What States Have No Tax on Clothing? Seven Tax Codes, Seven Different Ways to Define a Coat

There are three kinds of people at an American register, and the split isn’t income or taste. It’s geography. The first kind has never once read the tax line on a clothing receipt, because in their state there has never been one. The second kind reads it every time and can predict it to the penny. The third kind, the kind who eventually types this question into a search bar, gets a tax line on some receipts and not on others, from the same chain, in the same month, and can’t figure out what they did differently.

This is a September problem now. Fall receipts are piling up, the summer tax holidays are over, and American price stickers are quoted tax-out, so the sticker won’t warn you either. What follows is a desk read of the documents, dated September 16, 2026 (we read seven statutes and bulletins plus two holiday calendars for this, so the glamour-to-PDF ratio is about what you’d expect). No garments were purchased. None needed to be. The seven documents disagree with each other in writing.

What states have no sales tax on clothing?

New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Vermont exempt everyday clothing from state sales tax with no dollar cap, and five more states, Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon, charge no general sales tax on anything, per the Tax Foundation’s exemption map. Three others draw dollar lines: New York at $110 per item, Massachusetts at $175, Rhode Island at $250. That’s the fast answer. The honest one is that each code draws the boundary of “clothing” in its own hand, and your receipt follows the drawing.

The quickest way to see how strange the map is: walk it.

The cliff state

Start at the corner of West 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. Clothing and footwear sold for less than $110 per item or pair are exempt from New York’s 4% state tax, per Tax Bulletin ST-122. Read the phrasing slowly, because it’s a cliff, not a discount. At $109.99 the whole shirt is exempt. At $110.00 the whole shirt is taxed, first line on the bulletin’s not-eligible list, and in New York City that’s the combined 8.875% on all of it, $9.76 conjured by one cent of price.

Then it gets stranger, because the exemption is a state offer that each county gets to refuse. Publication 718-C, the two-page list dated 2/25 that the state still serves today, names exactly eleven jurisdictions that waive their local tax too: New York City plus ten counties, Monroe and Dutchess among them. Everywhere else in the state, the under-$110 shirt still pays local tax. In Buffalo’s Erie County that’s 4¾%, about $4.51 on a $95 shirt that would ring up at $95.00 flat in Brooklyn. Counties can switch sides only on March 1 of each year, per the same bulletin.

New York is the only state in this piece that runs its threshold as a cliff. The other two dollar-line states shave.

The flat-out four

Cross the Hudson and the tax line disappears. New Jersey exempts clothing and footwear outright, no cap, per S&U-4, the state’s sales tax guide. Its exempt list is a small poem: bathing caps, djellabas, ear muffs, yarmulkes, wedding apparel. What still pays the 6.625% is the perimeter. Fur clothing, where fur is worth more than three times the next most valuable component. Handbags, tote bags, jewelry, watches. Cleats and ski boots. The coat is sacred and the bag is not.

Two hours down I-95, Philadelphia plays the same game with different exceptions. Pennsylvania prints “generally, clothing is nontaxable” and then lists the sinners, per REV-717 (rev. 02-26): formal wear, fur with the identical three-times test, sporting apparel. So a tuxedo, a prom dress, and bridal wear are all taxable in Pennsylvania and all tax-free in New Jersey. A Halloween costume flips the same way. Same pattern, opposite verdicts, forty minutes apart.

Minnesota’s statute is the shortest sentence in this whole survey: “Clothing is exempt,” per Minn. Stat. § 297A.67, subd. 8. Then subdivision (c) spends its word count on what clothing isn’t: belt buckles sold separately, costume masks, briefcases, cosmetics, jewelry, sunglasses, umbrellas, wallets, watches, wigs, ballet shoes, cleats, goggles, roller skates, wetsuits, and fur. Vermont rounds out the four with its own uncapped exemption, per the same Tax Foundation map (Vermont’s revenue site is the one primary source we couldn’t pull directly, so we’re attributing that one secondhand).

