Sales Tax Calculator
Add sales tax or VAT to a price, or extract the tax back out of a total.
Add sales tax or VAT to a price, or work backwards to strip tax out of a total. Enter any rate and see the net, tax and gross amounts instantly.
Enter an amount and a rate to see the breakdown.
Features
- Add tax to a price, or remove tax from a total
- Works for any sales tax or VAT rate
- Shows net, tax and gross amounts at once
- Reverse mode extracts the tax already included
- Runs in your browser, nothing is uploaded
How to use it
- Enter the amount and the tax rate as a percentage.
- Choose add tax (for a net price) or remove tax (for a gross total).
- Read off the net, tax and gross figures instantly.
- Copy the full breakdown with one click.
Adding tax versus extracting it
There are two everyday tax questions and they are not the same calculation. The first is forward: you have a net price and want to add tax, so you multiply the price by the rate and add it on. A 100 item at 8.5 percent becomes 108.50. The second is backward: you have a gross total that already includes tax and want to know how much of it is tax, which many people get wrong by simply subtracting the rate.
Extracting tax correctly means dividing, not subtracting. If a total of 108.50 includes 8.5 percent tax, the net is 108.50 divided by 1.085, which is 100, and the tax is the difference, 8.50. Subtracting 8.5 percent of 108.50 would give the wrong answer, because the percentage was applied to the smaller net figure, not the gross. This calculator's remove-tax mode does the division for you.
The same maths covers US sales tax and European or global VAT, since both are a percentage added to a price. The only difference is convention: sales tax is usually shown added at the register, while VAT is typically already included in the displayed price, which is exactly when the reverse calculation is useful.