Texas’s Back-to-School Tax Holiday Lands in Early August

The school supply lists are starting to show up in DFW inboxes, and the aisles at every Target and Walmart in the metro are quietly flipping from pool noodles to pocket folders. Before you fill a cart, put one weekend on the calendar: Texas’s annual sales tax holiday runs Friday, Aug. 7 through midnight Sunday, Aug. 9 this year, according to the Texas Comptroller’s sales tax holiday page. For a DFW family paying 8.25 percent combined sales tax, that is $8.25 back on every $100 of qualifying gear, and with a few weeks still to go, there is time to shop smart instead of fast.

Here is what qualifies, what trips people up, and how the rules treat online orders, layaways and delivery fees.

The basic rule: under $100, per item

During the holiday weekend, most clothing, footwear, school supplies and backpacks priced under $100 sell tax free. The threshold applies to each item, not your total. The Comptroller’s own example: two $80 shirts both qualify even though the pair costs $160, because each shirt is under $100. But a single $100 item gets no break at all; the exemption is for items sold for less than $100, and an item at or over that line is taxed on its full price.

There is no limit on how many qualifying items you can buy, and you do not need any exemption certificate or paperwork at the register for personal purchases.

Clothing and shoes: what counts

Everyday clothing and footwear qualify, and the Comptroller publishes a detailed list of qualifying clothing and footwear. The line that catches shoppers is athletic gear. Items designed primarily for athletic activity or protective use, and not normally worn otherwise, stay taxable: golf cleats and football pads are the state’s examples. But tennis shoes, jogging suits and swimsuits qualify, because people wear them off the field too.

Also staying taxable: jewelry, handbags, purses, briefcases, luggage, wallets, watches and similar accessories, along with clothing rentals, alterations and cleaning services, and the raw materials for making clothes, like fabric, thread and zippers. Cloth and disposable fabric face masks count as clothing and qualify; industrial masks like N95s do not.

Backpacks and school supplies: read the list

Student backpacks under $100 are exempt, including backpacks with wheels and messenger bags, and you can buy up to 10 backpacks tax free at one time. Framed hiking backpacks, luggage, briefcases, computer bags, purses, and athletic or duffle bags do not qualify.

School supplies are the category where guessing goes wrong, because only the items on the state’s specific list qualify. The Comptroller’s school supply list covers the classics, so check it against your campus list before assuming. Three big-ticket categories that never qualify, holiday or not: computers, software and textbooks. If a laptop is on your back-to-school list, this weekend does nothing for you.

Online orders count, with a timing catch

You do not have to fight the crowds. Qualifying items bought online, by phone or by mail from a seller doing business in Texas are exempt too, as long as you pay during the holiday window. The state’s test is when the sale happens, not when the box arrives: pay for qualifying supplies at 5 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 9 and they are exempt even if they ship the following week. But if your card is declined Sunday night and you resubmit payment Monday morning, the purchase is taxable. The same logic covers layaways, in both directions: putting a qualifying item on layaway during the holiday, or making the final payment on an existing layaway during the holiday, earns the exemption.

Watch the delivery charge

Here is the sneakiest rule of the weekend: delivery, shipping and handling charges from the seller count as part of an item’s sales price. A $95 pair of jeans with a $10 delivery charge becomes a $105 item, and the whole $105 gets taxed. On big online orders, a flat per-package delivery fee can be attributed to a single item in the box, which can keep borderline items under the line, but per-item shipping gets added to each item it applies to. When something you are buying sits in the $90s, in-store pickup is the safer play.

If you get charged tax anyway

Registers and websites make mistakes, especially on borderline items. If you pay sales tax on something that qualified, the Comptroller says you can ask the seller for a refund of the tax. The seller can either refund it directly or hand you Form 00-985, an assignment of the right to a refund, which lets you claim the tax back from the Comptroller’s office yourself. Keep the receipt either way.

One last bit of perspective: the holiday is a nice trim, not a windfall. On a typical $300 back-to-school haul, DFW shoppers keep roughly $25 that would otherwise go to tax. The bigger savings still come from the campus supply list itself, buying what is actually required and skipping the rest. But since the state is offering the discount for one weekend, it costs nothing to schedule the errand for Aug. 7-9 and take it.

This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.