Local taxes vs. State taxes?

[hthrlu]

I live in Missouri, and the state sales tax rate is 4.225. The local municipality that I live in charges a different sales tax rate. Am I supposed to charge my clients for both local and state taxes? I am a wedding photographer, and this would be for albums, DVDs, prints, etc. Thank you!

[Evan]

Whether you need to charge sales tax on those items is up to your specific state and municipality laws. But generally, yes there would be two taxes. Your state tax of 4.225%, plus the local tax of X%. They are generally both based off of the total price. So a $100 item's tax would be $4.24 for state, and $100 x local tax rate. (You're not paying tax on tax usually.)

[jamesray50]

This is exactly why I hate doing sales taxes. Way too confusing when the local municipalities get involved. They don't do that in Kentucky, at least around Lexington they don't. And I'm not aware of other locals in KY charging sales tax.

[Evan]

Jo Ellen -- the "municipal" income taxes for Kentucky are equally as frustrating.

[jamesray50]

I am aware of all the local taxes for cities and counties for payroll and income. I mostly dealt with the payroll end of it. I had construction clients that worked in different cities and the major problem I alway ran into was getting the forms I needed. Especially from the smaller cities and counties. Most of them wouldn't mail them and didn't have them online.

But, we also did tax returns for some larger construction clients who had large returns and did work in lots of cities here in KY. I helped assemble the returns during the tax season and those returns were hard to do. Lots of the Net Profit returns weren't available in our forms program or only available as a pdf, so they would have to be typed. It would take a few hours to assemble those returns. The CPA's doing those returns hand wrote them and me and the other girl who assembled the returns did the typing and checking the math.

Although I miss the extra money I made the first four months of the year working at the CPA firm, I do not miss working all the overtime. My best friend was telling me the other day that I seem to be a lot happier since I am no longer working there. Kinda of weird since I'm unemployed and not earning any money yet. But, I do have one monthly client and know I will get more soon and can set my own schedule.

[mettro2]

Usually you can check your local municipality's website for the total sales tax you have to pay.
My business is in Denver and the sales tax here is not necessarily high but the breakdown is a little complicated:

We pay 3.62% to the city and county
1.0% to the RTD (public transportation)
0.1% to the stadium
0.1% to culture
2.9% to the state of Colorado
It all totals 7.72%.
This is just to give you an example of how complicated it can get in some place.