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Excise tax in the United States

indirect tax on listed items in the USA

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJan 26, 2026
Entity authorityQ16975482 ↗
Source-derived summary

Excise tax in the United States is an indirect tax on listed items. Excise taxes can be and are made by federal, state, and local governments and are not uniform throughout the United States. Certain goods, such as gasoline, diesel fuel, alcohol, and tobacco products, are taxed by multiple governments simultaneously. Some excise taxes are collected from the producer or retailer and not paid directly by the consumer, and as such, often remain "hidden" in the price of a product or service rather than being listed separately.

Federal excise taxes and revenues

Federal excise taxes raised $86.8 billion in fiscal year 2020 or 2.5% of total federal tax revenue.

Fuel

Federal excise taxes have been stable at 18.4¢ per gallon for gasoline and 24.4¢ per gallon for diesel fuel since 1993. This raised $37.4 billion in fiscal year 2015. These fuel taxes raised 90% of the Highway Trust Fund. The average of state taxes on fuel was 31.02¢ per gallon for gasoline and 32.66¢ per gallon for diesel fuel in 2021. However, most states exempt gasoline from general sales taxes.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Excise tax in the United States” is indirect tax on listed items in the USA. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Excise, United and States, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2020, 1993, 2015, 2021—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Excise, United and States is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “indirect tax on listed items in the USA” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16975482. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2020, 1993, 2015 and 2021.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Excise tax in the United States”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Excise tax in the United States primary sources, Excise tax in the United States archive and Excise research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Excise tax in the United States”?
  2. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
  3. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Excise tax in the United States” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.