ZIP Codes With No Sales Tax: The Full 0% List

The complete list of 0% ZIP code ranges

US ZIP codes are assigned geographically, and the first three digits — the sectional center facility prefix — never straddle a state line⁵. That is what makes a short answer possible at all: you can settle four of the five no-tax states from the prefix alone, without looking up the individual code.

These five are usually remembered by the acronym NOMAD — New Hampshire, Oregon, Montana, Alaska, Delaware. The acronym is a good memory aid and a bad compliance rule, because it implies all five behave identically at ZIP level. Two of them do not.

Delaware — ZIP 19701 to 19980

Delaware has levied no sales tax since statehood and permits none at county or city level, so every one of its roughly 90 ZIP codes is 0%⁴. What Delaware has instead is a gross receipts tax charged to the seller on total revenue. It is not itemised on a customer receipt and cannot legally be presented as sales tax, which is why Delaware store prices are the shelf prices.

Wilmington 19801-19810 · Dover 19901-19906 · Newark 19702, 19711-19717 · Middletown 19709 · Bear 19701 · Smyrna 19977 · Milford 19963 · Seaford 19973 · Rehoboth Beach 19971 · Lewes 19958

New Hampshire — ZIP 03031 to 03897

New Hampshire has no general sales tax and no local option to create one, so all of its ZIP codes are 0% for retail goods. The state does levy a Meals and Rooms (Rentals) Tax on restaurant meals, hotel stays and car rentals³. A visitor buying a laptop in Nashua pays nothing; the same visitor buying dinner pays the meals tax. Both are true at the same ZIP code.

Manchester 03101-03104 · Nashua 03060-03064 · Concord 03301-03305 · Portsmouth 03801 · Salem 03079 · Derry 03038 · Dover 03820 · Rochester 03867-03868 · Keene 03431 · North Conway 03860

Oregon — ZIP 97001 to 97920

Oregon voters have rejected a sales tax at the ballot box nine times, and the state continues to fund itself primarily through income tax⁶. Every Oregon ZIP is 0% for general retail. A handful of cities — Ashland and Yachats among them — levy a prepared-food tax on restaurant meals only, which again is not a general sales tax and does not touch retail goods.

Portland 97201-97299 · Eugene 97401-97408 · Salem 97301-97317 · Hillsboro 97123-97124 · Beaverton 97005-97008 · Bend 97701-97709 · Medford 97501-97504 · Corvallis 97330-97333 · Ashland 97520 · Astoria 97103

Montana: 0% almost everywhere, except the resort towns

Montana has no statewide sales tax, so the great majority of ZIPs in the 590 to 599 block are genuinely zero — including every large city. Billings, Missoula, Great Falls, Bozeman, Butte, Helena and Kalispell all charge nothing on retail goods.

The exception is narrow but real. State law lets small, tourism-dependent communities adopt a resort tax on lodging, prepared food, alcohol and certain resort retail². The base rate is capped at 3%, and since SB 241 (2019) voters may approve a further 1% for infrastructure — which is how six communities now sit at 4%. Eleven Montana communities levy one, and these are precisely the ZIP codes a visitor is most likely to be standing in. Groceries, fuel and general merchandise stay untaxed even inside a resort area.

Alaska: the ZIP codes that actually vary

Alaska is the reason a blanket "these five states have no sales tax" answer gets people into trouble. There is no statewide sales tax — true, and endlessly repeated. But Alaska delegates taxing power to its boroughs and municipalities, and roughly 100 of them levy their own general sales tax¹. The combined rate genuinely changes from one ZIP to the next.

The headline result surprises most people: Anchorage is 0%⁷, and so is Fairbanks. Together those two metros hold well over half of Alaska's population, which is why the state's average local rate is only 1.82% — the lowest non-zero figure in the country. But Juneau, the state capital, charges 5%⁸, and Kodiak and Wrangell charge 7%, which is higher than the statewide rate in California.

What ZIP code has the lowest sales tax?

This is asked constantly, and it has a slightly unsatisfying answer: nothing beats zero, so there is no single winner. Roughly 2,900 ZIP codes are tied at 0.00%. If you want the cheapest place to buy a large item, any Delaware, New Hampshire or Oregon ZIP does the job equally well — Portland (97205) and Wilmington (19801) charge exactly the same amount of sales tax as each other, which is none.

The more useful version of the question is which states charge the least when they charge at all. Ranked by combined state-plus-average-local rate:

The full ranking in both directions is on lowest sales tax by state and highest sales tax by state, and the interactive sales tax map shows the whole country at once.

Why ZIP codes are the wrong unit — and what to use instead

A caveat worth understanding before you rely on any ZIP-level answer, including this one. ZIP codes were designed by the Postal Service to route mail efficiently, not to describe tax jurisdictions. They are lists of delivery routes, and they were never drawn to follow city limits, county lines or special district boundaries.

