Sales Tax Calculator

Add sales tax to a price, or find the pre-tax price hiding inside a total that already includes tax.

How to Use the Sales Tax Calculator

Choose Add Sales Tax or Find Pre-Tax Price. The first takes a price before tax and a rate and adds the tax on top; the second takes a total you already paid — tax included — and works backward to what the item cost before tax was added.

US sales tax behaves differently from VAT or GST in a way worth stating plainly: it's tacked on at the register, not folded into the sticker price the way VAT-style taxes usually are elsewhere. A $50 shirt with 8% sales tax rings up as $54 at checkout; the same shirt in a VAT country would likely already be priced at $54 on the shelf, tax included.

There's no default rate loaded here, and that's deliberate. Combined state and local sales tax rates in the US range from zero — several states charge no sales tax at all — to well over 10% once city and county add-ons stack on top of the state rate. Look up the actual combined rate for the specific jurisdiction before trusting the output.

Adding tax: Tax = Price × Rate
             Total = Price + Tax
Finding pre-tax price: Pre-Tax Price = Total ÷ (1 + Rate)

The second formula isn't the first one reversed by subtraction — dividing the total by (1 + rate) is what's needed to strip tax back out correctly. Subtracting the rate straight off the total, instead, quietly understates the pre-tax price every time.