Sales Tax Nexus for Non-Resident Sellers With a US LLC

Economic nexus. Selling into a state above that state's threshold, measured by revenue or transaction count. This is the post-Wayfair regime and it is why a seller with no physical presence anywhere can owe tax in many states.

Physical nexus. Having something in the state. For a non-resident e-commerce seller this is almost always inventory, and it is the one that surprises people, because a fulfillment network moves your goods into states you did not choose.

Neither test asks where the LLC was formed.

If you sell through a fulfillment network that distributes inventory across warehouses, your goods can end up in states you never selected. In states that treat stored inventory as physical presence, that can create nexus independently of any sales threshold.

This is the single most common way a small non-resident seller acquires obligations in several states at once, and it happens as a consequence of a logistics decision rather than a tax one.

We have not verified which states currently treat third-party fulfillment inventory as creating nexus, and the position has been litigated and has changed over time. The mechanism is what this page describes; the state-by-state answer is not stated here.

Every roundup of economic nexus thresholds you will find is copied from a tax software vendor. We went to each state's own revenue department instead, and stopped where we could not get a primary source rather than filling the row.

Twenty-one states verified on September 2, 2026:

Three things in that table are worth more than the numbers.

New York is "and," not "or." Both conditions must be met, not either one.

New York's economic nexus test is conjunctive: a seller must both exceed $500,000 in gross receipts from tangible personal property delivered into the state AND make more than 100 such sales.[1]New York State Department of Taxation and Finance

Nearly every summary renders that as "or," which puts sellers over a line New York has not drawn. A seller doing well over the dollar figure across fewer than a hundred large orders has no New York obligation under this test.

The 200-transaction prong is dying. It was in the South Dakota statute the Supreme Court blessed, and it has been quietly removed since: California in 2019, Wisconsin in February 2021, Indiana in January 2024, and Illinois. Only seven of the twenty-one states above still count transactions. If you read a page written before 2026 it is wrong about Illinois.

The two biggest markets sit well above the number people quote.

California requires retailers located outside the state, expressly including foreign sellers located outside the United States, to register and collect use tax once combined sales for delivery into California exceed $500,000 in the preceding or current calendar year.[2]California Department of Tax and Fee Administration

Texas does not require a remote seller with less than $500,000 of total Texas revenue in the preceding twelve calendar months to obtain a permit or collect and remit state and local use tax.[3]Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts

A small seller is much further from a California obligation than the familiar "hundred thousand or two hundred transactions" shorthand suggests.

It is not a federal rule and it never was. It is the South Dakota statute the Supreme Court examined in 2018:

The South Dakota statute the Supreme Court upheld in Wayfair applied to sellers delivering more than $100,000 of goods or services into the state, or engaging in 200 or more separate transactions, annually.[4]Supreme Court of the United States, South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. (2018)

What the Court actually decided was narrower and more consequential:

Because the physical presence rule of Quill is unsound and incorrect, Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, 504 U. S. 298, and National Bellas Hess, Inc. v. Department of Revenue of Ill., 386 U. S. 753, are overruled.

And the test that replaced it:

such a nexus is established when the taxpayer [or collector] avails itself of the substantial privilege of carrying on business in that jurisdiction.

Nothing in that sentence is about where you are. That is why the next section is the one that matters most to you.

This is the question every non-resident founder asks and almost nobody answers with a citation. California answers it, in a parenthetical inside its own regulation summary:

"Including foreign sellers located outside of the United States." The threshold is territorial to the destination, not to the seller. A company in Lagos or Lahore shipping into California crosses the same line as one in Nevada, and having no US entity at all does not move it.

Which also means the reverse of what founders often assume: forming a US LLC does not create this exposure and dissolving one does not remove it. The sales are what create it.

We could only verify this explicit foreign-seller language from California. Other states' thresholds are written without reference to where the seller sits, which points the same way, but we are not going to quote one state and imply forty.

Four verified from their own revenue departments:

New Hampshire is normally listed as the fifth. We could not verify it, because revenue.nh.gov refused every automated request. That is a retrieval failure on our side, not evidence New Hampshire has a sales tax.

Note what Delaware's own sentence does: it denies a sales tax and names a gross receipts tax in the same breath. Founders who chose Delaware to avoid sales tax should read that line rather than the headline.

