Sales Tax Nexus Checker (2026)

Before June 21, 2018, a state could only force you to collect its sales tax if you had a physical presence there — an office, an employee, inventory in a warehouse. If you ran a craft business out of your kitchen in Ohio and shipped a candle to a buyer in California, California could not legally compel you to register, collect, or remit California sales tax. That rule, set by Quill Corp. v. North Dakota (1992), was the world every small seller built their business in.

Then the Supreme Court decided South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., 585 U.S. 162 (2018), and the physical-presence rule was gone. States were now free to require remote sellers to collect their sales tax based purely on economic nexus — a volume threshold of sales into the state. South Dakota's law, the one the Court upheld, set that threshold at $100,000 in gross sales or 200 separate transactions per year. Within four years, every single sales-tax state (and DC) had adopted a version of it.

Most adopted the same $100,000 / 200-transaction numbers South Dakota used. A handful went higher (California $500,000, Texas $500,000, New York $500,000 + 100 transactions, Mississippi $250,000, Alabama $250,000). A few have since eliminated the transaction-count threshold and use the dollar threshold only (Wisconsin, Wyoming, Indiana, North Carolina, Louisiana, South Dakota itself). The checker above encodes the current 2026 thresholds for every jurisdiction.

In the years right after Wayfair, states realized that forcing every hobby Etsy seller in every state to register, file, and remit was administratively impossible. So they passed a second wave of laws called marketplace-facilitator laws (MFLs). An MFL says: if a marketplace — Etsy, Amazon, eBay, Faire, Walmart Marketplace, Shopify Marketplace, TikTok Shop — facilitates a sale into our state, the marketplace itself is the tax-collection entity. The seller behind the listing does not register, does not file, and does not remit.

As of 2026, all 45 sales-tax states plus DC have adopted MFLs. Etsy, Amazon, and eBay collect and remit sales tax automatically on your behalf in every marketplace-facilitator state where the buyer is located. From your seller dashboard the tax line is already deducted from your payout — you do not need to do anything.

The practical consequence: a craft seller who does 100% of their business through Etsy, Amazon, and eBay typically has zero direct sales tax registration obligations in any state, no matter how much they sell. The "Marketplace covered" toggle on each state card in the checker above models exactly this carve-out.

Five states — New Hampshire, Oregon, Montana, Alaska, and Delaware (the "NOMAD" acronym sales-tax practitioners use) — have no statewide sales tax. If you ship to a buyer in any of them, you cannot create state economic nexus, because there is no state-level tax to collect.

Alaska is the asterisk. Alaska has no statewide sales tax, but Alaska's boroughs and municipalities each set their own local sales tax, and they coordinate collection through the Alaska Remote Seller Sales Tax Commission (opens in new tab) (ARSSTC). Starting January 1, 2025, the ARSSTC threshold is $100,000 in gross sales to Alaska with no transaction-count threshold — the only way a remote seller can create nexus in Alaska. The checker treats Alaska statewide and Alaska-local as two separate cards so neither gets missed.

The MFL carve-out is powerful but not universal. Three scenarios push a small seller back into direct registration territory:

1. You run a direct Shopify or BigCartel store alongside your Etsy shop. Shopify is a payment processor, not a marketplace facilitator in most states — so direct-store sales into a state count toward your economic-nexus threshold, separate from your Etsy volume. If your Shopify sales into California exceed $500,000 over a calendar year, you have California nexus regardless of how much Etsy collects on your behalf.
2. You sell wholesale at retail prices to a low-threshold state. A wholesale invoice to a boutique in Pennsylvania at $100,001 in a calendar year creates Pennsylvania nexus. Wholesale is exempt from sales tax only when the buyer provides a resale certificate — but it counts toward the gross-sales nexus threshold either way.
3. You sell across multiple channels into a state with a low transaction-count threshold. Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, and several others use a combined "$100,000 OR 200 transactions" rule. 200 transactions at $5 apiece (zines, stickers, digital downloads sold off your own site) is $1,000 in revenue — and it still creates nexus in those states.

The checker above models the third case directly: when a state has a transaction threshold, the transaction-count input appears and the verdict turns on whichever threshold is crossed first.

1. Register for a sales-tax permit in the state. Most states have a free online portal under "out-of-state seller" or "remote seller" registration. Get the permit before your first taxable sale after crossing the threshold — many states require it to be in place from day one of the next month.
2. Configure your direct-store cart to collect at checkout. Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCartel all support per-state sales-tax rates. Plug in the rate, set the start date, and your direct-store payouts will deduct the tax automatically.
3. Separate marketplace sales from direct sales in your books. Marketplace sales are not reported on your state sales-tax return as taxable — they go on a separate line (or are excluded entirely, depending on state) because the marketplace already remitted on them. Mixing them up triggers double-collection and a painful refund cycle.
4. Set up the filing cadence. Most states file monthly above a threshold, quarterly in the middle range, and annually for low-volume sellers. The state assigns the cadence at registration; calendar it the moment you receive the assignment.
5. Watch for retroactive lookback periods. A handful of states (notably Massachusetts and California historically) have applied nexus retroactively to the date you crossed the threshold, not the date you registered. Pay the back tax cleanly if you discover you crossed months ago — voluntary disclosure agreements (VDAs) in most states cap the lookback at 3–4 years instead of unlimited.