AvaTax: Sales tax calculation software - Avalara

Powering millions of businesses across 75+ countries

<10 ms

tax calculation speed

99.999%

accuracy in tax calculations

54 B+

global transactions (and counting)

Let’s solve your tax compliance challenges together

Fill out this short form to connect with an Avalara specialist and see how AvaTax helps you automate tax calculation with accuracy and confidence.

You can expect the following once you submit:

A quick review of your business needs and current tax setup
A tailored walk-through of how AvaTax fits into your systems and workflows
A clear view of how real-time, AI-powered tax calculation improves accuracy and reduces manual effort

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Benefits

Real-time tax accuracy for sales and purchases

AvaTax applies tax calculations in real time at every point in both the sales and purchasing processes. It ensures each transaction is taxed more accurately based on jurisdiction, product type, exemption rules, and more.

Agentic AI for effortless tax calculation

Avalara MCP servers make AvaTax smarter and faster. They allow AI agents to discover and call Avalara APIs using natural language, instantly configure nexus, map product codes, and launch AvaTax with minimal effort.

Intelligent, trusted tax content for global precision

AvaTax runs on AI-powered tax content from Avalara. With Avalara Tax Research now integrated into the AvaTax portal, users can access detailed tax content and research insights within the same workflow.

Trusted by businesses and governments alike

Avalara processes more than 54 billion transactions annually and is trusted by millions of businesses. Governments also rely on Avalara data to publish official tax rates and accept our filings at massive scale.

Overview video

AvaTax uses AI to make tax determination faster, easier, and more accurate

U.S. sales tax

Consumer use tax 

Video: More accurately calculate taxes in 190+ countries.

AVALARA AGENTIC TAX AND COMPLIANCE™

Meet Avi. Your tax assistant for calculation, determination, and everything in between.

Imagine a digital compliance team that works 24/7, never fatigues, and always stays current with the latest rules for all jurisdictions. That’s agentic compliance in action.

Video: See how Avalara agents can transform your workflow.

HOW IT WORKS

The global, AI-powered tax engine behind confident compliance

CONNECT

Bring your transaction data together — seamlessly

Get your sales and purchasing data where it needs to be, when it matters most. We connect to your systems, standardize the data, and make it instantly usable — so every downstream process starts with a clean, complete foundation.

Connect to any sales or purchasing system
Ingest data your way
Unify and standardize transactions
Enable real-time workflows

DETERMINE

Determine the correct tax treatment the moment a transaction happens

Whether it’s intelligent item classification, precise jurisdiction matching, or flexible rule configuration, every determination is calculated accurately — without slowing down checkout, billing, or AP workflows.

AI-powered item classification for accurate tax treatment
Precise jurisdiction matching with up-to-date tax content
Flexible custom business rules
Customizable content for specialized taxes and fees
Real-time exemption certificate validation

APPLY

Send the right tax back — automatically

Ensure the correct tax amount flows directly into your invoice and systems of record. We return calculated tax to your ERP, billing, and commerce platforms in real time — so every document (invoice, purchase order, or any transaction record) reflects the right amount and your accounting stays aligned.

Return accurate tax to every transaction
Keep systems in sync
Reduce reconciliation headaches

ANALYZE

Stay compliant and audit-ready

Gain clarity and confidence with transparent reporting, built-in research, and defensible audit trails. From real-time dashboards to jurisdiction-level detail, access the data you need to monitor exposure, validate decisions, and support filings — all in one place.

AI-powered dashboards with dynamic data visualization
Conversational AI for reporting and risk insights
Nexus tracking
Integrated tax research and citation-backed guidance
Certified Streamlined Sales Tax (SST) service provider

Customer Stories

See what our customers have to say

“Working with both Avalara and Sage, Set Solutions has saved more than $300,000 annually and 30 hours per week on tax compliance tasks.”

Missy Basone
CFO, Set Solutions

Read full customer story

A person seated in a modern office setting with exposed brick walls and large windows.

“Avalara is a game changer. With Avalara’s wide range of product offerings, they take the everyday pain points of doing business and make them simplified, streamlined, and most importantly, manageable.”

Jacob Swager
Tax Director, Sweetwater

“Avalara has significantly reduced manual tasks, errors, and custom, complex regulations for us, minimising the time our team spends maintaining data workflows.”

Ricardo Rodriguez
Senior Manager of Indirect Tax, Snowflake

“Incorporating Avalara AvaTax with our ERP has proven to be a truly monumental achievement, as it empowers us to seamlessly and effortlessly obtain sales tax information, ensuring multi-jurisdictional compliance with remarkable efficiency.”

