Add tax — or pull it back out
Sales tax questions come in two directions, and this tool does both. Going forward: a price and a rate give you the tax and the true total, so a shelf price becomes the till price before you reach it. Going backward — the direction that trips people up — a tax-included total is split into its pre-tax price and the tax inside it, which is what you need for expense reports, bookkeeping, and working out what a "tax included" price really contains.
The backward direction is division
The classic error is subtracting the percentage from the total: 8.25% of $108.25 is $8.93, but the tax inside $108.25 is only $8.25, because the percentage was originally applied to the smaller pre-tax price. Dividing by (1 + rate) undoes the multiplication exactly. The step panel shows both operations on your numbers so the result can be checked at a glance. Remember rates combine state, county and city layers in much of the US — enter your full local combined rate; the Discount Calculator handles the discount-then-tax order for purchases on sale.
Why rates are your input, not ours
There are over ten thousand sales-tax jurisdictions in the US alone, rates change mid-year, and categories like groceries and clothing are exempt in some places and taxed in others. Any tool that claims to know "your" rate from a glance is guessing. This calculator takes the rate you know applies to your purchase and does the arithmetic flawlessly in both directions.
Worked example
At 8.25%, a $100 price carries $8.25 of tax for a $108.25 total — and a $108.25 receipt backs out to exactly $100 + $8.25.
How to use this calculator
- Choose the direction: add tax to a price, or back tax out of a total.
- Enter the amount for your direction and your local combined tax rate.
- Read the full split — pre-tax price, tax, total — in the table.
Sales tax vs VAT
US sales tax is added at the register on the final sale to the consumer. A VAT (used in most other countries) is charged at every stage of production but credited back between businesses, and shelf prices are usually displayed tax-included. The extract mode of this calculator is exactly the operation for finding the net inside a VAT-inclusive price.