You can owe sales tax in a state you've never visited.

Sales tax is a state-level tax on the sale of goods and certain services. There is no single national sales tax — each state runs its own, with its own rules about what is taxable and what is exempt. When it applies, your company collects the tax from the customer and sends it to the state. You are a collector, but the money is not yours.

The tax is not tied to where your company is formed. It is tied to where your customers are, and to your connection with the state where the sale happens. That connection is what "nexus" names.

Nexus is the legal idea that a company has enough of a connection to a state that the state can require it to collect and remit tax. Some connections are obvious — an office, an employee, a warehouse in the state. Others are not: many states now treat making sales to customers in the state, above certain levels of activity, as creating nexus on its own, even with no physical presence at all.

That last part is why an online company with a Wyoming LLC and a founder in Lagos can find itself owing sales tax in, say, Texas. The customer's location, not the founder's, is what can create the obligation.

Those activity levels — the specific dollar or transaction amounts that trigger nexus — are exactly the kind of number we refuse to print, because they vary by state and change. To find out whether you have nexus, use our walkthrough: do I have nexus?

If your company sells to US customers, the honest answer is that whether and where you must register depends on your own sales patterns — and the source of truth is each state's department of revenue, not a marketing page. Registration, once you know you need it, is the topic of our state tax registration page.

We are not your accountant, and nexus is a judgment call about facts. The one thing worse than owing sales tax is not knowing you owe it — so resolve the question early.