Method record
Methodology
The reason to cite this site rather than a summary is that the figure can be taken apart. This page defines every term the count depends on, shows the arithmetic, names the states that would move the number under a different definition, and states plainly what is missing.
What counts as exempt
The governing rule for this site, stated in full:
full-exemption means no purity threshold, transaction minimum, or storage or form condition an ordinary bullion purchase could fail. A populated purityThreshold or transactionMinimum forces partial-exemption.
The second sentence is a mechanical tie-break, not a judgment call. If a state record carries a purity threshold or a transaction minimum in the field set aside for it, the state is classified as a partial exemption whatever the surrounding prose says. That removes the one place where an editor could quietly upgrade a conditional exemption into an unconditional one to make a number look better.
A transaction maximum is recorded in its own separate field, because a ceiling and a floor fail in opposite directions: a floor excludes the small buyer, a ceiling excludes the large one. Both make an exemption conditional.
Two further limits apply throughout. Every sales tax finding here is about the state levy only, so a county or municipal tax can still apply where a state one does not. And a state that levies no general sales tax is not exempting bullion. It has nothing to exempt, which is why it is counted in its own row below and never described as carrying an exemption.
What counts as legal tender
Recognition has to be in force as of the date the record was last checked, not merely enacted. A bill that has been signed but whose commencement date has not arrived is recorded as not yet in force, and the state is not counted as recognizing gold and silver as legal tender until that date passes.
That distinction is not academic. It is the difference between a law you could rely on today and a headline about a law you could not.
As of , the distinction currently affects 1 state:
- Texas. Enacted: HB1056. Not in force until September 1, 2026 , so this record carries the state as not recognizing gold and silver as legal tender.
9 of the researched states carry legal tender recognition that is in force: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Utah, Wyoming. Each state page gives the citation and the date.
Legal tender recognition and a sales tax exemption are separate laws with separate effects, and a state can have either without the other. They are treated separately everywhere on this site.
The count, derived
Every figure below is computed from the state records when the site is built. Nothing is typed in. The first three rows are the site's exempt figure and the table shows the addition rather than asserting the total.
| Classification | States | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Full exemption | 9 | A bullion exemption with no condition an ordinary purchase could fail. |
| Partial exemption | 8 | An exemption that carries a purity, quantity, or transaction size condition. |
| No state sales tax | 5 | No general sales tax exists, so there is no bullion exemption and none is needed. |
| No state sales tax on an ordinary bullion purchase | 22 | The three rows above, added. This is the site's exempt figure. |
| Taxed | 1 | A general sales tax applies and no bullion exemption was found. |
| Exemption repealed | 1 | An exemption existed and was removed by later legislation. |
| Researched | 24 | Exempt plus taxed, 22 and 2. This is the denominator for every published claim. |
| Not researched | 26 | No statute has been read for this record. Excluded from every figure above, never counted as either exempt or taxed. |
So the figure this site publishes is 22 of 24, checked between and . It is not 22 of 50, and it is not a national estimate.
Why this differs from the published 42 to 45 range
Published counts of exempt states do not agree with one another. Read on , three that circulate widely spanned 42 to 45: CollectiblesTax gave 42, Swiss America gave 44, and the Sound Money Defense League gave 45. The high figure is the one published by the organization that lobbies for these bills, and it is the one most other outlets repeat. Its June 30, 2026 release puts it this way:
Including Virginia, 45 states now partially or fully exempt precious metals from their state sales tax.
None of the three is necessarily wrong. They are unauditable, for three reasons that are easy to state and hard to check from the outside.
They rarely say whether the no sales tax states are included. 5 states levy no general sales tax at all: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon. Counting them as exempt is defensible, because a buyer there does pay no sales tax. Counting them as exempt without saying so is not, because it silently adds 5 to any total. Drop them from both sides of this site's ratio and the figure becomes 17 of 19.
They rarely distinguish a conditional exemption from an unconditional one. 8 of the researched states carry an exemption with a condition an ordinary purchase can fail, whether a purity threshold, a transaction floor, or a ceiling: Alabama, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, Utah, Wyoming. Every one of those is a state where a buyer can walk in and be taxed. Count only unconditional exemptions and the figure drops to 9 of 24. The 8 states named above are the entire difference between the two answers.
