Reverse Sales Tax Calculator

• Receipts with no tax line. Card statements, gas pumps, vending and many mobile payments show one number. To book the purchase at its pre-tax cost you have to reverse the tax from the total.
• Tax-inclusive pricing. Bars, food trucks, market stalls and event vendors often quote all-in prices. The seller still owes the state the tax embedded in each sale, so a $10.00 drink in a 9% locality is $9.17 of revenue and $0.83 of tax payable. The forward mode also answers the reverse question: what pre-tax price produces a clean $10.00 total.
• Employee reimbursements. An accountable plan reimburses the full amount paid, tax included, but the expense report may need the pre-tax figure by category. The batch table above splits up to five receipts at once and sums the columns. See the expense report template for the rest of the form.
• 1099 contractors expensing purchases. If you bill a client for materials at cost, the client usually expects the pre-tax cost and the tax as separate lines, and resale rules may mean the tax should not have been charged at all.
• Checking a merchant's rate. The tax-amount mode divides the tax by the subtotal. $17.50 of tax on a $250.00 subtotal is 7.000%; in a 6% state that means a full point of local tax was added.

Related reading: small business bookkeeping guide, business expense categories, and COGS for online sellers.

Not as a separate line. IRS Publication 334 (chapter 8, Business Expenses, under "Taxes") is direct: "Treat any sales tax you pay on a service or on the purchase or use of property as part of the cost of the service or property. If the service or the cost or use of the property is a deductible business expense, you can deduct the tax as part of that service or cost. If the property is merchandise bought for resale, the sales tax is part of the cost of the merchandise. If the property is depreciable, add the sales tax to the basis for depreciation." (IRS Pub 334, verified September 2026)

In practice that means:

• Supplies and services: deduct the full amount paid, tax included, in the same category as the purchase.
• Inventory: the tax becomes part of cost of goods sold when the item sells.
• Equipment and other depreciable property:the tax is added to the asset's basis and recovered through depreciation or Section 179. Publication 551 lists sales tax explicitly among the costs included in basis (IRS Pub 551, Cost Basis).

So why split the receipt at all? Because the pre-tax figure is what most expense policies, client rebills, inventory costing systems and fixed-asset registers ask for, and because the tax line is how you spot a merchant who charged tax on an exempt resale purchase. The opposite direction is also worth knowing: sales tax you collect from your own customers is not income, and remitting it to the state is not an expense (Pub 334, Accounting for Your Income).

The state preset in this calculator uses the state base rate. Thirty-eight states also let cities, counties, transit districts or special districts add local sales tax, so the rate on your receipt is usually higher than the state figure. The "add average local rate" toggle uses the Tax Foundation's population-weighted average local rate, which is a reasonable estimate but never the exact rate for one address. When the receipt prints the rate or the tax amount, use that instead.

Per the Tax Foundation midyear 2026 table (rates as of July 1, 2026, verified September 2026), the highest average local add-ons are in Alabama (5.46%), Louisiana (5.13%), Colorado (4.99%), Oklahoma (4.56%) and New York (4.54%), and the highest combined state plus average local rates are Louisiana (10.13%), Tennessee (9.61%), Washington (9.57%), Arkansas (9.48%) and Alabama (9.46%). California's CDTFA confirms the 7.25% statewide rate and district taxes of 0.10% to 2.00% on top in most areas.

Need the exact rate for a city or county? The sales tax calculator has local rates by state, and the sales tax due dates tool covers filing deadlines if you collect tax yourself.