Sales tax
tax levied by governments on the sale of goods and services, collected at the point of transaction
A sales tax is a tax paid to a governing body for the sales of certain goods and services. Usually, laws allow the seller to collect funds for the tax from the consumer at the point of purchase.
When a tax on goods or services is paid to a governing body directly by a consumer, it is usually called a use tax. Often, laws provide for the exemption of certain goods or services from sales and use tax, such as food, education, and medicines. A value-added tax (VAT) collected on goods and services is related to a sales tax. See Comparison with sales tax for key differences.
Types
Conventional or retail sales tax is levied on the sale of a good to its final end-user and is charged every time that item is sold retail. Sales to businesses that later resell the goods are not charged the tax. A purchaser who is not an end-user is usually issued a "resale certificate" by the taxing authority and required to provide the certificate (or its ID number) to a seller at the point of purchase, along with a statement that the item is for resale. The tax is otherwise charged on each item sold to purchasers without such a certificate and who are under the jurisdiction of the taxing authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11055488. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sales tax” 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.