not where you're shipping it from.
In-State Sales Are Where It Gets Genuinely Inconsistent
A handful of states — including Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and a few others — use origin-based sourcing for sales made entirely within their own borders, meaning a seller charges their own local rate to every in-state customer. Most other states use destination-based sourcing.
Why This Is Worth Getting Right Before You Scale
Charging the wrong sourcing basis isn't just a rounding error — collecting your own state's tax on a sale that should have used the buyer's destination rate is the kind of mistake that surfaces during an audit.