How is cannabis retail tax calculated?

13 of 52 jurisdictions published. A jurisdiction appears only after its rules have been read against its own statute and administrative code.

Each citation is a link to the state's own text. That is the whole offer of this site: do not take the number on trust, open the statute and see whether it says what we say it says.

Read the base on every row before comparing any two of them. A charge on a wholesale price is real money and it is in your cost of goods, but it is levied upstream and never appears on a customer's receipt, so it is not a line the till collects. A table that showed only percentages, without the base beside each one, would invite exactly that mistake, which is why the base is on the card rather than in a footnote.

What is the base? The corpus records the base on every published tax, because a percentage means nothing without it. A rate on the retail sales price and a rate on a weight are different taxes that happen to be written with the same kind of number, and a discount changes the first while leaving the second alone.

Does it stack? 19 of the 40 published taxes stack with sales tax. Where two charges apply, the order they apply in changes the total, because a percentage taken on a subtotal that already includes another percentage is a larger number than two percentages taken on the same base. It is a small difference per transaction and a systematic one per quarter.

Who does not pay it? Exemptions are usually about the customer rather than the product, which means they depend on a document being checked at the moment of the sale. A system that applies an exemption by product category will get it wrong in both directions.

How does it round? Not always the way a spreadsheet rounds, as the next section shows.

This is the clearest example on the whole site of why a citation beats a summary. Oregon does not leave the last cent to convention:

That is rounding up, in law, on every transaction that does not land on a whole cent. A system using ordinary half up rounding, or the banker's rounding that is the default in a good deal of financial software, will be a cent light on a large share of sales. Nobody notices for a year, and then a reconciliation does.

The same section is where the collection duty and the receipt duty come from. Subsection (1), read the same day, provides that the tax is a direct tax on the consumer, that payment upon retail sale is required, and that it is collected at the point of sale by the retailer at the time at which the retail sale occurs. Subsection (4) requires the amount of the tax to be separately stated on the invoice or receipt provided to the consumer at that time, except as the Department of Revenue provides by rule.

Subsection (5) is worth knowing about even though it will never apply to an honest shop: it prohibits knowingly selling, purchasing, installing, transferring or possessing electronic devices or software programs for the purpose of hiding, removing or falsifying records of retail sales. Sales suppression is legislated against by name, which is a reasonable clue about how seriously the sales record is taken.

A state that permits a local charge usually constrains it in the same breath, and the constraints are worth reading before assuming a city rate can be anything a council likes.

Three things follow for a retailer. A local rate above the statutory ceiling is not a rate you should be charging. A local tax that was never referred to the electors is on shaky ground. And the local charge carries the same customer exemption as the state one, which means the exemption logic at the till has to reach both lines rather than only the state line.

Read that carefully, because it is stronger than an exemption a customer may claim. The retailer may not collect the tax where proof is provided at the time of the sale. Charging it anyway is not a customer service problem, it is collecting a tax the statute says is not imposed.

The exemption also has an end date in the text. A note published with the section, read on September 6, 2026, records that it applies to retail sales occurring on or after 1 January 2016 and before 1 January 2028. A sunset in the text as it currently stands is not a prediction that it will lapse, and it is exactly the kind of thing a shop wants to know about in advance rather than in the week it happens.

Practically, the exemption depends on a document being checked at the moment of the sale and on that check leaving a record. Which makes it a purchase limits problem as much as a tax problem: see how much you may sell one customer, where the same card decides a different ceiling.

Two details in there catch people out. The retention clock is not the same as the licensing retention clock, so a shop deleting records on the shorter of the two is deleting tax records early. And the demand may be oral, which means the practical readiness question is not whether the records exist somewhere but whether they can be produced quickly by whoever is standing in the shop that day.

What that looks like in practice, and what else gets asked for, is on what a cannabis inspection asks for.

State tax is collected from the customer. The federal issue is a different thing entirely: it is about what a cannabis business may deduct from its own income, and it is the reason shops with healthy margins can post an effective rate that looks impossible.

That sentence is the whole of what the agency's own page states on the point. It does not set out what the limitations are, and this page is not going to fill the gap from memory. Federal tax treatment of a cannabis business is a question for an accountant who works in the industry, it changes with litigation and with policy, and Bloom has published nothing about it.