They are rarely dated. Exemptions are added and removed, and this one moves faster than an annual guide can follow. Washington's repeal took effect on , and the Washington record carries the act that did it. Maryland removed its exemption in 2025 and then restored part of it on , which is why the Maryland record classes the state as a partial exemption rather than as either of the two clean answers. Virginia's exemption was extended in the last hours before a June 30, 2026 expiry, and the release quoted above was written to announce it. Later legislation has already removed an exemption outright in 1 of the researched states, and several enactments in the current wave carry commencement dates that have not all arrived. An undated count cannot be checked against anything, because you cannot tell what it was true of. A figure that changed three times inside seven months is the strongest possible argument for publishing it dated and derived rather than quoted.
This site's answer, with all three disclosed: 22 of 24 researched states charge no state sales tax on an ordinary bullion purchase, as last checked , including 5 states with no general sales tax and 8 whose exemption carries a condition. The 24 researched states are not a random sample. Most were selected because something happened there legislatively, which tilts the set toward states that have exemptions, so this ratio should not be scaled up to fifty.
Sources for the published range
- [1]SecondaryCollectiblesTax, "Sales Tax on Gold and Silver by State: Which States Exempt Bullion", giving 42 exempt states, page updated February 27, 2026. Fetched and read July 28, 2026.
- [2]SecondarySwiss America, "Sales Tax on Gold and Silver by State", giving 44 exempt states, page dated July 24, 2026. Fetched and read July 28, 2026.
- [3]SecondarySound Money Defense League, "Virginia Extends Gold and Silver Tax Exemption Hours Before Midnight Expiration", ACCESS Newswire, June 30, 2026, giving 45 exempt states. Fetched and read July 28, 2026.
Source hierarchy
Every source carries one of four kinds. The first three are official records and the fourth is not. A reader can see which is which at a glance, from the marker beside it and from the word printed next to the marker, and never from colour alone.
- Statute
- The text of the law itself. Restricted to an official state host, meaning a hostname ending in .gov or .us, or to the Legal Information Institute at law.cornell.edu. A statutory quotation hosted anywhere else is downgraded rather than promoted, and the data gate refuses the build if it is not.
- Legislature
- A legislature's own record of a bill: the text as introduced or enrolled, the status record, the official docket, a roll call. This is what the state says happened to a measure.
- Revenue department
- A state tax authority speaking about its own tax: a bulletin, a notice, a published guide, a rule. Official, and the right source for how an exemption is actually administered.
- Secondary
- Anything that is not one of the three above. A trade association, a news report, an advocacy site, a recovered archive page. Marked with a hollow marker and the word Secondary, at the same ink, size, and weight as every other kind. It means not an official record. It does not mean weak, and several verbatim statutory quotations here rest on secondary hosts only because the official host could not be reached.
Where a claim has no source at all, the page prints a marker saying so rather than leaving the space blank. A missing citation is a fact about the record and it is published as one.
Known limits
Coverage. 26 of the fifty states have not been researched: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin. They are excluded from every figure on this site and appear in the comparison table marked as unresearched. Research is ongoing, and because every figure is computed at build time rather than written into a page, the numbers move when it lands.
State income tax on gains. No count is published from this field and none should be inferred from the comparison table. The underlying record stores a single flag for whether a state taxes a gain on bullion, and that flag does not distinguish a state that levies no individual income tax at all from a state that taxes the gain with no bullion carve-out. Those are entirely different legal positions that would matter a great deal to a seller, and the data collapses them, so the figures on this site are confined to sales tax and legal tender. Each state page still reports what its own record and sources say about gains, which is where that question can be answered honestly. This is a known defect in the data rather than a deliberate simplification, and it is recorded here rather than worked around quietly.
Scope. Local sales tax is not covered. Federal tax treatment is not covered. Dealer reporting obligations are not covered. Nothing here is legal or tax advice, and a statute can change after the date printed on a page.
Corrections. A claim on this site is worth exactly as much as the document under it. If a source says something different from what a page here says, the page is wrong. The About page sets out how to report that and what happens next.