About TaxesLedger

What we do

TaxesLedger is a suite of 62 free calculators covering US sales tax (forward, reverse, by-state, by-city, multi-state, reconciliation, holidays, tip & tax) plus VAT for Europe and GST/HST for Canada. Every tool shows its math like a clean receipt so you can audit each step — the rate applied, the components it breaks into, and the arithmetic that produced the total. Nothing is behind a signup, a paywall, or a trial.

Why a data engineer built a tax site

Most sales tax calculators return a number and stop. That is fine until the number is wrong, and sales tax rates are wrong more often than people expect: they change on effective dates rather than calendar years, they differ between a city and the improvement district three blocks away, and aggregator sites copy each other's errors for years. The interesting problem here was never the arithmetic — it is a multiplication — it is keeping several thousand rate records honest, sourced, and current.

That is a data pipeline problem, which is the work M. Imtinan Farooq does professionally. TaxesLedger is what it looks like when someone treats tax rates as a dataset with provenance requirements rather than as copy to publish: every rate carries a source, a confidence label, and a review date, and the site is willing to say out loud when a figure has not been re-verified recently.

How the data is maintained

Behind the calculators is a source registry of named tax authorities: 51 US state and District revenue departments, the Canada Revenue Agency and 5 provincial finance ministries, the European Commission's VAT database, the Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board, and research bodies including the Tax Foundation. Each dataset records which sources it draws on, when it was imported, when it was last reviewed, and a verification status of one of three values: officially verified, imported from an internal dataset, or needs an official refresh.

That third value is the important one. A site that claims everything is verified is claiming something no small publisher can honestly maintain across thousands of jurisdictions. Ours publishes the status per dataset on the Tax Data Sources page, so you can see what has been checked against an official publication and what is still awaiting that check before you rely on a figure for filing.

Rates render from data, never from prose. Worked examples throughout the site compute from the same rate records the calculators use, so when a rate is corrected the examples move with it instead of leaving a stale number embedded in a sentence.

Where our rates come from

US state and city rates are compiled from the Tax Foundation's published tables, with the official state Department of Revenue source attached to every dataset. Canadian rates come from the Canada Revenue Agency and provincial finance ministries. EU VAT rates come from the European Commission's official VAT database. We refresh on a rolling basis, and the Tax Data Sources page tracks each dataset's verification status — including anything still awaiting an official refresh.

Corrections

If a rate looks wrong, tell us and we will check it against the official source. Reports go through the contact page (there is a "Tax Rate Update / Correction" category on the form), and our editorial and corrections policy sets out how we triage them, how quickly we aim to respond, and what we do when a published figure turns out to be wrong.

What this site will not do

• We do not give tax advice. These are calculators and reference pages. Rate lookups and worked examples are not a substitute for a CPA, an enrolled agent, or your state revenue department — and for filing decisions you should use one of those.
• We do not sell or broker your data. Calculations run in your browser; we do not ask for a login, and we do not build profiles to sell. See the privacy policy for what the site does collect.
• We do not claim credentials we do not hold. The site is built and fact-checked against official sources by a data engineer, not reviewed by a CPA, and it says so wherever attribution appears.

Contact

Questions, rate corrections, partnership inquiries, or a request for an embeddable calculator on your own site — the contact page reaches us directly.