Alaska is the genuinely complicated one. No state tax, and broad municipal authority:

The state constitution and other state laws give very broad authority to cities and boroughs in enacting a sales tax ordinance and determining what is taxable.

It is possible. State law allows both cities and boroughs to levy a sales tax. In many boroughs that levy a sales tax, it is not unusual for a city within that borough to also levy a tax.

Most states now require marketplaces to collect and remit sales tax on sales made through them. Where those rules apply, the marketplace handles the tax on marketplace sales rather than you.

That is genuine relief and it is why many marketplace-only sellers have a smaller problem than they feared. It generally does not cover sales you make through your own storefront, and it does not necessarily remove a registration obligation created by inventory.

We have not verified the current scope of marketplace facilitator rules by state.

The marketplace collects and remits. Whether those same sales also push you over a threshold is a separate question, and the states split on it.

Arizona excludes them:

Sales made by remote sellers or marketplace sellers through a marketplace facilitator are not included in the remote seller's economic nexus threshold calculation.

North Carolina includes them, in the threshold definition itself: gross sales "including sales as a marketplace seller and marketplace-facilitated sales."

Maryland includes them too, and states the consequence plainly: a seller whose sales are all facilitated need not register, but one who also sells direct must.

So the same Amazon revenue counts differently depending on which state you are looking at. There is no general rule here and anyone offering you one has picked a state and generalised from it.

Two different state obligations, two different tests, and founders merge them.

Sales tax is a transaction tax you collect from a customer and remit. Nexus follows sales and physical presence.

California's annual LLC tax is an entity-level charge:

Every LLC doing business in California or organized in California owes an $800 annual tax, and it keeps falling due even in a year with no trading, until the LLC is cancelled.[5]California Franchise Tax Board, Limited liability company

You can have sales tax obligations in a state without owing that state an entity-level tax, and the reverse. Answering one does not answer the other.

Twenty-nine sales-tax states. We verified twenty-one from their own revenue departments and stopped. The remainder are not here because we did not read them, not because they have no threshold.

Georgia's remote-seller threshold. Georgia answers the question only by linking a policy bulletin PDF, and that download endpoint returns an HTML wrapper instead of the document under every method we tried. Its marketplace facilitator threshold is verified; the direct remote-seller figure is not.

New Hampshire. revenue.nh.gov refused every automated request. It is normally listed as a no-sales-tax state and we could not confirm that from New Hampshire.

The Alaska Remote Seller Sales Tax Commission. It is administered through the Alaska Municipal League on a .org domain, and no state .gov page we found describes it. Alaska's municipal sales taxes are real and this is the body that coordinates them; we simply have no primary source for how it works.

Which states treat third-party fulfillment inventory as physical nexus. Still open, and it is the question an Amazon FBA seller most needs answered.

Registration and filing mechanics for a non-resident-owned entity. Whether a state's registration portal can be completed without an SSN, and what it accepts as a responsible-party identifier, is not published by the states we read.

Six gaps. The framework and twenty-one states are now sourced; the fulfillment-inventory question is the one still worth a practitioner.

Work out where your customers are and how much you sell into each state. You cannot assess thresholds you have not measured, and the data is in your own records.

Find out where your inventory physically sits, if you use a fulfillment network. This is retrievable from the provider and most sellers have never looked.

Get a state-level assessment before you cross thresholds, not after. Sales tax obligations accrue whether or not you knew, and back exposure is the expensive outcome.

Do not treat marketplace collection as covering everything. Check whether it covers your channels and whether a registration obligation remains.

Does forming in Wyoming avoid sales tax? No. Formation state has no bearing on nexus, which follows sales into a state and physical presence there.

I have no US presence. Do I still owe sales tax? Possibly. Economic nexus is based on selling into a state above its threshold, not on being there. Inventory in a fulfillment warehouse can also create physical nexus.

Does the marketplace handle it for me? For sales made through the marketplace, often yes under marketplace facilitator rules. Not necessarily for your own storefront, and not necessarily for a registration obligation created by inventory.

What are the thresholds? They vary by state and we have not verified current figures. This is a case where using an out-of-date number is worse than having none.

Is this the same as California's annual tax? No. Different tax, different test. You can owe one without the other.