Receipt requirements · LA
Louisiana receipt requirements
What a business issuing its own receipts in Louisiana 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
- 5%
- Combined with local
- 5% – 13.5% combined
- Sourcing
- Destination-based — tax follows the buyer's address
Does tax have to be separately stated?
Louisiana expects the tax shown separately from the sales price. Because state and parish taxes have different bases, showing them as separate lines is the safer presentation.
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
- Groceries for home consumption exempt from the state rate
- Prescription drugs exempt from the state rate
- Residential utilities exempt from the state rate
- Parishes may tax items the state exempts
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 Louisiana
No statute requires a written rent receipt; a tenant may still request one and most landlords issue one.
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 Louisiana
Louisiana's state and local taxes have genuinely different exemption lists, so an item can be exempt from the 5% state tax and fully taxable by the parish. Combined with parish-level collection, Louisiana produces the highest average combined rate in the country.