Should you enroll
Who qualifies for free CSP services in the SST program? The CSP-compensated seller test
Simplify Sales Tax. Last updated 2026-09-01. Sources last verified 2026-08-19.
You qualify for free CSP services in a Streamlined Sales Tax member state if you registered through the states’ shared system and met all five criteria below in that state over the 12 months before you registered. Qualify there and that state pays your Certified Service Provider (CSP) rather than you. All five or none, answered state by state rather than once for the company, and it can be lost later.
If you have nexus in a good number of member states and no premises, no property, and no payroll in any of them, the answer is yes in every one of them. Those states pay a certified provider to do the filing work, and you pay nothing for it. A warehouse, a store, stock a third party holds for you, or one person on payroll in a member state ends it in that state.
Whether that is real money for you comes down to five lines in the contract between the states and the providers. Two of the five are restated wrong in a lot of published guidance, so they sit here word for word, and then in plain terms: a lease, stock in a warehouse, people on payroll, a contract with the state.
The five SST criteria, quoted from the contract
Read these rather than skim them. A CSP-compensated seller in a member state is a seller registered through the Streamlined Sales Tax Registration System that, in the words of the Governing Board’s contract with certified providers, “meets all the following criteria during the twelve (12) month period immediately preceding the date of registration with the Streamlined State”:
- a. “no fixed place of business for more than thirty (30) days in the Streamlined State”
- b. “less than $50,000 of Property, as defined below, in the Streamlined State”
- c. “less than $50,000 of Payroll, as defined below, in the Streamlined State”
- d. “less than twenty-five percent (25%) of its total Property or total Payroll, as defined below, in the Streamlined State”
- e. “was not collecting sales or use tax in the Streamlined State as a condition for the seller or an affiliate of the seller to qualify as a supplier of goods or services to the Streamlined State”
Three things about how to read it.
All five, or none. One miss in one state ends it there, and changes nothing anywhere else.
The window closed the day you registered. It’s the 12 months immediately before your registration date in that state, so it’s a historical question rather than a description of where you sit today.
Property and Payroll are defined terms, not your fixed asset register and your payroll register. Property you own counts at original cost, property you rent at eight times the net annual rent, averaged across the start and the end of those 12 months. Payroll is what you paid employees over the period, placed in the state where the work was done.
What the criteria mean in things you actually have
Criterion a is about premises. An office, a shop, a counter, a warehouse you hold in that state. Days rather than sites, so a unit leased for the year is a different answer from a pop-up you ran for three weeks.
Criteria b and c are two $50,000 gates in the CSP Operating Contract, and the first is usually stock. $50,000 at original cost isn’t much inventory, so a fulfillment footprint tends to decide criterion b. Watch rented space too: it counts at eight times the net annual rent rather than at the rent itself, which carries a modest lease over the line fast. On payroll, two full-time salaries can reach $50,000, and remote employees count where they work rather than where you’re incorporated, so one sales rep living in a member state puts payroll there. Compensation is what you pay employees, so on the face of it a contractor isn’t Payroll, but that reading is ours rather than the contract’s and it’s worth putting to your own adviser.
Criterion d is a share of your whole company. Not a figure measured inside that one state on its own. Work out Property and Payroll for the entire business, then ask what share of each total sits in that state. The contract test is total Property or total Payroll, so 25% or more on either one is enough to fail it. You can clear both $50,000 contract gates comfortably and still fail here, because when your company total is small, one state is a large slice of it.
Criterion e is much narrower than it looks. It doesn’t ask whether you’ve ever collected sales tax in that state. It rules out one arrangement: you, or an affiliate, were collecting there because collecting was a condition of qualifying as a supplier of goods or services to that state government. Collecting there for any other reason doesn’t fail this criterion. And it reaches your affiliates, not only the entity that registers.
The checklist: what to pull to test each criterion
One worksheet per state, one row per criterion. Everything in the right hand column is a record you already hold.
