Tax-Free Weekend 2026: Every State’s Dates and Your Shopping List
Here is the short version: 18 states are running a back-to-school tax-free period this summer, most of them clustered between July 31 and August 16. Online orders count. And the savings are real but smaller than the marketing makes them sound, which means the smart move is knowing exactly which purchases are worth timing around it.
I have spent enough years on the marketing technology side of retail to know that “tax free” is one of the most effective promotional hooks there is. It creates urgency without the retailer discounting anything. That does not make it a bad deal. It just means you should walk in knowing the math.
Here is everything you need.
📅 Every 2026 back-to-school tax-free period by state
Florida: July 20 through August 20 The longest one in the country. Clothing, footwear, wallets, and bags priced $100 or less. School supplies $50 or less. Learning aids and jigsaw puzzles $30 or less. Computers and computer accessories $1,500 or less.
New Mexico: July 31 through August 2 Clothing, footwear, and accessories under $100. Backpacks, bookbags, maps, and globes under $100. Computers up to $1,000. Computer accessories up to $500. Calculators under $200. School supplies under $30. Worth noting: retailers here are not required to participate, so confirm before you count on it.
Tennessee: July 31 through August 2 Apparel $100 or less. Computers, laptops, and tablets $1,500 or less. School and art supplies $100 or less.
West Virginia: July 31 through August 3 Clothing and footwear $125 or less. Laptops and tablets $500 or less. School supplies $50 or less. Instructional materials $20 or less. Sports equipment $150 or less.
Arkansas: August 1 through 2 Clothing under $100. Accessories, cosmetics, and jewelry under $50. Electronic devices commonly used by students, with no price cap. School supplies with no price cap.
Iowa: August 7 through 8 Clothing and footwear under $100. Friday and Saturday only, no Sunday.
Texas: August 7 through 9 Clothing and footwear under $100. School supplies and backpacks under $100 per item.
Ohio: August 7 through 9 Clothing $75 or less per item. School supplies and instructional materials $20 or less per item.
Missouri: August 7 through 9 Clothing $100 or less. Computers and peripherals $1,500 or less. Software $350 or less. Graphing calculators $150 or less. School supplies $50 or less.
Virginia: August 7 through 9 Clothing and footwear $100 or less. School supplies $20 or less. This one also covers hurricane preparedness items and qualifying Energy Star and WaterSense products up to $2,500, which makes it one of the more useful weekends on the list.
South Carolina: August 7 through 9 No price caps at all, which is rare. Clothing, footwear, computers, printers, software, school supplies, and select bed and bath items.
Oklahoma: August 7 through 9 Clothing and footwear under $100.
Illinois: August 7 through 16 Not a full exemption. The state rate drops from 6.25 percent to 1.25 percent on qualifying clothing and footwear under $125 and on school supplies.
Massachusetts: August 8 through 9 The most generous list in the country. Most single items of tangible personal property bought for personal use and priced $2,500 or less. This is not a back-to-school holiday so much as a buy-almost-anything holiday.
Maryland: August 9 through 15 Clothing and footwear $100 or less. For backpacks and bookbags, only the first $40 is exempt.
Connecticut: August 16 through 22 Clothing, footwear, and backpacks priced under $300. The threshold jumped from $100 to $300 this year, which is a meaningful change if you have been shopping this week in past years.
Already passed for 2026: Mississippi ran July 10 through 12 and Alabama ran July 17 through 19.
💻 Yes, online orders count for tax-free holidays
This is the part most people get wrong, and it is the single most useful thing on this page.
Sales tax holidays apply to every registered retailer selling qualifying items into the state, including online sellers based somewhere else entirely. Amazon, Target.com, Walmart.com, all of it. The exemption follows your shipping address, not the store’s location.
Texas spells out the rule most clearly: your order qualifies if you pay for it and receive it during the exemption period, or if you order and pay during the period for immediate shipment, even when the box arrives after the holiday ends. Most states follow similar logic. So an order placed Sunday night at 11:45 that ships Tuesday still counts.
What this means in practice: you do not have to fight anyone for a parking spot at Target on the first Saturday in August. You can do the whole thing from your couch.
One caveat worth knowing. Shipping charges get treated differently by state. Where shipping is folded into the sales price, it is usually exempt as long as the item plus shipping stays under the price cap. So a $95 pair of boots with $10 shipping could push you over a $100 threshold in some states. Free shipping sidesteps this entirely.
🧮 What you save
Let us do the math, because nobody else will.
