Create and Manage Your Sales Tax Settings
With Square, you can apply taxes to your in-person and online sales, and create custom taxes with specific rules. You can also enable your team members to edit taxes at the time of sale through your team permissions, and track your taxable and non-taxable sales from your Dashboard.
Note:Square’s fees are taken out of the total amount of each transaction (including taxes and tip).
Create In-Person Sales Taxes
Set up tax rates for your in-person operations from either your Dashboard or Square app.
- From your Account & Settings page, go to Business information > Sales taxes.
- Click Create tax.
- Under Details, enter the tax name and rate, and select the locations where the rate applies.
- Under “Tax application,” choose to apply the tax to either All current and future taxable items at selected locations, or Select items to choose specific items to apply the rate to. You can also apply the tax to custom amounts. Note: If an item is set as non-taxable, taxes won’t be auto-applied to the item on any orders across Square Online or Square Point of Sale.
- Under “Tax calculation,” choose either Additive tax to have tax as a separate line item on customer receipts, or Inclusive tax to have tax included in the item price.
- Under “Tax exemption,” toggle on Add exemption rule to specify when this tax should not be applied.
- Click Save when finished.
- From your Point of Sale, tap ≡ More > Settings > Checkout > Sales taxes.
- Tap the tax you’d like to modify or the button to create a new one.
- Enter the tax name and rate.
- Under “Tax application,” choose to apply the tax to either All items and services (current and future), or Select items to choose specific items to apply the rate to. You can also apply the tax to custom amounts. Note: If an item is set as non-taxable, taxes won’t be auto-applied to the item on any orders across Square Online or Square Point of Sale.
- Under “Calculation method,” choose either Additive tax to have tax as a separate line item on customer receipts, or Inclusive tax to have tax included in the item price.
- Tap Save when finished.
Note: The option to apply tax to All items and services is currently available on the Square Point of Sale, Square Appointments and Square Invoices apps.
Create Online Sales Taxes
You can set up tax rates for orders that come from your Square Online site directly in your Square Online Overview Page. Learn about managing sales tax settings for Square Online orders for more details.
Disable or Delete Sales Taxes
You can disable or delete your sales tax rates at any time from either your Dashboard or POS. To start:
Disable: From the Sales taxes tab, select the tax you wish to disable, then Actions > Disable tax. By disabling, the tax will no longer be applied to purchases.
Delete: From the Sales taxes tab, select the tax you wish to delete, then Actions > Delete tax. This action cannot be undone.
Manage Item-Level Taxes
To manage item-level taxes:
From your Square Item Library, select an existing item or create a new one.
Under Details, select Taxes.
Toggle on Non-taxable item if you don’t want the item to be taxed. Toggle it off to apply specific tax rates you’ve created to the item. Click Done.
Click Save when finished.
If you’ve listed the item as non-taxable, taxes won’t be auto-applied to the item on any orders across Square Online or Square Point of Sale.
Note: Sales tax and custom taxes will automatically apply to sales where a custom amount is entered. To disable taxes for custom amounts, visit your tax settings in the app.
Edit Taxes at the Time of Sale
If you need to edit taxes at the time of sale:
From your Point of Sale, tap Checkout > Review sale.
Tap an item.
Under Taxes, toggle applicable tax rates on or off.
Note: From the “Current sale” screen, you can also tap Tax to view all tax rates applied to the current sale. Tap the X icon to remove a tax rate from applicable items within the sale, then tap Save to return to checkout.
Create Tax Exemptions
You can create tax exemption rules from Dashboard to apply them to sales across your devices. These rules can exempt specific items or categories from taxes. You can also create a tax exemption rule for price thresholds. Learn how to create and manage tax exemption rules with our Tax Exemption Guide.
Manage Taxes with the Catalog Import Tool
Once you’ve created a sales tax, you can apply the tax to your catalog in bulk via the catalog import tool. To start:
From your Square Item Library, click Actions > Export Library.
Once your file’s exported, tax columns will appear on the spreadsheet. From here, enter Y or N in each row to apply or not apply the tax rate to the selected item in the catalog. For large catalogs, items can be sorted by category. A formula can also be written to facilitate the bulk application of tax rates.
Once tax rates have been assigned to items within the spreadsheet, go back to your Square Item Library and click Actions > Import Library to upload any changes.
Note: When editing any existing catalog items from the spreadsheet, do not edit or remove the value in the Token column. Upon reimporting, the token is used to identify the existing item in the catalog.
Learn more about item importing and exporting.
DISCLAIMER: Although we’ve built a powerful tax calculation system for Square, Square cannot offer any tax advice or consultation services. Tax compliance is your responsibility. We do not guarantee the applicability or accuracy of our tax tools. If you have any questions about your tax obligations, consider consulting a professional tax advisor.