Table: the five CSP-compensated seller criteria in the CSP Operating Contract, and the record that answers each one. Checked August 21, 2026.
| Criterion | The records that answer it |
|---|---|
| a. Premises | Leases, license and storage agreements, and occupancy dates for every site in that state. Count days held rather than sites: the line is 30 days. |
| b. Property under $50,000, a contract criterion rather than a nexus threshold | Fixed asset register with locations, inventory on hand by warehouse including third party fulfillment sites, at original cost, and the rent schedule for anything you lease there. |
| c. Payroll under $50,000, also a contract criterion rather than a nexus threshold | Payroll register for the 12 months by work location, remote employees mapped to where they work, and the contractor ledger so you can show what you left out and why. |
| d. Share of the company total | Company wide Property and Payroll totals on the same definitions, so that state can be expressed as a percentage of each. The criterion fails if either percentage is 25% or more. |
| e. Supplier to the state | Government supplier registrations and state and local government contracts, across every affiliate rather than the registering entity alone. |
Date stamp it. The figures are historical, the window ends on your registration date in that state, and you’ll run it again for every member state you add.
Free CSP services are decided per state, and can go away
One third party warehouse in Ohio can cost you free CSP services in Ohio and nowhere else, if the stock there takes your Property over the contract’s $50,000 criterion or over 25% of your company total. Neither threshold trips automatically, and the same books in the same year can still make you a CSP-compensated seller in the state next door.
The status is live rather than permanent. Sign a lease, put staff on the ground, or move inventory in, and you can stop meeting the criteria there. That ends the funding in that state and only that state. Your provider has to ask you in writing whether your status has changed, so expect the question at least once a year. Treat a new warehouse or a first hire in a member state as the trigger to re-run the worksheet without waiting to be asked.
Two boundaries. Qualifying decides who pays your provider and nothing else: those definitions exist to compute the provider’s compensation, and they settle nothing about whether you owe tax anywhere. And none of it reaches you outside the states’ shared registration system, so registering through the SSTRS comes first.
Crossing an economic nexus threshold does not by itself disqualify you
The most common misreading of the test. Being required to collect in a state purely because you passed its economic nexus threshold leaves you inside the funded category, and the Governing Board says so directly:
“A remote seller that is only required to report and remit sales tax in a state because it meets the economic nexus threshold of that state qualifies for free CSP services in that state.”
It works one way only. Passing a threshold isn’t a qualifier either, and you still have to meet all five criteria in that state.
Where SST free CSP services usually land for a growing brand
Those two $50,000 gates are compensation criteria in the provider contract rather than nexus thresholds, and they bind in the wrong places for a brand with distributed inventory or remote staff. You clear them in the states you barely sell into and fail them in your largest ones, because that’s where the stock and the people sit. Model the qualifying subset, not the member state count.
Of the 24 member states, 23 are full members and Tennessee is the only associate member, and whether the states’ funding of providers reaches an associate member has no published answer, so count 23 rather than 24 while you do. States where you fail the test, states outside the program, and work past the certified services are ordinary paid work, priced at what a certified provider costs.
The clean case stays clean. No premises, no property, and no payroll in the member states you sell into, and you meet all five criteria in every one of them. If that’s you, the qualifying subset is the whole list, and the only thing that shrinks it is putting premises, stock, or a person into one of those states. That is a decision somebody in your business makes on other grounds entirely, which is why it is worth telling them what it costs here.
The provider decision comes right after this one and splits along the same line. TaxCloud is built for mid-market ecommerce and SaaS brands with five or more states of nexus, where most of the footprint is remote and the funded column is doing real work. Avalara is the enterprise option, built for complex ERP environments and multi-country obligations, and its own pricing routes larger businesses to a custom quote. AccurateTax is built for small business ecommerce, where the state count is small enough that the funded column is most of it.
What this page cannot tell you about whether you qualify
No page can. The test runs on your own figures, per state, over a window that closed the day you registered there, and nobody outside your finance team holds them. Three things make it harder than it should be.
- There’s no calculator. The Governing Board publishes no self-service tool to test qualification, so the arithmetic is yours.
- The contract values Property without locating it. It says what Property is and how to value it, and sets no rule for which state Property sits in. The state you assign stock to is your own reading rather than the Board’s, which bites hardest on stock a 3PL holds for you.
- The answer moves when the business moves. A lease, a hire, or a pallet crossing a state line changes it, in that state, in the year it happens.
Nothing here is legal or tax advice. Take the criteria to your own advisers, and where a state’s treatment is unclear, to that state. Still deciding whether to enroll at all? That’s which businesses should enroll in the SST program, and the provider’s own role is what a Certified Service Provider is.