How Taxes Work in WooCommerce

Table of Contents

• Defining Prices
• Tax Calculations (simplified)
• Cross-border/country/region taxes
  • Prices including tax - Default v2.5.x Behavior
  • Prices including tax - Experimental Behavior
• Showing 0 value taxes

Some confusion is present to the way WooCommerce does its tax calculations. This post should hopefully clear that up.

Defining Prices

Prices for products can be defined:

1. Including tax
2. Excluding tax

Note: shipping prices are always defined excluding tax in the current system, although a change is being considered.

When we say defined including tax, we are referring to the taxes of the store's base country. e.g. A store with base country GB (United Kingdom) would define their prices with their GB rate of 20%.

Tax Calculations (simplified)

To work out how much tax is applicable to a given price there is a calculation like as follows.

Tax calculations are performed per line, not per item. For a tax rate of 20%, the following would be used:

For tax exclusive prices

Tax = Line Price * 0.2

For tax inclusive prices

Tax = Line Price - Line Price / 1.2

Note how the tax is not exactly 20% of the line price when prices include tax already. Doing a regular percentage calculation would essentially be taxing the tax already applied :)

Cross-border/country/region taxes

Calculating taxes across various countries for tax exclusive prices is simple; you take the tax exclusive price and multiple by the tax rate.

For prices including tax this is slightly more complicated.

Prices including tax - Default v2.5.x Behavior

Example 1: Let's take an example of selling from GB (with their 20% tax rate) to Germany. The price of the product is 9.99 including tax. GB based sellers do not need to charge tax for physical goods in Germany so:

New price = 9.99 / 1.2 = 8.325

The German would pay 8.33 for the product.

Example 2: Let's take the same above example, but consider a digital good where tax would apply of the rate 19%.

First you would strip the GB tax, then you would need to apply the German tax like so:

New price = ( 9.99 / 1.2 ) * 1.19 = 9.90675

The German would pay 9.91.

Prices including tax - Experimental Behavior

A common feature request is to charge the same amount everywhere and absorb the differences in taxes. To enable this feature in 2.5 you would use the code:

add_filter( 'woocommerce_adjust_non_base_location_prices', '__return_false' );

This would result in the following results, based on the previous 2 examples.

Example 1: Selling from GB (with their 20% tax rate) to Germany. The price of the product is 9.99 including tax. GB based sellers do not need to charge tax for physical goods in Germany.

Price = 9.99 (the same)
Tax   = 0 (no tax is charged

The German would pay 9.99 for the product, the same as GB people.

Example 2: Let's take the same above example, but consider a digital good where tax would apply of the rate 19%.

Price = 9.99 (the same)
Tax   = 9.99 / 1.19 = 8.39 (slightly less than GB)

The German would again pay 9.99.

Showing 0 value taxes

These are hidden by default. To show empty taxes, use the snippet:

add_filter( 'woocommerce_order_hide_zero_taxes', '__return_false' );