About Us

US Sales Tax Calculator is a small, independent website with one job: make it effortless to work out the sales tax on a purchase anywhere in the United States — in either direction. Shoppers use it to know what they will really pay at the till; sellers, freelancers and bookkeepers use the reverse calculator to strip tax back out of totals on receipts and invoices.

The maths is deliberately boring — price × rate, nothing hidden — and our guide to how sales tax works shows the formulas openly, because you should never have to trust a black box with a number you might rely on.

Every state rate on this site comes from a single published source: the Tax Foundation — State and Local Sales Tax Rates, Midyear 2026. We do not scrape random rate lists, and we never guess a figure. Each rate is an average combined rate — the state rate plus a population-weighted average of local rates — and we label it as an average everywhere it appears, because the exact rate belongs to an address, not to a state. Our rates page sets out the methodology and its limits in full.

A statewide average cannot reproduce your receipt to the cent: your city or county may add more or less than the average, and some items — groceries, clothing, medicines — follow special rules. So this site says “estimate” wherever an average is used, offers a custom-rate box for when you know the exact rate, and tells you plainly when to check with a tax authority instead. Nothing here is tax, financial or legal advice.

The site is free to use, with no accounts and no sign-up. Every calculation runs in your own browser: the prices and rates you type are never sent to a server, never stored, and never sold. Our privacy policy explains the small amount of technical data involved in serving any website.