What are the requirements for enrolling in the SST program?

There’s no eligibility test to enroll in the Streamlined Sales Tax (SST) program: no fee through the states’ shared registration system, no revenue floor, no minimum number of states, and any seller may register. The requirements are the information you bring and the obligation you accept. You need your identifiers, your entity details, a state list, and a start date per state. In exchange you collect and file in every state you tick.

Unsatisfying, if you came for a bar to clear. Most readers arrive expecting a qualification hurdle at this stage, and at this stage there isn’t one. There is a test that decides whether a state pays your provider, and it’s a different question from whether you may register.

Is there an eligibility test, a fee, or a minimum number of states to register for SST?

No, no, and no. It’s worth saying plainly how light this is. Any seller may use the states’ shared registration system, including a seller already registered in a state, and there’s no fee to register through it. It’s elective as well: it’s the route for sellers who want what the Agreement offers, not a filing anybody compels you to make. If you’re still weighing what that’s worth, start with what the SST program is.

One narrow caveat on the fee: a state may charge its own where you’re legally required to register there, and nobody publishes what those cost.

No minimum number of states. Take every member state or just the ones you pick, add more later, and one state is a valid registration.

No revenue floor, and no ceiling. The only revenue figure anywhere in this process attaches to running your own internal software rather than to enrolling.

So the requirements to get in are light. What you agree to on the way in is the heavier half.

What you need before you start an SST registration

Gather all of it before you open anything, because nothing you type is held until you submit: leave the form early and it’s gone. The screens themselves, in order, are how to register for SST through the SSTRS, step by step.

What to have in hand, from the Board’s own field list, with the reason each one matters:

• Entity type. It fixes whose name every state account is issued in, so use the entity that holds the FEIN.
• FEIN or SSN. With a US address you have to enter one. A foreign seller with neither, and no US address, is assigned a number at submission.
• Legal business name, DBA, business phone, NAICS code, and state of incorporation or organization. Only the NAICS code takes a judgment call: it names what you mainly sell.
• A business location address and a mailing address. States mail letters, bills, and notices to the mailing address.
• A contact person’s name, phone, and email. Every confirmation and every state follow-up lands there, so don’t name someone who’s leaving.
• The states where you’re already registered, meaning an active license there. That flag is what stops a duplicate account.
• The states where you’re a remote seller. It covers every remote seller whether or not you’ve met that state’s economic nexus threshold, so a state you sit under the threshold in still becomes one you collect and file in.
• Your state list, and a start date for each state on it. The date is when that state expects you to start collecting, and it can differ by state.

Two of those are decisions rather than records: which states go on the list, and which date goes against each.

Do you have to use a Certified Service Provider?

No, and most registrants don’t. The Board’s counter on that same registration page showed 35,109 active registrations, with 29.2% of those businesses contracting a Certified Service Provider (CSP), as of July 31, 2026. Seven in ten registrants are filing for themselves.

If you do want one, settle that first, because a provider can register you and can only serve you in a state you’re registered in. Registering yourself first closes nothing off: you “may contract with a CSP after you are registered,” and you file your own returns until that contract begins.

The order carries a cost the Board doesn’t mention: go provider first and the vendor decision lands before you hold a single state account, which is where it’s hardest to walk away from. It’s reversible, and switching SST providers is what that takes, priced at what an SST Certified Service Provider costs.

Are the requirements for free CSP services the same as the requirements to enroll?

No. Registering gets you registered. It doesn’t qualify you for anything free.

Free CSP services in a state take three things: registration there through the shared system, a contract with a provider, and meeting five criteria in that state over the 12 months before you registered. Only the third is a test, and it runs state by state rather than once for the company, on where your property and your people sat in that window: the CSP-compensated seller test is where to work it against your own footprint.

That’s the hurdle readers come looking for, and it sits after the door rather than in front of it. It runs one way only: failing it doesn’t stop you enrolling, and it says nothing about what you owe. Qualifying decides who pays your provider. Enrolling decides who you’ve agreed to collect for.

What does registering actually commit you to?

Registering is the act that creates the obligation, and it lands in every state you ticked: “you are required to collect and remit sales tax to each state even if you don’t have nexus.” The recurring half of that is your ongoing obligations after registering, the decision-stage version is the tradeoffs and risks of registering, and your prior liability stays exactly where it was except in a state offering amnesty, Tennessee alone at this time, on what SST amnesty covers.

Why no eligibility test doesn’t mean no cost

Nothing screens you out, which means nothing screens you in either. The obligation is per state and it doesn’t scale down with the benefit: tick twelve states and you own collection and filing in twelve, whether or not the funded part reaches you in any of them. Three things follow, and each is cheap to handle now and expensive to find late.

• The start date you enter is the one thing nobody can correct. That state expects collection from it, ready or not, and the fix is ending the registration and starting again.
• A ticked state expects a return every period, including the empty ones. Ticking a state to be safe buys filing work rather than safety, and that work recurs.
• Nothing here can tell you what your own footprint qualifies for. That test runs per state, on Property and Payroll as the provider contract defines them rather than as your books do, and the window closes the day you register in that state.

Still deciding whether to do this at all? That’s which businesses should enroll and which businesses should not. Whether you’re required to register in a given state is for that state and your own advisers, and nothing here is legal or tax advice. Count the states you’d be filing in before you tick any of them: that’s the requirement nobody screens you for.