🧾 Sales Tax & VAT Calculator

Add sales tax or VAT to a price, or work backward from a tax-inclusive total to find the pre-tax price and the tax amount.

Mode

Price is tax-exclusive (add tax) Price is tax-inclusive (remove tax)

Price Before Tax ($)

Tax / VAT Rate (%)

Adding tax multiplies, removing it divides

The two modes are not mirror images, and that is where most mistakes happen:

add tax:    tax = price x rate / 100      total = price + tax
remove tax: pre-tax = total / (1 + rate / 100)
            tax     = total - pre-tax

At the default 8.5%, a $100 ticket price becomes $108.50. Switch to tax-inclusive and feed $108.50 back in and you get $100.00 and $8.50 again. Taking 8.5% off $108.50 instead would give $99.28 - short by 72 cents, because the tax was charged on $100, not on the total.

Sales tax and VAT behave differently at the till

US sales tax is excluded from the shelf price, so you almost always want the add mode. Rates are state plus county plus city, which is why they land on figures like 8.375%.
VAT and GST are included in the advertised price across the UK, EU and much of Asia, so the remove mode is what you need to pull the net amount out for an expense claim.
The 20% UK shortcut: divide a VAT-inclusive price by 6 for the VAT. On a £59.99 item that is £10.00, leaving £49.99.

One rate at a time. Where a state and a city tax stack, add the rates together first - 6.25% plus 2.25% is 8.5% - since both are charged on the same pre-tax amount rather than one on top of the other.

Frequently asked questions

How do I find the VAT in a price that already includes it?

Divide the total by 1 plus the rate as a decimal, then subtract. At 20% VAT, a 120 total divided by 1.2 is 100 net and 20 of VAT. The quick version for 20% is to divide the gross figure by 6.

What is 8.5% sales tax on $100?

$8.50, for a total of $108.50. Multiply the price by 0.085, or take 10% ($10.00) and subtract 15% of that ($1.50).

Why does the tax-inclusive answer end in an odd number of cents?

Because dividing rarely lands on a round figure. $50 inclusive of 8.5% is $46.08 net and $3.92 of tax; the tool shows two decimals, but the underlying value carries more. Registers round the final total, not each line.