Sales Tax on Bullion in Texas: What Buyers, Sellers and Dealers Owe

What Texas actually exempts under Section 151.336

Texas is one of the friendliest states in the country for physical precious-metals buyers. The statute that does the heavy lifting is Texas Tax Code Sec. 151.336, Certain Coins and Precious Metals, implemented by the Comptroller through administrative rule 34 TAC Sec. 3.336 (“Currency, Certain Coins, and Gold, Silver, and Platinum Bullion”). Read together, they carve out three specific categories from the state’s 6.25 percent sales tax.

• Gold, silver and platinum bullion. Refined bars, rounds and ingots whose price is set primarily by metal content and spot price, not by artistic or collectible premium.
• Coins that are legal tender. American Gold Eagles, American Silver Eagles, Canadian Maple Leafs, Austrian Philharmonics, South African Krugerrands and similar sovereign-mint coins that circulate (or once circulated) as currency somewhere in the world.
• Numismatic coins. Rare or collectible coins traded above face value for their historical, artistic or grading premium, whether or not still legal tender.

The exemption is broad enough that most bullion and coin purchases made in Texas or shipped into Texas are tax-free at the point of sale. That is deliberate. Texas has actively courted the precious-metals industry over the past decade, most visibly through the creation of the Texas Bullion Depository (more on that below).

What still gets taxed: jewelry, palladium and the borderline cases

The exemption stops at bullion, coins and select numismatic pieces. Everything else that a precious-metals shop might ring up is standard taxable retail:

Two lines from that table trip up first-time buyers most often. Palladium is the first: many multi-metal stackers assume it rides on platinum’s coattails, but the statute names gold, silver and platinum only. A 1 oz palladium Maple Leaf carries the 6.25 percent state rate plus any local rate at a Texas dealer, even though the neighboring silver Maple Leaf sitting on the same shelf does not.

Jewelry is the second. A 24-karat gold pendant is metallurgically identical to a 1 oz gold bar of the same weight, but the moment metal takes a jewelry form (chain, bracelet, ring, wearable art) it stops being bullion in the eyes of the Texas Comptroller and becomes standard taxable retail. Buyers rolling wealth from paper into physical metal often skip jewelry precisely for this reason.

How Texas sales tax rates actually stack

Texas layers sales tax in two pieces. The Comptroller’s Sales and Use Tax page is unambiguous:

• State rate: 6.25 percent on retail sales, leases and rentals of most goods and taxable services.
• Local add-on: up to 2 percent from cities, counties, transit authorities and special-purpose districts.
• Combined maximum: 8.25 percent.

That combined rate is what applies to the taxable items in the table above. It also means that on the same shopping cart, an exempt Silver Eagle and a taxable copper round can trigger two different math paths at checkout: zero on the coin, the full local rate on the round.

The Comptroller publishes a tax rate locator for every Texas address so dealers can determine the correct combined rate. A Houston sale and a rural Panhandle sale can carry different local rates; the total simply cannot exceed 8.25 percent.

Online vs in-store: the rules do not change, but who collects can

Since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair (2018), out-of-state online retailers with enough Texas sales must register and collect Texas sales and use tax on shipments to Texas addresses. That did not change the substance of Section 151.336, but it did change who writes the check.

• Eligible bullion or exempt coin shipped from any state to Texas: not taxable. Well-run national dealers configure their carts to zero-out the tax line for these SKUs on Texas orders.
• Non-exempt item (jewelry, palladium, accessories) shipped to Texas: the seller usually collects state plus local tax on the delivery zip code, or the buyer self-reports use tax on their Texas return.
• In-person purchase in a Texas coin shop: same substantive rules. Local tax is set by the dealer’s storefront address.

Some out-of-state dealers still get the exemption wrong on Texas orders. If you see a line item labeled “sales tax” on eligible bullion shipped to a Texas address, ask the dealer to correct the invoice and cite Section 151.336. Do not pay the erroneous tax and then try to recover it from the Comptroller: recovery from the state on a wrongly collected tax collected by a third party is a slow, paperwork-heavy path.

Buying out of state and bringing it home: use tax reality

Use tax is the mirror image of sales tax. When a Texas resident buys taxable goods somewhere else (in person or by mail) and no Texas tax was collected, they owe the same 6.25 percent state rate plus their local rate on that purchase, reported on their Texas Franchise and Sales Tax return or via the Comptroller’s e-file portal.

For exempt bullion and coins, the use tax is zero because the sale itself would be zero in Texas. For taxable items brought back from a Colorado or Louisiana dealer (jewelry, palladium, copper products), the Texas resident technically owes the difference between what was collected there and what Texas would have charged, capped at 8.25 percent. In practice, individual enforcement on personal-scale purchases is uncommon, but dealers and repeat-volume buyers are correctly viewed as reporting obligations by the Comptroller.