Andre Johnson
Business Analyst, NEFCO

See all customer stories

Integrates with the business applications you use

Engineered to fit into any financial landscape, Avalara has over 1,400 signed partner integrations across ERP, ecommerce, procurement, and POS. It connects to the systems you already use and unifies them through a single AI-powered tax and compliance platform.

See all integrations

TAX TYPES

Calculate tax rates based on item, location, legislation, and regulations

AvaTax automates even the most complex, industry-specific tax scenarios — applying the right rates and rules based on what you sell and where you operate. Whether in communications, hospitality, or energy and fuel, AvaTax reduces manual effort while helping ensure accuracy at scale.

Sales tax

Get highly accurate, real-time sales tax calculations across states, cities, and special jurisdictions.

Consumer use tax

Identify missing or underpaid tax and accrue use tax automatically on purchases.

Value-added tax (VAT)

Apply correct VAT treatment across borders with country-specific rules and rates.

Communications tax

Handle complex telecom and digital services taxes with precision.

Occupancy and lodging tax

Calculate lodging and occupancy taxes, including local rules and thresholds.

Excise tax

Manage excise taxes across regulated goods with confidence and consistency.

Goods and services tax (GST)

Apply GST accurately across applicable regions and transaction types.

Small businesses
Midmarket
Enterprise
Developers and partners
Governments

Small businesses

Automate tax calculation from day one. Focus on growth, not compliance complexity.

Avalara for small businesses

Midmarket finance and accounting professionals

Reduce manual effort, improve accuracy, and scale tax operations across every state.

Midmarket solutions

Enterprise tax departments

Centralize global tax calculations with enterprise-grade performance and always-on, multicloud resilience. Avalara is active-active across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI.

Enterprise

Developers and partners

Embed powerful, API tax calculation into your platform — or manage multiclient calculations efficiently with solutions built for accounting practices.

Partners

Developers

Governments

Modernize tax administration with real-time data, automation, and greater transparency.

AvaTax features


Product taxability codes	Avalara maintains predefined tax codes that track taxability for categories of software and related services regardless of the delivery methods in all U.S. states. AI-powered Item Classification uses product images to suggest the right tax code.
Centralized tax policy administration	AvaTax provides centralized administration to implement tax policies across the business to more accurately calculate sales and use tax across all channels.
Geospatial technology	AvaTax uses proprietary geospatial technology to validate an address and match it to a nationwide database of tax regions.
Custom tax rules	AvaTax allows the addition of custom tax rules to determine how items with custom tax codes are taxed, to override tax rules for the predefined Avalara tax codes.
Advanced transaction rules	AvaTax allows businesses to create, modify, and apply business- and taxability-specific rules, which are executed before the tax calculation occurs.
Accounts payable assessment and accrual	All AP transactions, regardless of source and processing status, will appear in an enhanced transaction list within AvaTax. It will also enable the review of variances for over- and undercharged transactions, and act on one, several, or many transactions.
Accounts payable single config for real-time and sourcing rules	All configurations will be centralized within the Accounts Payable solution in AvaTax and will apply to both real-time and batch transactions with a hybrid design.
Sourcing rules	Sales tax treatment based on sourcing rules (whether sales taxes should be based on the source or the destination of the transaction) varies across states. AvaTax accounts for the state-by-state variation by automatically applying sourcing rules based on the address of the seller and the “ship to” location supplied by the buyer.
Jurisdictional nexus	Avalara maintains predefined jurisdictions (domestic U.S. states and local jurisdictions and non-U.S. countries) that allow an end user to easily modify their tax profile as their business grows and expands. Tax profiles can be modified to determine where and when AvaTax calculates and reports taxes (sales, use, input VAT, and output VAT) for your company.
Reporting	The Avalara report library provides AI-driven reporting and natural-language search to generate insights, dashboards, and audit-ready trails in seconds.
REST API	The AvaTax REST API exposes the most commonly used capabilities for interacting with the AvaTax service, allowing calculation of tax, modification of documents, and validation of addresses.
Integrated tax research and guidance	Avalara Tax Research delivers authoritative, citation-backed tax content directly within the AvaTax portal. Access jurisdiction-specific rules, interpretations, and exemptions in context.

Part of a complete compliance platform

Streamlined Sales Tax (SST) program

Simplify multistate sales tax compliance through the Streamlined Sales Tax program.

Avalara Exemption Certificate Management

Automate exemption certificates and stay audit-ready with less effort.

