What is nexus analysis & registration?
Where you actually owe sales tax — economic and physical nexus mapped against real thresholds, then registered state by state.
There is no US federal sales tax and no single national registration the way GST works in India. Forty-five states plus DC levy their own sales tax (Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon charge none statewide), each with its own Department of Revenue, its own online portal, its own rate table, and — in states like Colorado and Louisiana — thousands of local home-rule jurisdictions layered on top that register separately from the state itself. A business that starts selling into a new state does not get GST-style automatic coverage; it gets a fresh registration decision to make, one state at a time.
The trigger for that decision is called nexus, and it comes in two forms that get evaluated separately. Physical nexus is the old test — an office, an employee, a contractor, or inventory sitting in a state, including Amazon FBA stock a seller never physically touches once it lands in a fulfillment center. Economic nexus is the newer test, created by the Supreme Court's 2018 *South Dakota v. Wayfair* decision: a state can require registration once a remote seller crosses a dollar or transaction threshold in that state, with no physical presence needed at all. Most states set the dollar threshold at $100,000 in sales; a growing number of states — roughly 17 as of this year — have dropped the old 200-transaction leg entirely, so a business that ships a low volume of high-value orders can trip a $100,000 threshold on transaction count alone in states that still count transactions, while sailing under it in states that dropped that leg. The two tests have to be run separately for every state a business ships into, because a state where nexus doesn't exist yet is a state where registering early creates filing obligations with nothing to report.
Who does what
| Your CapEasy team | Nexus analysis & registration, the reconciliations and reporting behind it, and the questions list that keeps it honest. |
| Your CPA or enrolled agent | Everything that carries a licence in United States — rendered exactly as written: issue compilation, review or audit reports — those are restricted to licensed cpa firms. |
| You | One conversation with one named person, and the decisions that are genuinely yours. |
Nexus analysis & registration in United States
Physical and economic nexus are two separate tests, and both have to be checked
Physical nexus doesn't disappear just because a business is 'digital' — an Amazon FBA warehouse holding inventory in a state creates physical nexus in that state regardless of where the seller is based, and it is the single most commonly missed nexus trigger because the seller never chose that warehouse location. Economic nexus, the post-Wayfair test, is evaluated independently and looks only at sales volume or transaction count into a state with no physical footprint at all. A business can have economic nexus in a state it's never shipped inventory to, and physical nexus in a state it's never crossed a sales threshold in — both checks run on every state, every period.
Roughly 17 states have dropped the 200-transaction threshold — check the current rule per state, not the 2018 rule
Wayfair-era economic nexus laws originally paired a dollar threshold (commonly $100,000) with a transaction-count threshold (commonly 200 separate sales), and crossing either one triggered nexus. States have been individually repealing the transaction-count leg since — roughly 17 states no longer use it as of August 2026 — which means a business doing high-volume, low-dollar sales that would have tripped the old 200-transaction rule may have no nexus at all in a state that dropped it, while a business doing the reverse can trip a surviving transaction-count rule elsewhere. Treating '200 transactions' as a universal number is the single most common outdated-threshold error we see.
There is no multi-state permit — one filing, one portal, one login, per state
Unlike GST's single national registration, each state sales tax permit is filed through that state's own Department of Revenue portal, using that state's own field requirements and its own permit-holder credentials afterward. A business registering in twelve states files twelve separate applications and ends up managing twelve separate portal logins — there is no consolidated multi-state application, and no state's registration counts toward another's.
A registered agent and a virtual mailing address are not interchangeable, and states reject filings that try
A registered agent — the person or entity a state requires to hold a physical in-state street address to receive legal notices — is a Secretary of State entity-formation requirement, separate from sales tax registration itself and requiring a state-authorized provider CapEasy does not act as directly. A virtual mailing address is a private commercial product for general correspondence. States reject a formation or foreign-qualification filing that tries to use a virtual mailbox or PO box as the registered agent's address, so the two have to stay strictly separate in how a business sets up before it registers.
What your CPA or enrolled agent receives from us
- A physical-nexus checklist — offices, employees, contractors, and inventory locations (including every Amazon FBA fulfillment-center state) mapped against current addresses and headcount.
- An economic-nexus tracker, state by state, showing sales and transaction counts against each state's current threshold rule — flagged where the state has dropped the transaction-count leg so an outdated 200-transaction assumption doesn't get applied.
- A ranked list of states where a threshold has been crossed, or is close enough to flag before the next sales cycle closes.
- The entity-document package assembled for filing: EIN, formation certificate, business address, NAICS code, officer/ownership details, and the projected first-sale date in each target state.
- A drafted permit application per target state, built from the state's own DOR portal fields, ready for your CPA or enrolled agent's review before it goes in.
- A home-rule jurisdiction flag for any Colorado home-rule city or Louisiana parish nexus is triggered in, since the state permit doesn't cover those separately.
