US Sales-Tax Nexus Checker (Foreign Sellers)
Sales tax scares foreign sellers more than it should. Tell us where your inventory sits, roughly how much you sell, and how much runs through marketplaces — and this shows where you likely have nexus (the connection that makes a state's sales tax your problem), what Amazon already covers, and what to actually check. Every figure is an estimate for education, with thresholds as of 2026 — the real answer depends on your state-by-state sales, and thresholds change.
How this reads your answers
There are two ways a US state gets to make you deal with its sales tax. Physical nexus comes from having something in the state — most often inventory. If Amazon stores your stock in a warehouse in a state, or you ship from there, that state can require you to register, even for marketplace sales it already collects on. That's why the states you tick above are treated as physical-nexus states. Economic nexus is the newer rule: a state can require you to collect its tax purely because you sold enough into it, with no physical presence. The catch that trips sellers up is that economic nexus is measured on where your customers are, not where your company is formed — so this tool screens your direct (non-marketplace) sales against the state thresholds as a first pass, and tells you which of your top destination states to confirm.
The common threshold pattern is $100,000 in sales or 200 transactions into a single state in a year, and that is the figure most states use as of 2026. But it is a starting point, not a universal rule: a shrinking group of states still counts transactions while many have dropped it, and several large states set a higher dollar bar — California, Texas, and New York at $500,000 (New York also requires more than 100 sales), Alabama and Mississippi at $250,000. Five states have no statewide sales tax at all — the NOMAD group: New Hampshire, Oregon, Montana, Alaska, and Delaware — so inventory there creates no state sales-tax duty (Alaska has local sales taxes only). The per-state figures shown when you tick a state come from the Sales Tax Institute economic-nexus guide, cross-checked against Avalara's state-by-state guide; both are updated as states change their rules, and thresholds do change.
One thing this tool deliberately keeps separate: sales tax has nothing to do with US income tax. Owing or collecting sales tax says nothing about whether you owe income tax, and vice versa — our guide to sales tax vs income tax pulls the two apart. For the full picture on marketplace collection and when a foreign seller still has to register, read US sales tax for foreign e-commerce sellers, and if you buy wholesale to resell, see what a resale certificate is. When you want your real footprint mapped and set up correctly, our e-commerce practice does exactly that — or talk to a CPA.