There is no federal sales tax and no national threshold. Forty-five states plus the District of Columbia each set their own bar, and once you cross it you are expected to register there and start collecting.
The good news is that they cluster. The bad news is that the exceptions are the ones that catch people.
The default: $100,000
Most states landed on $100,000 in sales into the state, measured over the current or previous calendar year. If you sell into a state and stay under six figures, you are usually below the bar.
Many of these states originally paired that with a transaction count — typically 200 separate sales — but a number have since dropped the count, because it swept in tiny sellers doing a few thousand dollars across many small orders. Where the count survives, it is usually an "or": either condition triggers registration.
The higher bars
Three states set $500,000: California, Texas, and New York. Between them that is a very large share of the US consumer market, which means a seller can do substantial national volume without triggering registration in the three biggest states.
Alabama and Mississippi sit in the middle at $250,000.
If you are a smaller seller worried about a fifty-state compliance burden, this is the reassuring part: the largest markets have the highest bars.
The two that require both conditions
This is the detail worth knowing, because it works in your favour and almost nobody checks it.
Connecticut requires $100,000 and 200 transactions. New York requires $500,000 and more than 100 transactions.
Both, not either. A business selling $400,000 into New York across 60 large orders has crossed neither bar. The same $400,000 across 900 small orders crosses both. Identical revenue, opposite obligations — decided entirely by average order value.
For high-ticket, low-volume sellers, those two states may never trigger regardless of revenue. That is worth confirming rather than assuming, but it is a real distinction.
The five with no statewide sales tax
Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon. No statewide general sales tax, so no state registration to worry about.
Two caveats that matter more than the headline:
Alaska has local sales tax. No state-level tax, but boroughs and cities levy their own, administered centrally for remote sellers through a single commission. The local layer is the whole story there.
The other four replaced it with something. Delaware has a gross receipts tax on sellers. Oregon has a Corporate Activity Tax on commercial activity above a threshold. New Hampshire has the Business Profits Tax and Business Enterprise Tax. Montana is the closest to genuinely clean, though resort communities levy local taxes on lodging and some retail.
"No sales tax" does not mean "no obligation." It means the obligation has a different name and a different agency.
What actually trips businesses up
Not the thresholds themselves. Three other things.
Nobody is measuring by state. The books record total revenue with no ship-to dimension, so the question "how much did we sell into Georgia last year" cannot be answered without a project. You cannot monitor a threshold you are not measuring against.
Marketplace sales confuse the picture. Large platforms generally collect and remit on transactions made through them. But your own site, wholesale, and direct sales remain yours. Some states count marketplace sales toward your threshold anyway; others do not. Lumped together in the books, the two streams become inseparable.
Physical presence still counts. Economic nexus was added to the old rules, not substituted for them. Inventory in a third-party warehouse, an employee working remotely, or attending a trade show can create an obligation at zero dollars of threshold.
Finding yours
We keep a page per state with the administering agency, the statewide base rate, the current threshold, the filing cadence, and the specific thing that trips people up there — all as of August 2026. Start at the state tax and revenue agency directory, or go straight to sales tax filing support for how the tracking and filing actually works.
Rates and thresholds change. Everything above reflects August 2026 and is worth verifying against the current authority before you rely on it — particularly the transaction-count tests, which several states have been quietly removing.
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