The practical consequences:

• One ZIP can span several tax rates. A single code can cross a city boundary so that one side of a street is inside a transit district and the other is not.
• ZIP codes change. The USPS creates, retires and reassigns them continuously, which is one reason any count of "no-tax ZIP codes" is approximate.
• Some ZIPs have no geography at all. Unique ZIPs assigned to a single large recipient, and PO-box-only ZIPs, describe a mailbox rather than an area.

None of this affects the five NOMAD states, because their rate is set at state level and there is no internal boundary for a ZIP to straddle. It matters enormously everywhere else — the reason a Colorado or Louisiana ZIP lookup can be wrong by two percentage points. The mechanism is covered in how accurate ZIP code sales tax is, and the address-level method is in how to find the rate for any address.

Zero rate does not mean zero obligation

The most expensive misunderstanding on this page is that buying in a 0% jurisdiction ends the matter. It usually does not.

If you buy goods without paying sales tax and then use them in a state that taxes them, that state generally expects use tax at its own rate. The tax did not vanish; the obligation moved from the seller to the buyer. This is the mechanism behind the classic border-shopping scenario — drive to New Hampshire, buy a television, bring it home to Massachusetts, and technically owe use tax on arrival.

Enforcement against individuals is famously light, but it is not light against businesses. Use tax on untaxed purchases is one of the first things an auditor tests, precisely because untaxed invoices are easy to spot in a purchase ledger. The full mechanism is in use tax vs sales tax, and the cross-border version is in border shopping and sales tax.

Shipping to a no-tax ZIP is not a strategy

A recurring question is whether shipping to an address in a zero-rate state avoids the tax. The rate follows where the goods are genuinely delivered and used. If the delivery address is real and that is where the item stays, the zero rate is simply correct — a Portland resident buying online pays no sales tax because Oregon has none, and that is the system working as designed.

If the address exists to route around tax on goods consumed elsewhere, that is evasion rather than planning. States look for exactly this pattern: a billing address in one state and a shipping address in a NOMAD state, repeated. The sourcing rules that decide which jurisdiction's rate applies are in origin vs destination sales tax.

If you sell into these states

Three practical points for businesses, because "no sales tax" does not mean "nothing to do":

1. Delaware, New Hampshire and Oregon require no sales tax registration, because there is no tax to register for. Economic nexus thresholds are irrelevant there. Delaware's gross receipts tax can still apply to a business with Delaware operations, but it is a tax on you, not a tax you collect.
2. Alaska does require attention. The Alaska Remote Seller Sales Tax Commission administers local sales tax for member jurisdictions through a single registration and return, and applies a statewide $100,000 threshold to remote sellers. A business that ignores Alaska because "Alaska has no sales tax" is the classic failure case. Check your exposure with the economic nexus calculator.
3. Montana's resort taxes are locally administered. They mostly affect businesses with a physical presence in the resort community rather than remote sellers.

How to check any specific ZIP code

1. Read the first three digits. The ZIP prefix settles the state. 197-199 is Delaware, 030-038 is New Hampshire, 970-979 is Oregon, 590-599 is Montana and 995-999 is Alaska. Any other prefix belongs to a state with a general sales tax, so the answer is already no.
2. Stop if the prefix is Delaware, New Hampshire or Oregon. These three states levy no general sales tax and permit no local one, so every ZIP inside them resolves to 0% with no further checking.
3. For Montana, check whether the ZIP is a resort community. Montana is zero almost everywhere, but designated resort communities such as Whitefish, Big Sky and West Yellowstone levy a local resort tax of up to 4% on lodging, prepared food and some retail.
4. For Alaska, resolve the borough and city. Alaska has no state rate but around 100 local jurisdictions levy their own. Anchorage and Fairbanks are 0%; Juneau, Kodiak, Sitka, Nome and Wrangell are not. Resolve the specific municipality rather than relying on the state.
5. Check for narrow category taxes. Confirm whether the item falls under a meals, lodging or resort tax, which can apply even where the general sales tax rate is zero.
6. Confirm where the goods are actually delivered. A zero rate applies because of where the sale is sourced, not where the buyer would prefer it to be. Use the real delivery address.
7. Account for use tax in the destination state. If the goods will be used in a state that taxes them, expect a use tax obligation at that state's rate even though no sales tax was collected at purchase.

The sales tax by ZIP code lookup resolves any of these directly, including the Alaskan and Montanan cases where the state alone does not settle it. To work out what a specific purchase costs once the rate is known, use the sales tax calculator; to pull the tax back out of a total that already includes it, use the reverse sales tax calculator.

Continue the lookup chain

• How to find the rate for any US address — the general method, and why ZIP codes are an approximation.
• Alaska sales tax — the one state on this list with a hundred separate local tax systems.
• California sales tax by ZIP code — the opposite extreme, where districts stack.
• Use tax vs sales tax — what you owe after an untaxed purchase.
• Sales tax by state — full state-level rate comparison and rankings.