How To Set Up Sales Tax for Services in Individual Cities

WHN — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 13:59:22 GMT

**EDIT** The short answer is no. Square's AI Chatbot replied with this:

"Normally the sales tax is calculated based off of your businesses' address and not the customer. Unfortunately we cannot make each payment charge a different tax amount because of a different city. Unfortunately this is not available with Square I apologize for the inconvenience!"
And after trying to confirm this with a live person and 2.5 hours of the most AWFUL customer service I've ever experienced, I can say they do not provide this service. You cannot appropriately charge sales tax in certain states with Square.

We are only offering mobile services (appointments) online right now. In my state, sales tax is calculated by the 1. State tax AND 2. Individual cities *in the city the service is provided*, not the location of the business itself. As a mobile service, we will be servicing about ten different cities or so in our area to start with...obviously all with different tax rates.

Square (Under Account & Settings>Sales Tax) offers a tax registration for my state tax (it's accurate), and even has a "Lookup Tax Rate Option" which is very efficient in calculating taxes correctly by zip code (city). However, when I go to the website and pretend to do a sale, it will only calculate the state tax, but will not add the city taxes, even though the "Lookup Tax Rate Option" shows it.

Is there an option to automatically calculate taxes based on zip code? If not, because each city tax is different, is there a way to get Square to automatically calculate this somehow by adding an option for each city in checkout maybe?

Any help is appreciated!

Re: How To Set Up Sales Tax for Services in Individual Cities

BernadetteA — Thu, 09 May 2024 02:44:26 GMT

Thanks for posting, @WHN

It sounds like you are setting up taxes under the Square dashboard, but are you using the Square Online website for your Appointments page? I would like to look into this further for you, and possibly speak with the product team about expected behavior. Can you please post a link to your appointments page?

Thanks in advance!

thread Re: How To Set Up Sales Tax for Services in Individual Cities in Appointments & Bookings

How To Set Up Sales Tax for Services in Individual Cities

Re: How To Set Up Sales Tax for Services in Individual Cities