Stripe Tax

Stripe Tax is Stripe's product for calculating and collecting indirect tax on the payments you take through Stripe. That covers US sales tax, VAT, and GST. It adds the correct tax to each checkout or invoice, collects it with the payment, and tracks where your sales may require you to register. You still owe the tax authority. Registering and filing stay your job unless you pay Stripe or a partner to handle them.

What's included in Stripe Tax

Stripe splits tax compliance into four jobs, and Stripe Tax helps with each one to a different degree.

1. Monitoring. Stripe tracks your Stripe-processed sales, minus refunds, by customer location and compares them with each jurisdiction's registration threshold. In the US these thresholds are called economic nexus. Stripe flags where you may have an obligation, and you decide whether you do. Monitoring only runs in live mode, and new transactions can take up to 7 days to show up.
2. Registration. Stripe Tax only collects tax in places where you've added an active registration. You can register with the tax authority yourself and add the registration in the Dashboard, or ask Stripe to register for you. Stripe registers directly in US states where you're a remote seller and works through Taxually in other countries.
3. Calculation and collection. You turn on automatic tax for Checkout, Payment Links, invoices, or subscriptions. Stripe then works out the tax from your registrations, the customer's location, the product tax code, and the price's tax behavior.
4. Filing and remitting. Stripe offers filing through TaxJar, a Stripe company, for the US and through Taxually for other countries.

On pay-as-you-go pricing you get monitoring, calculation, and collection. Registration and filing services come bundled with the Tax Complete plans below.

Stripe Tax pricing

Stripe only charges for Stripe Tax on live transactions in places where you're registered to collect tax. A sale to a state or country where you have no registration costs nothing, because Stripe Tax collects no tax there. Stripe's Tax pricing page lists two models.

• Tax Basic, pay as you go. With a no-code integration such as Checkout, Payment Links, Billing, or Invoicing, the fee is 0.5% of the transaction. With the Tax API, each transaction costs $0.50 and includes 10 calculation calls, and every extra calculation call costs $0.05. There's no monthly fee.
• Tax Complete, a subscription. Four tiers on one-year contracts, starting at $90 a month. The largest listed tier is $1,500 a month. Each tier includes a set number of transactions, API calls, registrations, and filings. Stripe charges extra if you go over those limits and for some registrations and filings outside the US.

These are the USD prices on Stripe's US pricing page. Check the page for your own country before you budget.

Does the Stripe Tax fee depend on whether you get paid?

No. Stripe charges for the tax calculation, not for the money collected. Stripe's support docs say the fee can apply when the payment is never collected, when the card charge is disputed, or when the calculated tax is zero.

How Stripe automatic tax calculation works

You enable automatic tax per integration. In the API that means passing automatic_tax[enabled]=true on a Checkout Session, invoice, or subscription. For each transaction, Stripe looks at the customer's location, checks whether you have a registration there, finds the rate for the product's tax code, and adds the tax line. Customers outside the US need at least a country on file before Stripe Tax can calculate anything.

Tax behavior decides how the price is shown. Exclusive adds tax on top of the price, which is normal in the US. Inclusive keeps the customer's total fixed and includes the tax in it, which is common for consumer sales in many other countries. Stripe's recommended "Automatic" setting uses exclusive pricing for USD and CAD and inclusive pricing for other currencies. Once you set a price's tax behavior to exclusive or inclusive, you can't change it.

An invoice uses the tax rate in force when it's finalized, not when the draft was created.

Stripe Tax codes

A product tax code tells Stripe Tax what kind of product you sell, because jurisdictions tax categories at different rates. Each code is txcd_ followed by 8 digits. Some common ones:

• txcd_10000000 is General, electronically supplied services.
• txcd_10103001 is Software as a service, business use.
• txcd_10103000 is Software as a service, personal use.
• txcd_99999999 is General, tangible goods.
• txcd_00000000 is Nontaxable.

Set a preset tax code in your Dashboard tax settings, and Stripe applies it to every product that has no code of its own. You can also set a code on each product in the Dashboard or with the tax_code field in the API. Stripe's product tax codes page has the full list, and the Tax Codes API returns the same list.

Pick codes with care. A SaaS product left on a tangible goods code gets taxed at the wrong rate in every state that treats software differently.

Are Stripe fees subject to GST?

Yes, in some countries. This is a separate question from Stripe Tax. Stripe Tax handles the tax you charge your customers. GST or VAT on Stripe's own fees depends on where your business is based.

• Australia. GST applies to all Stripe fees at the standard rate.
• Canada. GST or HST applies to Stripe's software products, such as Billing, Radar, and Tax.
• Singapore. GST applies to certain Stripe fees, such as Connect, Terminal hardware, and Radar.
• Ireland, Norway, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the UAE. Stripe charges local VAT on its fees.

Where Stripe charges tax on its fees, it issues a monthly tax invoice in the Documents section of the Dashboard by the 10th of the following month. Your accountant uses it to claim the tax back if you're registered. In other countries you may need to account for the tax yourself under the reverse charge, and Stripe tells you to ask a tax advisor. Stripe's taxation of Stripe fees page links to each country's rules.

Mistakes that cost money

• Existing subscriptions aren't covered automatically. Stripe Tax applies to transactions created after you set it up. Subscriptions that existed before have to be migrated to automatic tax, or they keep billing without tax.
• A missing location turns tax off. If a subscription customer has no recognized location, for example after their default payment method is removed, their invoices keep charging without tax. Stripe sets the subscription's automatic_tax.disabled_reason to requires_location_inputs and sends customer.subscription.updated. The Subscriptions page has an "Automatic tax not enabled" filter that finds them. Ask your tax advisor whether you owe tax on those sales.
• Standalone invoices stall. An automatically finalized invoice without a subscription stays in draft when the customer's location is invalid. Stripe sends invoice.finalization_failed with a customer_tax_location_invalid error.
• Connect platforms count per account. On Stripe Connect, your connected accounts' sales count toward their own thresholds by default, not your platform's.

Who does what

1. Founder or finance decide where to register, ideally with a tax advisor as Stripe recommends, and respond to threshold notices in the Tax dashboard.
2. Engineering enables automatic tax, collects enough address data at checkout, sets product tax codes, and migrates older subscriptions.
3. Finance reconciles tax collected against tax filed each period with Stripe Tax reports.

Stripe Tax and ChargeBell

ChargeBell has no tax-specific alert, but Stripe Tax changes how you read your payment alerts. A successful payment alert shows what the customer paid and what you keep after Stripe's fees. On a taxed sale both numbers still include tax you'll pay to a tax authority, because Stripe takes its fee out but leaves the tax in. Treat the alert as a cash signal and use Stripe's tax reports for the revenue split. The Stripe Slack integration page shows which payment events ChargeBell posts.