Avalara Managed Returns

Prepare, file, and remit returns — accurately and on time.

Avalara Tax Research

Get clear, citation-backed answers to complex tax questions.

Frequently Asked Questions

Avalara helps solve common compliance challenges

Most businesses using a prebuilt connector (Shopify, NetSuite, QuickBooks, Dynamics 365, and others) can complete self-serve setup and begin processing live transactions within days. The median for self-serve customers is 26 days including external registration processes. For enterprise ERP environments like SAP or Oracle, Avalara offers managed implementation with a typical timeline of 4–6 months depending on scope. Every customer gets access to a sandbox environment for testing before going live, plus Avi, our AI implementation assistant, to actively guide configuration.

AvaTax pricing is based on the number of tax-calculation transactions your business processes annually. One transaction equals one API call — and a single invoice counts as one transaction regardless of how many line items it contains (1 line or 200 lines = 1 transaction). Plans are structured in annual tiers, with usage-based pricing that scales as your business grows. There are no per-jurisdiction surcharges or hidden platform fees.

AvaTax has more than 1,400 signed partner integrations, including prebuilt connectors for Shopify, NetSuite, QuickBooks, Sage, Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP, Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Salesforce, Oracle and many more. In addition, our REST API enables a custom integration, and with Avalara MCP servers, AI agents can discover and call Avalara APIs to configure integrations using natural language. You don’t need to buy a separate connector; AvaTax supports both prebuilt connectors and direct API integration.

AvaTax uses the best proprietary geospatial technology, not ZIP codes, to match each transaction to the precise tax jurisdiction at rooftop-level accuracy. This matters because tax boundaries often don’t align with postal codes: A single ZIP code can span multiple cities, counties, and special taxing districts with different rates. AvaTax validates the address, assigns the correct jurisdiction, and applies the right rate for every tax type, including overlapping state, county, city, and district-level taxes. This covers more than 900,000 tax rules across 12,000+ U.S. sales and use tax jurisdictions and 190+ countries.

Noncompliance carries real financial risk. In the U.S., interest and penalties on uncollected sales tax can exceed 30% of the tax due, and you’ll be liable for paying past-due taxes out of your own pocket. States can also impose criminal penalties and damage your business’s reputation during audits. AvaTax mitigates this risk by calculating the correct tax in real time, maintaining a complete audit trail of every transaction, and keeping rates and rules current without manual intervention. Businesses using AvaTax as well as Managed Returns and Exemption Certificate Management have improved audit preparation efficiency by up to 85%, reducing time spent per audit by up to 34 hours.

Yes. AvaTax supports multicompany, multientity, and parent/child corporate structures within a single account. Each entity can maintain separate tax profiles, nexus settings, exemption rules, and filing configurations — while your tax team retains centralized visibility and control across all of them. This is particularly valuable for businesses managing acquisitions, separate EINs, or operations across multiple ERP instances that need to roll up into consolidated returns.

Avalara supports migrations from other tax engines — including TaxJar, Vertex, Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE, Anrok and native ERP tax modules. Our implementation team handles tax code mapping, nexus configuration, and data validation to ensure continuity. If you’re currently using batch CSV uploads with another provider, AvaTax uses AI data mapping for your sales and purchases to easily map your transactions to required fields, and our AI assistant Avi can guide you through the process. Your historical transaction data remains accessible during the transition, and sandbox testing ensures accuracy before you go live.

Yes. Avalara Returns integrates directly with AvaTax to automate the preparation, filing, and remittance of sales and use tax returns across multiple jurisdictions. Avalara processed and filed more than 6.6 million returns in 2025. You can also use Avalara Managed Returns, where Avalara handles filing and remittance on your behalf — reconciling a single worksheet and paying one consolidated amount. Avalara Returns can be added to your AvaTax subscription at any time without requiring a new integration; they share the same platform and transaction data.

AvaTax runs active-active across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI — meaning if one cloud provider region fails, tax calculations continue without interruption. This multicloud architecture delivers sub-second response times and high availability, even during peak transaction volumes like Black Friday or fiscal year-end. Avalara processes more than 54 billion API calls annually for more than 200,000 direct and indirect customers, and governments rely on Avalara data to publish official tax rates.

Yes. Avalara MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers enable AI agents to discover and call AvaTax APIs using natural language, accessing tax determinations, mapping product tax codes, and executing compliance tasks with less manual intervention. This means your existing AI workflows (across ERPs, marketplaces, and partner ecosystems) can embed tax compliance as a native capability rather than a separate process.

AI-first tax calculations, trusted and built to scale