September 9, 2026
You added a second launch point across the state line. Or you started selling excursions to cruise passengers who fly in from the mainland. Or a mainland operator asked you to run a few trips in their backyard for a season. Somewhere in there, a quiet question starts to nag: do I owe sales tax in a place where I don't even have an office?
For a long time the answer was simple. You collected sales tax where you had a physical shop, and that was that. Then a 2018 Supreme Court case rewrote the rule, and now a state you've never set foot in can still expect you to file. It's the same kind of state-by-state homework we've walked through before with credit card surcharge laws by state and the 1099-K threshold rollback for tour payouts — except this one turns on where your guests are and where your boat actually goes.
This is a plain-English map, not tax advice. Every operator's situation is different, and the right move at the end of this is usually a short conversation with a CPA who knows your states. But you'll walk in knowing the right questions to ask.
"Nexus" is just the legal word for a connection between your business and a state that's strong enough for that state to make you collect its sales tax. No connection, no duty. Enough of a connection, and you're on the hook.
The old rule came from a case called Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, and it drew a bright line: a state could only tax you if you had a physical presence there — a store, a warehouse, employees on the ground. Mail-order and, later, online sellers used that line to sell into states without collecting a dime of sales tax.
That ended in 2018. In South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., the Supreme Court overturned the physical-presence rule and held that a state can require a remote seller to collect and remit sales tax based purely on economic activity in the state — no in-state store, warehouse, or employees required. The motivation was money: before Wayfair, the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated that state and local governments were losing somewhere between $8 billion and $13 billion a year in uncollected sales tax from remote sellers.
Here's why it matters to you and not just to Amazon: you don't have to be a giant retailer to trip a state's rules. If you sell trips to people who cross state or island lines — or you run trips in more than one place — a state where you have no office at all could still expect a filing.
This is the part the generic guides get wrong for our world. There are two separate tests for nexus, and crossing either one on its own creates a filing duty. Most economic-nexus articles are written for e-commerce sellers, so they obsess over dollar thresholds. For a tour or charter operator, the other trigger — physical presence — is often the one that bites first.
Wayfair didn't get rid of physical-presence nexus. It added economic nexus on top of it. Physical presence is still a fully independent basis for owing sales tax, and it comes with no dollar threshold at all.
Tax guidance is blunt about this. As Thomson Reuters and state tax manuals lay out, sending staff, equipment, or a boat or vehicle into a state to actually perform a service there creates nexus immediately, regardless of revenue — Washington's Department of Revenue famously uses a "more than the slightest presence" standard. State guidance routinely lists "in-person services or selling" and "performing services in-state" as triggers with no minimum sales figure attached.
Read that through an operator's eyes. Actually running a trip in a second state — your guides on the ground, your crew, your gear physically there — is far more likely to create an immediate tax obligation than slowly creeping up on some dollar threshold. You could run a single season of trips in a neighboring state and have nexus there from day one, long before the money adds up to six figures. That's the risk the e-commerce guides never mention, because e-commerce sellers don't show up in person.
The second trigger is the one everyone talks about: pure sales volume. The model that Wayfair upheld came from South Dakota's law, and it set the "safe harbor" that most states still copy today. Nexus kicks in once you deliver more than $100,000 of goods or services into the state, or complete 200 or more separate transactions there, in the current or prior calendar year.
As of 2026, 45 U.S. taxing jurisdictions enforce economic nexus, and 41 of them use that standard $100,000 threshold. Most apply an "OR" test: cross either the dollars or the transaction count and you're in.
A few states are different, and the differences are worth knowing:
Knowing you have nexus is only half the puzzle. The next question is whether what you sell is even taxable — and sales tax rules were written around physical goods, so how a state treats "a guided tour" or "a boat trip" varies wildly. Three examples that catch operators out.
Texas doesn't tax only your gift-shop merchandise. The Texas Comptroller classifies "sightseeing tours" as a taxable amusement service, right alongside live performances, exhibitions, and participatory sports and games. That means a company based in Texas — or operating tours in Texas — has to collect and remit Texas sales tax on the tour charge itself, not just on the t-shirts and koozies.