The Texas Bullion Depository: a state-run vault, not a tax loophole

Texas took an unusual step in 2015: it authorized its own state-administered precious-metals depository through House Bill 483, signed by Governor Greg Abbott on June 19, 2015. The facility opened for business on June 6, 2018 in Leander, Texas, making Texas the first U.S. state to operate its own bullion depository.

The Depository accepts gold, silver, platinum, palladium and rhodium for storage from individuals, businesses, financial institutions and foreign governments. Storage itself is a service and is not a sales-tax event. What it does is give Texas residents a state-jurisdiction option for allocated, segregated storage that competes with Delaware, Nevada and Utah private vaulting.

For IRA-eligible metals, the Depository can hold assets on behalf of an IRS-approved self-directed IRA custodian. The IRA purchase itself avoids sales tax on two grounds at once: the product qualifies for exemption under Section 151.336, and the transaction is a custodial acquisition for a retirement account, not a retail sale to the individual owner.

Practical scenarios: what a Texas buyer actually pays

Three worked examples, using the 8.25 percent combined ceiling for the taxable items:

1. Houston coin shop, $10,000 order of 1 oz American Gold Eagles. Sales tax owed: $0. The coins are both legal tender and gold bullion, exempt under Section 151.336.
2. Same shop, $2,000 order of 22-karat gold jewelry. State tax: $125 (6.25 percent). Local tax (assume Houston max): $40 (2 percent). Total: $165 owed at checkout.
3. Online dealer in Delaware ships $5,000 in palladium bars plus $5,000 in silver rounds to a Dallas address. Silver rounds: $0 (exempt). Palladium bars: state plus local Dallas rate on the $5,000 palladium portion, typically the full 8.25 percent, so approximately $412.50 collected by the dealer at checkout.

The takeaway: for a buyer building a stack of qualifying bullion and coins, Texas is effectively a zero-sales-tax state. For a buyer picking up palladium or jewelry alongside, the tax line on the mixed portion of the invoice is unavoidable.

Record-keeping and audit exposure

Retail buyers should keep the invoice for every precious-metals purchase, whether tax was collected or not. The invoice should show the item description, the quantity, the price and, for exempt items, either a zero tax line or a clear notation of the Section 151.336 exemption. If a dealer refuses to itemize or lumps taxable and exempt items into a single subtotal, that is a red flag on both sales-tax compliance and general shop transparency.

For dealers and shop owners the record-keeping bar is higher. The Comptroller can audit sales and use tax returns for four years and expects contemporaneous documentation showing which line items were exempt and why. Exemption certificates for resale, invoices that identify the metal and form, and a clean point-of-sale configuration that separates bullion SKUs from accessory SKUs make audits routine rather than expensive.

How Texas compares to neighboring states

Texas is not alone in exempting bullion, but the specifics vary widely across state lines:

• Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas: all offer bullion sales-tax exemptions with narrower scope than Texas, and some retain purchase-amount thresholds. Cross-border shipments are still governed by the delivery state’s rules, not the seller’s location.
• New Mexico: historically applied its gross receipts tax to bullion sales, which functions like a sales tax collected from the seller. Recent legislative sessions have debated changes; buyers should verify at time of purchase.
• Federal treatment: completely separate. Regardless of state sales tax, physical gold and silver held more than one year are federally taxed as “collectibles” at up to 28 percent on realized long-term capital gains under IRC Section 1(h)(4). Our capital gains guide walks through the mechanics.

A Texas resident who drives to a neighboring state to buy jewelry can end up worse off than staying home: the neighboring state may or may not exempt, the Texas use-tax obligation may still apply, and the travel cost erases the savings. For pure bullion the answer is the reverse: Texas is already tax-free, so there is nothing to save by leaving.

Where to verify before you buy

Rules change. Before a large purchase, confirm the current text and rate directly with the state:

• Texas Tax Code Sec. 151.336, the operating statute for the coin and bullion exemption.
• Texas Comptroller Sales and Use Tax page, which lists the 6.25 percent state rate and the 2 percent local cap.
• Comptroller Sales Tax Rate Locator to look up the combined rate for any Texas address.
• STAR (State Tax Automated Research) system for private letter rulings and policy statements interpreting Section 151.336 in edge cases.

This guide is educational and reflects our reading of the public Texas Comptroller guidance current at the time of publication. It is not legal or tax advice. For a substantial purchase, an audit issue, or a dealer starting a Texas storefront, a licensed Texas CPA or sales-tax attorney is the right call.