If you sell from Texas, you may have spotted a strange line on your fee statements: sales tax on the marketplace’s own commission. It is not your sales tax. It is tax on the fee the platform charges you. And right now, Texas is moving to stop it. Here is what is real, what is still just a proposal, and what to do while you wait.
What Texas actually did
On September 30, 2026, Texas Comptroller Don Huffines signed an executive order telling his office to change Rule 3.330. That rule is the one that has treated certain online marketplace services as taxable data processing. The proposed change would say that fees charged to sellers for listing, offering, or helping sell items are not taxable data processing or information services.
The proposed amendment is scheduled to appear in the Texas Register on October 16, 2026, with public comments open through November 15, 2026. No effective date has been set, and the final rule could end up different from the proposal.
Why this matters if you resell
Several big marketplaces started taking Texas sales tax out of seller fees. Poshmark told Texas sellers it would begin deducting sales tax on its commissions starting October 1, 2025. eBay did not give Texas sellers advance notice, and some found the tax sitting in their transaction records – its help pages later listed taxable seller fees like Store subscriptions, insertion fees, and final value fees. Etsy warned sellers it would collect Texas sales tax on certain fees, and its December 2025 Payments Policy update allows tax on seller fees where it applies. The coverage did not mention how Mercari handles it, so check your own statements there.
That tax comes out of your profit on every single sale. On a thin-margin item, it adds up fast.
What this means for you right now
Nothing changes today. The marketplaces have to keep following the current rule until the rulemaking is finished, so the tax will keep showing up on your fees for now. The executive order also does not say whether sellers can get back tax that was already collected, or whether the change reaches backward. Even if refunds turn out to be possible, it is unclear how they would work, since the platforms took the money and sent it to the state. So please do not count on a refund.
The smart move is simple: keep clean records of your fees and the tax taken from them, so you are ready whichever way this lands. If you are a Texas seller on Etsy, keep your location information accurate in your account too.
The cost of tracking this by hand
Let’s do the math out loud. Say you have a 1,000-sale year. Finding the sales-tax line on the fee statement for one sale takes about 30 seconds. Do that for 1,000 sales and you have burned a bit over 8 hours – on one marketplace. Spread across three marketplaces, that is 25 hours. More than three full working days of squinting at statements.
And it is not a one-time job. Every new month brings new statements, platforms change how they label fees, and a rule change like this one means you get to redo the whole thing when the tax stops. Manual means signing up for it again, every year, forever.
The worst part is how productive it feels. You are scrolling, copying, typing numbers into a spreadsheet – you are moving, so it feels like work. But it creates nothing, and nobody pays you for it. Weekends quietly disappear into it. I am frustrated on your behalf, because that time belongs to you.
The smarter fix: keep it all in one place
This is exactly why I run my business out of Nifty. Your listings and your sales from every marketplace live in one place, so you are not hopping between three seller dashboards just to figure out what happened on a sale. List once, sell everywhere, and let the tool notice when something sells. That is your foundation, and it makes everything else – including tax time – so much calmer.
For the expense side, grab my free Schedule C Expense Tracker. It gives you a clean place to log your fees and business costs so nothing slips through when you file.
Bottom line
Texas is trying to stop taxing seller fees, but it is a proposal for now – comments are open until November 15, and nothing changes today. Keep your fee records tidy, do not plan around a refund, and keep your shop running without you babysitting it. Your shop should work while you sleep, and your paperwork should not eat your weekends.
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