Sales Tax for Interior Designers: What You Owe, Where, and Why (2026)
Quick answer: The moment you buy furniture at trade prices and resell it to a client, you're a retailer — and retailers collect and remit sales tax. The resale certificate that lets you buy tax-free isn't a perk; it's the paperwork that moves the tax obligation from your purchase to your client's, with you as the responsible middle party. Where the furniture is delivered — not where you live — decides which state's rules apply. This guide is orientation, not advice: rules vary by state, and an accountant who knows designer sales tax is worth every dollar.
The mental model
Design services and product resale are two different tax animals, and most designers do both on one invoice. Your design fee is a service — taxed in some states, not in others. The furniture is goods, and goods are taxed at retail everywhere there's a sales tax. When you source a $5,000 sofa at trade and invoice your client $6,500, that $6,500 is a retail sale. You either paid tax at purchase (and lost margin doing it) or bought tax-exempt with a resale certificate — in which case you now owe the state the tax you collect from your client.
What a resale certificate really is
A resale certificate says to the retailer: "don't charge me tax — I'm not the final buyer; I'll collect it when I resell." Getting one requires being a real business first: a registered entity or licensed sole proprietorship, an EIN, and a sales-tax registration with your state's department of revenue — that registration is what the certificate certifies. Then the certificate has to be on file with each brand you buy from, and kept current as certificates expire. Miss the filing with one brand and you pay tax at checkout — money that's genuinely difficult to recover.
The multi-state trap
Here's what catches nearly everyone: furniture is taxed where it lands. Design a Manhattan apartment from your New Jersey home office and the delivery into New York makes it a New York sale. Now the hard part — roughly a quarter of states, including California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Washington, don't accept out-of-state resale certificates. A project delivering into one of those states means registering with that state's revenue department before you order, filing that state's exemption form with each brand, and then filing ongoing returns there — monthly or quarterly, often even for periods with zero sales. Every new delivery state is a new registration, new certificates, and a new filing calendar, forever.
The recurring obligations
Once registered, the machine must be fed: collect the right rate on each client invoice (state plus local, by delivery address), file returns on each state's schedule, remit what you collected, and keep exemption certificates current with every brand. None of it is conceptually hard. All of it is unpaid administrative time that scales with your success — more states, more brands, more filings. Our guides on registering a design business and the trade programs themselves (CB2, RH, DWR) show where each piece of paperwork plugs in.
The alternative
On Suede, this entire layer runs through us. We purchase from trade programs under our own access and tax registrations, place and track the orders, invoice your client, collect and remit the sales tax, and pay out your earnings. You pick the products and find clients, Suede manages the rest — no state registrations, no exemption filings, no return calendar.
Sales tax is the least visible part of a design business and the least forgiving. On Suede it's handled — procurement, invoicing, tax, and payments run through us, on your behalf. Join the waitlist here.
Orientation only, not tax or legal advice; rules vary by state and change. Verified against state resale-certificate guidance as of July 2026.