Receipt requirements · DE
Delaware receipt requirements
What a business issuing its own receipts in Delaware needs to show: the rate, whether tax has to be stated separately, which categories are exempt, and whether a written rent receipt is required.
Rates verified: 2026-08-05. Rates change — check your state Department of Revenue before relying on a figure for filing.
Sales tax at a glance
- State rate
- %
- Combined with local
- No state or local sales tax
- Sourcing
- No state sales tax
Does tax have to be separately stated?
There is nothing to state separately. Delaware imposes a gross receipts tax on the seller instead, and that tax may not be broken out and billed to the customer as a line item.
Whatever the rule, print it as its own line. Separately stating tax is what lets a reviewer isolate the pre-tax cost, and it is the mechanism most state statutes use to let a seller exclude the tax from gross receipts. The display conventions are covered here.
Exempt and specially rated categories
- No sales tax on any category
- Seller-side gross receipts tax applies instead
- Monthly and quarterly gross receipts exclusions available
- Some services taxed under separate occupational licence fees
A basket that mixes an exempt item with a taxable one needs a per-line tax flag and separate taxable and non-taxable subtotals, or the tax line cannot be checked against the lines it came from.
Rent receipts in Delaware
Where a landlord accepts a cash payment of rent, the landlord must give the tenant a receipt for that payment within fifteen days.
Authority: 25 Del. C. § 5501(e).
The two fields landlords most often omit are the period the payment covers and the unit number. The full field list is here, and the statutory format is in the rent receipt spec.
Worth knowing in Delaware
A Delaware retail receipt should show no tax line at all. Adding one is a real problem here, not a cosmetic one — the gross receipts tax is the seller's own cost of doing business and cannot lawfully be presented to the customer as a tax they owe.