New York taxes "admission charges to a place of amusement" at the 4% state sales tax rate, plus local sales tax based on where the amusement actually takes place. And New York's tax department defines "admission charge" broadly — it sweeps in any service charge, cover charge, or entertainment or amusement fee. So the way you itemize a booking doesn't get you out of it; the add-on fees can be taxable right along with the ticket.
Florida draws a line that snags charter operators specifically. Under Fla. Stat. 212.08(7)(y), a "charter" that furnishes a crew and charges one flat rate for the whole boat, solely for fishing, is exempt from sales tax. But a "head boat" that sells seats per person is taxed as an admission. And even a boat that looks like a fishing charter becomes taxable the moment it runs a sunset or sightseeing cruise without active fishing.
The sting is in the enforcement. Florida auditors are reported to scan operator websites for per-person pricing language as a red flag — a reason to reclassify an "exempt" fishing charter as a taxable head boat. Because the charter exemption is something you have to affirmatively claim, the burden is on you to prove you qualify. And if you never filed a return, there's no statute-of-limitations clock protecting you. In other words, the wording on your pricing page can decide your tax bill.
If you operate in Hawaii or around the Caribbean, throw out part of the mainland playbook.
Hawaii doesn't have a traditional sales tax at all. Instead it charges a General Excise Tax (GET) on your gross business receipts — which means a Maui tour operator owes GET on every booking, whether or not the trip turned a profit. Hawaii also runs its own Wayfair-style nexus rule (HAR §18-237-2.95) that mirrors the mainland: an out-of-state seller crosses the line at more than $100,000 in Hawaii gross receipts or 200 separate transactions in a calendar year.
Puerto Rico has gone the same direction. It enacted its own Wayfair-style economic nexus for its 11.5% IVU (sales and use) tax. A non-resident merchant crosses nexus at more than $100,000 in gross sales or 200 transactions into Puerto Rico in a year — and, as on the mainland, physical presence there creates nexus immediately, regardless of volume.
The U.S. Virgin Islands is the outlier. As of 2026 it has not adopted any Wayfair-style economic nexus rule for remote sellers. Instead it taxes local business activity through a 5% gross receipts tax. If you're weighing how all this lands across islands, it's one more reason why Caribbean operators need a locally compliant booking system — the tax rules genuinely differ from one flag to the next.
Sometimes — but only for the bookings that actually run through the platform. Every state with a sales tax now has a "marketplace facilitator" law. These generally require platforms like OTAs and marketplaces to calculate, collect, and remit sales tax on the bookings they facilitate, once the platform itself crosses the state's threshold. The big OTAs blew past those thresholds years ago, so for a booking paid through them, the platform is usually handling the tax.
Here's the catch that matters for our audience: that coverage only applies to sales paid through that platform. The bookings you take directly — on your own website or booking widget — are not covered. They stay your own nexus and your own collection responsibility.
So as you shift toward direct bookings (which is the entire point of owning your channel and keeping the OTA commissions in your pocket), more of the sales-tax question lands back on your desk. That's not a reason to feed the OTAs — it's a reason to keep clean records of what you sold directly and where. If you want a fuller picture of the money side, we've written separately about reconciling OTA payouts and staying tax compliant.
First, don't panic. Economic nexus isn't retroactive going forward — once you cross a state's threshold, the collection duty applies from that point on, not to every sale you ever made.
But there's a real catch. If you should have registered in a prior year and didn't, a state can still audit you later, find that you crossed the threshold back then, and assess back taxes plus interest and penalties for those periods. The exposure doesn't vanish just because nobody noticed at the time.
The calm, practical move looks like this: figure out where you actually have nexus today — physical footprint first, then dollars and transactions. Register in those states going forward. Then talk to a CPA about any past exposure and whether a voluntary disclosure — raising your hand before the state finds you — makes sense. It almost always costs less to come forward than to get caught in an audit.
You don't have to become a tax expert. You have to know where you operate and keep records clean enough to answer a few questions. Run through this once a year:
None of this should scare you off growing across state or island lines. It just means the same discipline you already bring to deposits and refunds now extends to knowing where your trips run and keeping your direct-booking records tidy by state. Get that habit in place, and the tax question stops being a lurking worry and becomes a five-minute annual check.
