Enter a pre-tax price to see the tax and total, or switch to reverse mode and enter a tax-included total to find what the item cost before tax.
A $100 item at a 7% rate adds exactly $7.00 in tax for a $107.00 total. Reversed — starting from that same $107.00 total at 7% — $107 ÷ 1.07 = $100.00 exactly, confirming the two modes are true inverses of each other rather than two separately-tuned approximations.
The $7.00 above is 7% of the $100 pre-tax price, calculated once. It is never taxed again as it changes hands, because US-style sales tax applies only at the single final retail sale. A VAT or GST system instead applies its rate at every stage — manufacturer to wholesaler, wholesaler to retailer, retailer to customer — with each business reclaiming what it already paid on its own inputs, so only the value added at each step is taxed, not the whole price repeatedly. The end result on a receipt can look identical to a flat sales tax; the mechanism generating it is not.
Subtracting 8.25% from a $270.63 total gives $248.30 — cheaper than the true pre-tax price of $250.00 by more than two dollars. The error compounds itself: subtracting a percentage of the total removes too much, because tax was only ever a percentage of the smaller, pre-tax figure in the first place. Dividing by 1 plus the rate is the only version of "reverse" that lands back on the exact original number, which is exactly what this page's default round-trips to confirm. The same forward/reverse pair shows up whenever a discount is layered in before tax — the Discount Calculator handles that combined case directly — and the underlying "X% of a number" arithmetic is the same idea the Percentage Calculator covers on its own.
Tax is the pre-tax price multiplied by the tax rate as a decimal: tax = price × (rate ÷ 100), and the total is simply price + tax. A $50 item at 8% sales tax adds $4.00 in tax for a $54.00 total.
Divide by 1 plus the rate, don't subtract the percentage: price = total ÷ (1 + rate ÷ 100). A $54 receipt at 8% tax means the pre-tax price was 54 ÷ 1.08 = $50 — not 54 minus 8% (which would incorrectly give $49.68). This reverse calculation is the single most common place people make an error with tax math, and it's exactly what "Remove tax from total" mode above does for you.
In the US, sales tax is set at the state level, and most states let counties and cities layer on additional local rates on top — so the combined rate genuinely differs block to block in some metro areas, not just state to state. Five US states (Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon) charge no statewide sales tax at all, though Alaska allows local sales taxes. There's no federal sales tax in the US, unlike most other countries. Always check the actual combined rate for your specific location — this calculator computes the math correctly for whatever rate you enter, but doesn't look up rates by address.
No, even though the end result on a receipt looks similar. US-style sales tax is collected once, only at the final retail sale to the consumer — businesses buying wholesale for resale are typically exempt. VAT (used across the EU and UK) and GST (used in India, Australia, Canada, and elsewhere) are collected at every stage of the supply chain, with each business reclaiming the tax it paid on its own inputs, so only the value it added gets taxed at each step. For international pricing, use the GST / VAT Calculator instead, which is built around that multi-stage system and its country-specific rates.
No — sales tax rates in the US alone span thousands of overlapping state, county, city, and special-district jurisdictions that change periodically, so no calculator can respond to "where are you" reliably without a live, frequently updated address-level tax database. Enter the combined rate for your specific location (check a recent receipt, or your state revenue department's site, for the current figure) and this tool handles the arithmetic precisely.
Worked example: a $250 purchase in a location with 8.25% combined sales tax: tax = 250 × 0.0825 = $20.63, total = $270.63. Reversed: if a receipt shows $270.63 total at 8.25% tax, the pre-tax price is 270.63 ÷ 1.0825 ≈ $250.00 — consistent with the forward calculation, as it should be.