Sales Tax by State: What You Really Pay at the Register in 2026

Ring up a $1,000 cart in Louisiana and you hand the register about $95.60 in sales tax. Ring up the exact same cart in Delaware and you pay $0.00, because Delaware has no sales tax at all. That is roughly $95.60 of difference on identical spending, and it lands on everyone at the same flat rate no matter what they earn. You can price your own cart in any state with the Sales Tax Calculator.

Income tax gets all the attention, but sales tax is the one most people actually feel every week. It shows up on the receipt, it is added after you decide to buy, and it is charged at one rate for everyone in line. That last part is what makes it quietly regressive. The same $95.60 is a rounding error on a big salary and a real dent in a small one.

The combined rate is what matters, not the state rate

The number on the receipt is almost never just the state rate. Most states let counties and cities stack their own sales tax on top, so the figure to compare is the combined state-and-local rate. Tax Foundation publishes a population-weighted average of those combined rates for every state, and it is the number the map below uses.

Open “Show the numbers” under the map for all 51 rows. A few things jump out. The highest combined rates sit in the South, led by Louisiana at 9.56%, Tennessee at 9.55%, and Arkansas at 9.45%, with Washington (9.38%) and Alabama (9.29%) close behind. California, the largest state, lands at 8.85%, and Texas at 8.2%. The national population-weighted average is about 7.53%, per Tax Foundation.

Louisiana and Alabama top the list even though their state rates are middling, because their local add-ons are the steepest in the country. Alabama’s average local rate runs about 5.46% and Louisiana’s about 5.13%, so the county and city layers do most of the work. Colorado (about 4.99% local), Oklahoma (4.56%), and New York (4.54%) round out the states where the local piece does the heavy lifting. That is why you cannot judge a state by its headline state rate alone.

The map shows an average, and the register can run higher than the average where you actually stand. A downtown storefront in a city that has layered a county tax, a city tax, and a special transit district on top of the state rate can charge more than the statewide figure suggests. That is the trade-off with a population-weighted number: it is the right way to rank states against each other, but it smooths over the block-by-block reality of a specific checkout. When the exact cent matters, price the purchase for the city you are buying in, not the state.

The states with no sales tax at all

Five states charge no statewide sales tax. The memory trick is NOMAD: New Hampshire, Oregon, Montana, Alaska, and Delaware. Four of them (New Hampshire, Oregon, Montana, and Delaware) have neither a state nor a local general sales tax, so the register total is the sticker price.

Alaska is the asterisk. It has no state sales tax, but it lets boroughs and towns levy their own, and they do. The average local rate in Alaska works out to about 1.82%, so a purchase in Juneau or Kodiak is not tax-free even though there is no state line. On the map above Alaska shades just off zero for exactly that reason.

A state with no sales tax still has to fund schools and roads, so it usually makes the money up somewhere else. Oregon and Delaware lean harder on income tax. New Hampshire leans on property tax. The absence of sales tax is real and it helps at the register, but it is not the same as a low overall tax burden.

Why a flat rate is a regressive tax

Sales tax is called regressive because the identical rate takes a bigger share of a smaller income. Tax Foundation’s own worked example makes it plain: a household that spends $10,000 in a year at a 5% sales tax pays $500 in tax. That $500 is 1.7% of a $30,000 income, but only 1.0% of a $50,000 income. Same purchases, same rate, and the lower earner gives up a larger slice of what they make.

Our $1,000 cart shows the same shape. The $95.60 gap between Louisiana and Delaware is about 0.16% of a $60,000 salary, but 0.48% of a $20,000 one. The dollar amount is fixed. The bite is not.

There is an honest counterpoint worth stating. Measured over a whole lifetime rather than a single year, sales tax looks closer to neutral than the annual snapshot suggests. A retiree spending down savings or a student with a low year of income can show a high spending-to-income ratio that does not reflect their lifetime means. So the single-year receipt is a true picture of annual-income incidence, and it is the one you feel, but it is not the last word on who bears the tax across a life.

Most states also blunt the edge deliberately by exempting or lowering the tax on groceries and prescription medicine, which are a bigger share of a tight budget. That is a real softener, and it means the combined rate does not apply to every dollar you spend.

The same cart, four states

Here is the register math on an identical $1,000 purchase, using the combined rates the calculator uses.

• Louisiana (9.56%): $95.60 tax, $1,095.60 total.
• California (8.85%): $88.50 tax, $1,088.50 total.
• Texas (8.2%): $82.00 tax, $1,082.00 total.
• Delaware (0%): $0.00 tax, $1,000.00 total.

The cart is the same. The total swings by $95.60 from top to bottom, and every dollar of that swing is location, not choice. Run your own basket and state in the Sales Tax Calculator to see the exact line for where you shop.

A note on the numbers. The rates here come from Tax Foundation’s 2025 edition, which is the version the calculator runs on right now. Tax Foundation’s 2026 update moved several states: a 2025 state-rate increase pushed Louisiana to about 10.11%, Tennessee to 9.61%, Washington to 9.51%, and Alabama to 9.46%, so the real 2026 Louisiana-to-Delaware gap on a $1,000 cart is closer to $101 than the $95.60 shown above. These are also population-weighted averages, so the exact rate at a specific store depends on the city and county and on what is being taxed. Treat the ranking as reliable and the exact cent as close.

For where sales tax fits in the bigger picture of what a state costs you, start at The 50-State Money Hub. If you are weighing a move, see which places skip income tax entirely in the no-income-tax states guide, and for handling the register in everyday life, budgeting and everyday money covers the rest.