What the register covers

One register, one schema, for every regime — measured against release 2026.09.22-261. The figures move with every release, which is why the command below is the answer and this table is only an illustration.

Ask it what it covers rather than trusting this page:

php artisan tax:data:status

How a rate is found

The key is (jurisdiction, category, classification) — not category alone. 93% of live EU rates carry a CN, CPA or band code, and on that key there is no ambiguity anywhere in the register. The ambiguity that appears at (jurisdiction, category) is entirely an artefact of collapsing across classification.

So a supply with a commodity code resolves exactly. Without one, a category with two live answers refuses the band and takes the standard rate, flagged heading_ambiguous — the direction a customer can be refunded from.

Two details that decide real invoices:

• The longest classification wins, and a shortened match is an inference. Codes run to two, four, six and eight digits, and a chapter can disagree with a subheading beneath it: the register has 95 live cases where it does. Austria taxes food at 10% under CN 04 and carves CN 0401 10 out at 4.9%.
• Only what the customer bears. A digital services tax is a levy on the supplier's turnover; summed into a cart it overcharges the customer and under-declares the liability in one step.

Below the state line, in the United States

Every authority that applies is summed, or none of them: inside Kansas City a county and a city both levy (6.5 + 1.0 + 1.625), and a rate short by one authority's share would be an under-charge stamped authoritative. A local record the store cannot price abandons the whole stack and returns the state share flagged instead. A stack is also no surer than the state share it stands on: Pennsylvania's 6% is a bracket table, and a local share added to it as a percentage is within a cent of the answer, not on it: Derived, flagged BracketSchedule. Where the local share publishes its own table — Pennsylvania's 1% is ten cents on each exact $10 (61 Pa. Code § 60.16) — each table is read on its own and the two are added, which is exact.

A state that writes its tax as a table is priced by the table. Alabama, Idaho, Maryland and Pennsylvania publish tables in cents, and Maryland's statute states the tax as its table: on $1.34 it is 9 cents, where 6% rounded is 8. The rate carries the table (TaxRate::$schedule) and a tax-exclusive sale is priced by it — on the sale's total, not line by line, so two $0.40 lines are one $0.80 sale at 5 cents. Where the table cannot be read — a tax-inclusive price, a local share on top, an amount it has no row for — the table's per-dollar figure is used and flagged BracketSchedule. The Streamlined states round a percentage instead: their agreement bars requiring a bracket system.

A sale too small to tax is not taxed. Colorado taxes no sale of 17 cents or less, Idaho none of 11, Maryland none of 19. The register publishes it as a minimum_taxable_sale rule, and it is read on the sale: a line of an order reads the order's total (TaxQuery::$saleAmount), so two 10-cent items are one taxable 20-cent sale.

Every kind of rule the register publishes is accounted for. The engine applies it, or has set it aside with the reason written down; tax:data:sync names any kind in neither list, and the check against the live register fails on one. Set aside today: the margin scheme for second-hand goods (it needs the purchase price and the seller's election), and who collects a local tax (a filing question, not a price).

A ZIP is a mail route, not a tax boundary. Washington's 98001 holds Federal Way and Auburn at 10.4% and unincorporated King County at 10.3%. Asked with the bare five digits, the store can only return one of the ZIP's answers, so a ZIP split between authority sets comes back flagged RateLimit::PostcodeSpansLocalities with the ZIP+4 or the street as the remedy; the ZIP+4 settles it. Illinois lists single add-ons rather than ranges, so a split ZIP there has no answer for the five digits at all: the state share, with the same flag. A ZIP whose addresses all share one set is decided by its five digits and is not flagged. A host can ask before it geocodes: RegisterBoundaries::zipIsUniform('WA', '98001') is false, true for a uniform ZIP, and null where the store holds no postal data for it.

A district drawn over the postal layer needs the point. Nebraska's Good Life Districts set the state's own rate inside boundaries no ZIP follows — 2.75% in Avenue One in Omaha, where the state's is 5.5% — so the postal files never name them. The register draws them in a separate overlay, never as the state's polygon layer, and each district says what it replaces. Asked with a ZIP+4 and the point it was geocoded to (scheme zip9+latlng), the ZIP+4 answers the city and county and the point says whether the address is inside a district: Avenue One is 2.75 + Omaha's 1.5 = 4.25%. Asked with the ZIP+4 alone in a ZIP a district reaches, the answer is the one outside it, flagged RateLimit::DistrictNeedsPoint — and only where the district would change the figure: the four districts at the state's own 5.5% raise nothing. The shipped geocoder sends both keys for any state whose store holds an overlay.

Outside every polygon is not automatically "no local tax". The register says per state whether its artifacts leave any levying ground out, as a dated list of the codes they never place (absence.blockedBy). Where none of those is in force on the supply date — California and New Mexico — a point in no polygon is priced at the state rate, authoritative. Where one is — Texas has a district in force with no polygon, and districts starting on 1 October before its layer carries them — the point stays unresolved and flagged. A ZIP missing from a postal file is never read as "no local tax": it is a gap in the file. The register also says which level a local answer needs (resolution); a state that needs only the county is resolved from the county's name. A release that predates these fields behaves as before.

California files all-in totals rather than components, so a combined record replaces the state share instead of adding to it — and still decomposes into the state share and the aggregate local share, because a return is filed against authorities.

Texas resolves by point. The Comptroller publishes the Rate Locator's layers — cities, combined areas, transit, special purpose districts and counties — and the register ships them as a polygon file. A combined area stands in place of the city, district or county it combines (geometry format 3, replaces), so those are dropped wherever it covers the point. A polygon layer lists the locals, not the state: the state share is added to every point answer, which is what a state filing local components needs, and changes nothing where locals are combined totals (California, New Mexico).

Proved against the register's own deck

The register publishes a conformance deck — addresses in, expected authority set and rate out — cut from the artifacts a release actually ships and read back through the same shared resolver this engine uses. RegisterConformanceTest checks the expected authority sets for Kansas and Arkansas. It does not compare the deck's rate totals; calculation and live-sync tests are separate.

That is the only cross-check that means anything here. Two readers of one format drift apart quietly: it is exactly what happened when the resolver package read a formatVersion 3 artifact as a v2 one and answered "no local authority levies here" for every address in twenty-four states, with its own suite green throughout.

It is not SST's certification deck, and passing it is not certification.

Known gaps

• Street indexes are opt-in and fifteen states publish one. The other nine Streamlined states top out at ZIP+4, which is the state's own choice rather than a hole.
• An undetermined (state, category) pair resolves to taxable. The retired us-tax-data dataset carried an explicit marker where its sources disagreed and the engine refused on it; the register's taxability lives in sworn Streamlined answers keyed by classification, with no per-category verdict for that marker to be. Taxable is the over-charge direction and therefore recoverable — but it is a real difference from what this package did before.
• A jurisdiction the register does not carry still refuses, because there the engine knows nothing rather than knowing a default.