The shave states

Boston and Providence both wrote thresholds, and both wrote them kindly. In Massachusetts, clothing up to $175 per item is exempt and only the amount above $175 is taxed, per M.G.L. c. 64H, § 6(k). A $200 blazer pays 6.25% on $25. That’s $1.56. Rhode Island does the same at a higher line: essential clothing at $250.00 or less per item is exempt, and only the portion above $250 pays the 7%, per 280-RICR-20-70-6.6. A $300 coat pays $3.50.

Hold the same $200 blazer up in all three threshold states. Providence: $0. Boston: $1.56. Manhattan: $17.75. One garment, one price, three receipts.

State	Printed rule	Still taxed anyway	Source
New Jersey	Clothing exempt, no cap	Fur (3x value test), handbags, accessories, sport gear	S&U-4
Pennsylvania	Clothing exempt, no cap	Formal and bridal wear, fur, sporting apparel	REV-717
Minnesota	“Clothing is exempt”	Accessories, fur, sport and protective equipment	§ 297A.67
Vermont	Clothing exempt, no cap	Accessories, sport equipment	Tax Foundation
New York	Under $110/item: exempt. At $110: taxed in full	Local tax outside 11 waiving jurisdictions	TB-ST-122, Pub 718-C
Massachusetts	First $175/item exempt, excess taxed	Athletic and protective-only wear	c. 64H § 6(k)
Rhode Island	First $250/item exempt, excess taxed	Accessories, protective and sport gear	280-RICR-20-70-6.6

The calendar states

Florida taxes clothing all year at 6%, then opens a window. The back-to-school holiday is permanent law now, and in 2026 it ran July 20 through August 20 on clothing at $100 or less per item, per the Department of Revenue’s TIP 26A01-11. Connecticut runs the same play in miniature. Its year-round exemption for clothing under $50 was repealed back in July 2011, per a state legislative report, and what’s left is Sales Tax Free Week, which in 2026 ran August 16 through 22 with the per-item cap raised to $300. If you’re reading this in September, both windows are shut. They reopen next summer, not for Black Friday.

The no-register five

Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon skip the machinery entirely, and Alaska skips it at the state level while letting local governments levy their own, per the Tax Foundation. No clothing carve-out needed when there’s no tax to carve from. This is the tier-one group from the first paragraph, the people who’ve never read a tax line because their receipts don’t print one.

Why is there tax on clothes online?

Online clothing orders are taxed by the ship-to address, so the state where your package lands sets the rule, not the state where the retailer sits. Ship that $95 shirt to Brooklyn and the checkout adds nothing. Ship it to Buffalo and the county’s line reappears. New York’s bulletin applies the exemption to “sales and use taxes,” which is the pair of levers that makes address-based tax work, and New Jersey’s guide states the mirror image: items delivered to a New Jersey address owe New Jersey’s tax treatment, which for clothing is zero. When a checkout total moves after you edit the delivery address, that’s the statute doing its job, and it sits right next to the other number that moves at checkout, the free-shipping threshold. One caveat with teeth: buying from abroad is a different regime entirely, customs duty, and no state exemption touches it.

A limitation worth stating plainly: everything above is what the documents print as of September 16, 2026. Local rates shift, New York counties can flip their election every March 1, and holiday windows get redrawn by legislatures annually (Connecticut just tripled its cap this year).

Check the linked source before you build a road trip around any number here.

Is there tax on shoes?

Shoes follow the clothing rule in every state in this piece, and New York’s bulletin prices them “per item or pair.” The flip happens at the sporting edge: everyday sneakers are exempt in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, while cleated and spiked shoes, ballet and tap shoes, golf shoes, and ski boots move to the taxable column, per S&U-4 and REV-717. What the code is really asking is whether you could wear the thing to a grocery store.

Do handbags count as clothing?

Handbags are taxed as accessories even in the four full-exemption states: New Jersey’s taxable list names handbags, shoulder and tote bags outright, and Minnesota’s statute files them with jewelry, wallets, and watches. Which produces this map’s quietest joke. Walk out of a Newark store with a $2,000 wool coat, tax-free. The $40 bag you’d carry it home in pays.