Use manual Tax Rates

Stripe supports manually defining Tax Rates to collect taxes (sales, VAT, GST, and others) for different locations. However, Stripe Tax is recommended instead of manual tax rates to automatically enable support for 60+ countries.

There are two ways to collect taxes in Checkout:

• Use fixed tax rates when you know the exact tax rate to charge your customer before they start the checkout process (for example, you only sell to customers in the UK and always charge 20% VAT).
• Use dynamic tax rates with the Prices API when you need more information from your customer (for example, their billing or shipping address) to determine the tax rate to charge. With dynamic tax rates, you create tax rates for different regions (for example, a 20% VAT tax rate for customers in the UK and a 7.25% sales tax rate for customers in California, US) and Stripe attempts to match your customer’s location to one of those tax rates.

Create tax rates

First, create tax rates for regions you need to collect taxes for. If you’re working with a small number of tax rates, it’s often simpler to use the Dashboard to create and manage them. After creating tax rates, you can pass them as either fixed or dynamic tax rates to the Checkout Session.

Create tax rates with the API

The following example demonstrates how you can create a tax rate with the API.

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/tax_rates \
  -u "
sk_test_BQokikJOvBiI2HlWgH4olfQ2
:" \
  -d display_name="Sales Tax" \
  -d inclusive=false \
  -d percentage="7.25" \
  -d country=US \
  -d state=CA \
  -d jurisdiction="US - CA" \
  -d description="CA Sales Tax"

Required properties:

• The display_name is a short-name that describes the specific type of tax, such as Sales, VAT, or GST.
• The inclusive property determines whether the tax percentage is either added to, or included in, the overall amount.
• The percentage is a number (up to 4 decimal places) that represents the tax percentage to be collected.

Optional properties:

• The optional country property is a valid two-letter ISO country code. Some countries (for example, United States) require an additional two-letter state property. Use these properties to apply dynamic tax rates based on your customer’s billing or shipping address in Checkout Sessions.

• The optional jurisdiction property represents the tax rate’s tax jurisdiction and you can use it to differentiate between tax rates of the same percentage. In the Dashboard, jurisdiction appears as the tax rate’s Region label.

• You can also store additional details in the description. This property isn’t exposed to your customers.

Fixed tax rates

• For one-time payments, pass the Tax Rate ID to line_item.tax_rates.
• For recurring payments, pass the Tax Rate ID to subscription_data.default_tax-rates.

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/checkout/sessions \
  -u "
sk_test_BQokikJOvBiI2HlWgH4olfQ2
:" \
  -d "line_items[0][price]"=
{{PRICE_ID}} \
  -d "line_items[0][quantity]"=1 \
  -d "line_items[0][tax_rates][0]"=
{{TAX_RATE_ID}} \
  -d mode=payment \
  --data-urlencode success_url="https://example.com/success" \
  --data-urlencode cancel_url="https://example.com/cancel"

Dynamic tax rates

Pass the array of tax rates to line_items.dynamic_tax_rates. Each tax rate must have a supported country, and for the US, a state. The current list of supported countries are:

• Austria
• Australia
• Belgium
• Bulgaria
• Cyprus
• Czech Republic
• Germany
• Denmark
• Estonia
• Spain
• Finland
• France
• United Kingdom
• Greece
• Croatia
• Hungary
• Ireland
• Italy
• Lithuania
• Luxembourg
• Latvia
• Malta
• Netherlands
• Poland
• Portugal
• Romania
• Sweden
• Slovenia
• Slovakia
• United States

This list matches tax rates to your customer’s shipping address or billing address. The shipping address takes precedence over the billing address for determining the tax rate to charge.

Billing address collection is automatically enabled when using dynamic tax rates. If you’re not collecting a shipping address, your customer’s billing address is used to determine the tax rate. If you haven’t passed a tax rate that matches your customer’s shipping or billing address, no tax rate is applied.

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/checkout/sessions \
  -u "
sk_test_BQokikJOvBiI2HlWgH4olfQ2
:" \
  -d "line_items[0][price]"=
{{PRICE_ID}} \
  -d "line_items[0][quantity]"=2 \
  -d "line_items[0][dynamic_tax_rates][0]"={{FIRST_TAX_RATE_ID}} \
  -d "line_items[0][dynamic_tax_rates][1]"={{SECOND_TAX_RATE_ID}} \
  -d mode=payment \
  --data-urlencode success_url="https://example.com/success" \
  --data-urlencode cancel_url="https://example.com/cancel"

Apple Pay and Google Pay

When using dynamic tax rates without shipping_address_collection, Apple Pay and Google Pay aren’t available to customers.

Tax reporting and remittance

Any business collecting taxes ultimately needs to remit tax to the appropriate government. You can use Stripe’s data exports to populate the periodic reports that you’re required to make to taxation authorities.

Data exports

From the Dashboard’s Tax Rates list, you can export data files required for tax reporting calculations. Different Checkout modes require different processes.

Payment mode

When using Checkout in payment mode, use the following two tax reporting exports:

• Checkout payment mode line item tax export—Includes details down to the line-item level, including per-line-item tax rates, inclusive and exclusive, amounts, and so on. This is a lower-level export.
• Checkout payment mode totals export—Shows the aggregate tax collected on the Checkout Session as a whole, including adjustments for any refunds.

For remittance reporting, use the Checkout payment mode line item tax export to sum all of the amounts paid for all of the tax rates used. To factor in any refunds, you also need to pivot against the Checkout payment mode totals export.

Subscription mode

When using Checkout in subscription mode, use the Stripe Billing tax exports instead.