United States VAT registration threshold

What this value means

REFUSAL — the United States fixes no VAT/GST registration threshold because it levies no VAT or GST; any single national figure would be an invention. General consumption tax is imposed by the STATES as a single-stage retail sales and use tax, and since Wayfair (2018) each state sets its own economic-nexus registration threshold. Anchor figures verified against the primary instruments this pass: South Dakota SDCL 10-64-2 — $100,000 delivered into the state in the previous or current calendar year (the '200 transactions' limb was REPEALED by SL 2023 ch 38, effective 1 July 2023); California Rev. & Tax. Code s 6203 (AB 147) — $500,000 of tangible personal property in the preceding or current calendar year, aggregating related persons; Texas — $500,000 safe harbour over the preceding twelve calendar months, counting taxable AND nontaxable sales of goods and services; New York Tax Law ss 1101(b)(8)(i)(E), (b)(8)(iv) — BOTH more than $500,000 of tangible personal property AND more than 100 sales, over the immediately preceding four sales tax quarters; Alaska (no state tax) — member local jurisdictions via the ARSSTC Uniform Code, $100,000 last or current year (its 200-transaction limb removed 1 January 2025). Five states levy no state-level general sales tax: Alaska, Delaware (seller-side gross receipts tax instead), Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon. PERIOD BASIS: not even the same shape across states — prior-or-current calendar year (SD, CA, AK), rolling twelve months (TX), rolling four sales-tax quarters running Mar-May/Jun-Aug/Sep-Nov/Dec-Feb (NY). On crossing, obligations run forward, not retroactively, with differing lead times: Texas allows until the first day of the fourth month after the month of crossing; New York requires immediate registration; South Dakota's statute is expressly non-retroactive. NON-ESTABLISHED SUPPLIERS: the usual foreign-seller rule is INVERTED here, and getting this backwards is the expensive error. The state economic-nexus threshold IS the non-established-supplier rule — a supplier outside the United States is treated the same as an out-of-state American one (California's AB 147 guidance expressly reaches 'foreign sellers located outside of the United States'; Texas provides a paper registration route for sellers outside the US). But the threshold shelters only sellers with NO physical presence: inventory in a fulfilment warehouse, an employee, a sales agent, or a leased server creates an obligation from the first taxable sale. There is no single United States registration — each state is tested separately, plus DC and Alaska's local commission. IMPORTED DIGITAL SERVICES: no federal registration, no OSS equivalent, no separate digital threshold, and no reverse charge. Digital supplies fall into the same state tests, but the MEASURE differs: South Dakota counts products transferred electronically and services; Texas counts taxable and nontaxable sales of goods and services (and taxes SaaS as data processing); California and New York measure only tangible personal property, so a pure SaaS seller may never trigger those two tests on turnover at all. B2B is not reverse-charged — the buyer self-assesses USE TAX where the seller does not collect, and a seller is relieved by a valid resale/exemption certificate, not by a customer tax number. Traps: (1) Any single national figure is wrong. (2) The threshold protects only sellers with no physical presence — consigned stock in a marketplace warehouse defeats it in that state. (3) Identical headline figures measure different bases (CA: tangible property only, related-party aggregated; TX: everything including resale and exempt sales; NY: tangible property only). (4) Periods differ by state. (5) NY is conjunctive (dollars AND transaction count); SD/CA/TX are dollar-only. (6) Cached transaction-count limbs over-collect: SD's 200-transaction limb repealed 2023, Alaska's removed 2025 — do not serve the 2018 rules. (7) Crossing does not mean collecting at once or retroactively. (8) State registration is not the whole obligation (California district use tax has its own $500,000 test; Alaska taxes only through local jurisdictions). (9) Marketplace sales count differently by state — ARSSTC counts ALL sales including marketplace-facilitator sales, while a Texas seller selling only through a certifying marketplace needs no permit. (10) This is not a VAT: single-stage, no input credit — applying VAT input-output logic or an EU-style reverse charge produces the wrong answer. (11) Wayfair created no federal rule; it removed the physical-presence bar and left over 10,000 jurisdictions setting their own standards.

Get it programmatically

curl https://usaref.dev/v1/us/vat-registration-threshold
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://usaref.dev/v1/us/vat-registration-threshold/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://usaref.dev/provenance/us/vat-registration-threshold

Other United States series: Federal funds target range (upper bound) · Value added tax · State general sales tax rate · Federal minimum wage (FLSA) · Federal public holidays 2026 · Consumer Price Index (CPI-U), 12-month change · Federal corporate income tax rate · Withholding tax rates · Federal post-judgment interest rate (28 U.S.C. § 1961) · Federal individual income tax brackets (single filer, tax year 2026) · Statutory social-insurance contributions

The same figure elsewhere: Canada · Costa Rica · Dominican Republic · El Salvador · Guatemala · all 10