Families with children or college students preparing to head back to school will be able to save some money if they buy their school supplies during the first weekend in August.
Missouri's annual back-to-school sales tax holiday runs from 12:01 a.m. Aug. 4 to midnight Aug. 6, according to a Missouri Department of Revenue news release. For the weekend, some school supplies, computers clothing and other items will be exempt from all state and local sales tax.
While some municipalities have not participated in the tax holiday in the past, this year, all local sales taxes and state sales taxes will be waived in all cities, counties and special tax districts in Missouri for qualifying purchases, according to the release.
Tax will not be charged on the following items:
Clothing not worth more than $100, including shoes, diapers, cloth used to make school uniforms, and any clothing to be worn on or around the body. Items that are not included are watches and watchbands, jewelry, handbags, handkerchiefs, umbrellas, scarves, ties, headbands or belt buckles.
School supplies, not more than $50 per purchase, for a standard classroom for educational purposes, such as textbooks, notebooks, paper, writing instruments, crayons, art supplies, rulers, backpacks and book bags, chalk, maps, globes, calculators, graphing calculators worth no more than $150, and computer software worth no more than $350. Watches, radios, CD players, headphones, sporting equipment, portable or desktop phones, copiers or other office equipment, furniture or fixtures are not eligible for the sales tax holiday.
Personal computers and computer peripheral devices that do not cost more than $1,500, including laptops; desktops; tower computers with a central processing unit, random access memory, storage drive, monitor and keyboard; disk drives, memory modules, compact disk drives, daughterboards, digitizers, microphones, modems, motherboards, mouses, multimedia speakers, printers, single-user hardware, single-user operating systems, sound cards or video cards.
The release states that anyone can participate in the tax holiday with a qualifying purchase, regardless of whether they are a student or a Missouri resident.