Five states levy no statewide general sales tax. For a business operating in one, that removes the largest single source of quiet liability — collected tax that was never remitted simply cannot happen if there is nothing to collect.
It does not mean there is nothing to track. Four of the five replaced the revenue with something else, and those substitutes catch people precisely because nobody is looking for them.
Alaska
No state sales tax, but boroughs and cities levy their own — and for remote sellers those local taxes are administered centrally through a single commission with its own registration and threshold.
So Alaska is the opposite of simple. The local layer is the entire story, and a seller who concludes "no sales tax in Alaska" and stops there can end up with local obligations they never registered for. Physical presence in a taxing borough matters too.
Delaware
No sales tax, but a gross receipts tax levied on the seller. It applies to receipts rather than to a taxable sale, it is not collected from the customer, and it is filed monthly or quarterly.
That last point is what catches people: because it is not a sales tax, businesses do not think of it as one, and because it falls on the seller there is no customer-facing moment that prompts anyone to ask. It is simply a cost of doing business there that has to be accrued.
Montana
The closest to genuinely clean. No general sales tax and no broad replacement.
The caveat is local: resort communities levy their own taxes on lodging and certain retail. If you operate in one of those, there is a local obligation even though there is no state one.
New Hampshire
No sales tax and no tax on wage income, which is the part everyone knows. What is less known is that businesses face two separate taxes: the Business Profits Tax and the Business Enterprise Tax.
The second one is the surprise. It is levied on compensation, interest, and dividends paid — meaning a business can owe it while showing no profit at all. Businesses relocating to New Hampshire for the tax treatment sometimes discover this after the fact.
Oregon
No sales tax, but the Corporate Activity Tax applies to commercial activity above a threshold. Like Delaware's, it functions as a gross receipts tax rather than a profits tax, so it can be owed by a business operating at a loss.
Oregon carries a second quirk relevant to one industry specifically: it levies a weight-mile tax on commercial trucking instead of collecting fuel tax at the pump. For carriers based in or running through Oregon that is a separate return with separate records, and it is genuinely different from how every other state handles it.
What this means practically
If you are based in one of these five, your bookkeeping does not get simpler so much as differently shaped. The sales tax liability account that dominates most businesses' compliance attention does not exist. In its place: employer registration and payroll, entity filings, and whichever gross-receipts-style tax applies.
If you are selling into one of them from elsewhere, there is generally no state sales tax registration to worry about — with Alaska's local layer as the significant exception.
Each of those states has a page in the state tax and revenue agency directory with the administering agencies and the specific thing that trips people up. Whether a particular substitute tax applies to your business is a determination for your CPA — what we do is make sure it is accrued and recorded rather than discovered.
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