Most state and local combined rates land somewhere between 6 and 9 percent. On a $400 back-to-school haul, that is $24 to $36. On a $1,200 laptop in a state with a computer exemption, it is $72 to $108.
So: worth planning around for a laptop. Not worth driving across a state line for three notebooks and a pack of pencils.
The single best use of a tax-free weekend is a purchase you were already going to make, that falls under the price cap, in a category where the item does not go on deeper sale later in the season. Everything else is worth a second look.
🛒 What’s worth buying tax free
Laptops, tablets, and computer accessories in the states that include them. This is where the dollar savings are largest by a wide margin. Missouri, Tennessee, Florida, New Mexico, South Carolina, and West Virginia all cover computers at various caps. If your kid needs a machine for school, this is the weekend.
Backpacks, particularly in Connecticut where the cap is now $300, and in Texas and New Mexico where backpacks are explicitly named. Just watch Maryland, where only the first $40 is exempt, which makes the savings on a nice backpack close to nothing.
Shoes and sneakers. Kids’ feet grow whether or not it is a convenient month. Footwear qualifies in nearly every state on this list, and it is one of the few categories where you are buying on need rather than want.
Anything at all in Massachusetts. With a $2,500 per-item cap on most personal-use goods, this is the weekend to buy the vacuum, the mattress, the patio furniture, or the thing you have been putting off. Massachusetts residents should be thinking way bigger than pencils.
Energy Star appliances in Virginia. Qualifying Energy Star and WaterSense products up to $2,500 are included, which almost nobody realizes because the holiday gets marketed as back-to-school.
🚫 What to skip
Basic school supplies. A $20 supply run saves you about $1.40. Not nothing, but the crowds and the picked-over shelves cost you more than that. I would rather buy supplies in a quiet week and pay the tax, which is part of why I put together the best time to buy every school supply.
Anything you would not have bought anyway. This is the whole game. A 6 percent exemption on something you did not need is a 100 percent loss. Retailers know this, which is exactly why the promotion exists.
Clothing you can wait on. Fall and winter apparel gets marked down 40 to 60 percent by late September and again after the holidays. A 6 percent tax break in August does not compete with that. If you can wait, wait.
Items priced just over the cap. A $105 item in a $100-cap state gets you nothing in most cases, since these are per-item thresholds rather than deductions. Check whether an item comes in a cheaper colorway or a smaller size that clears the line.
💡 The part retailers do not advertise
Two things worth knowing from the inside.
First, price movement in the run-up. Tax-free weekends are on every retail calendar months in advance, which means pricing teams have plenty of time to prepare. It is common to see items nudge upward in the two to three weeks beforehand and then get promoted as tax-free “deals.” Not every retailer does this, and it is not illegal. It just means the price you see on August 7 is not necessarily the price that item held in June. Check price history before you assume you are getting a deal on top of a deal.
Second, the threshold game. When a state caps the exemption at $100 per item, you will see a lot of merchandise priced at $99.99 and a suspicious shortage of items at $89. That is deliberate assortment planning. The retailer captures the full psychological benefit of “tax free” while charging the maximum the exemption allows. If you can find the equivalent item at $70, you are paying tax on it and still coming out ahead.
If this kind of thing interests you, I went deeper on the mechanics in how retailers decide what you pay and the sneakiest tricks retailers pull during big sales.
🧾 How to stack it
Tax free is a floor, not a ceiling. Layer these on top:
Cash back on the same purchase. Rakuten pays you a percentage back at hundreds of the same stores running tax-free promotions, and it stacks with the exemption because they are two separate things. The tax break comes off at checkout, the cash back comes from the retailer’s affiliate budget. Sign up for Rakuten here if you have not already. I wrote about how I have used it in more detail here.
Grocery and drugstore rebates. If you are picking up snacks, lunch supplies, or household basics in the same trip, Ibotta covers a lot of what ends up in a back-to-school cart.
Price tracking before you buy. A browser extension that shows price history will tell you in three seconds whether that $99.99 item has been sitting at $99.99 all year or whether it crept up last week. I rounded up the extensions worth installing.
Price adjustments after you buy. If the item drops in the two weeks after your tax-free purchase, many retailers will refund the difference. Here is how to ask for it.
📌 Your quick checklist
- Find your state’s dates above and put them in your calendar now
- Make the list before the weekend, not during it
- Check each item against your state’s price cap
- Shop online where possible, since the exemption applies either way
- Check price history on anything over $50
- Activate cash back before you click buy
- Skip anything you would not have purchased in September
The best tax-free weekend is a boring one. You buy the four things you needed, you save $30, and you go about your Saturday.
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