Do I charge sales tax on services in Indiana?

Short version: if you're an Indiana mobile pro selling labor, you mostly don't charge sales tax.

Indiana's 7% applies to tangible goods. The mulch, the parts, the products you resell: those are taxed. The hours you spend on the job aren't.

The work is knowing which of your line items count as goods, and not registering for a tax you don't owe. What follows is a summary of the Indiana Department of Revenue's own bulletins, plus how operators in online business communities have handled it. It isn't tax advice. For a real decision, spend an hour with a CPA who knows Indiana.

Your Ohio friend is right about Ohio

The scariest sales-tax stories come from other states.

A first-year detailer in Ohio posted that a manager asked whether he paid sales tax, he "said no since we are a service," and he ended up owing about $1,500. North Carolina taxes nearly every kind of car wash. Nebraska taxes detailing outright. Florida taxes the whole bill once you supply the parts.

Indiana is different, and in your favor. Services aren't a retail transaction under the Indiana code, so labor by itself sits outside the tax. The Department of Revenue's own example is a repair tech: no tax on the repair service, but tax on the components she sells.

That one sentence is most of what you need. The rest is applying it to your invoice.

Goods on their own line

The question operators ask comes out in mulch.

A handyman in another state wanted to know whether a job with $100 of materials and $400 of labor gets taxed on the whole $500. An Indiana shop owner who rebuilds suspensions asked the same thing about oil and seals versus labor. He called the Department of Revenue and was told to go read the bulletins.

Here's what the bulletins say: when an invoice separately lists the service and the tangible goods, the service is generally not taxable and the goods are.

So the Indiana answer to the mulch question: tax the $100 if it's on its own line, never the $400. Itemize what you sold, and the tax follows the line.

Trade by trade

Detailing: Washes, polishing, and waxing are not taxable. Indiana has no detailing bulletin; the rule comes from the service-station bulletin, which also says separately stated labor on a repair order isn't taxed while parts are. A coating you apply is like a wax: the labor isn't taxed, and you pay tax on the product when you buy it. Sell a customer a bottle of anything to take home, and that line gets 7%.

Mowing: Labor. Not taxable.

Fertilizer and weed control: This changed on January 1, 2026. The Department of Revenue rewrote its bulletin so a lawn-care application sold as one price, chemicals included, is not taxable. You pay tax on the chemicals when you buy them, and you can't use a resale exemption on them. If you looked this up before 2026, or you're still collecting tax on applications, the answer changed. Old third-party pages still list Indiana lawn care as taxable. They're wrong now.

Mulch, plants, fencing, and other installs: The state treats this as construction contracting. Quote it time-and-materials with the materials on their own line, and you're a retail merchant for that line. Register, collect 7% on the mulch, and buy it tax-free with an exemption certificate. Quote it as one lump sum, and you pay the tax on your materials and charge the customer none. Pick one and be consistent.

Pressure washing, house cleaning, bin cleaning: Labor. Not taxable, unless you're selling the customer a product to keep.

Handyman: Same as the repair tech. Your time isn't taxed. The faucet you supplied is.

The real trap is filing, not owing

Every Indiana horror story in those communities is about paperwork.

One owner had the state pull $1,600 out of his business account, by court-ordered levy, over a sales-tax return he never filed for one quarter of 2019. Another registered for the wrong tax type when forming his LLC and got a bill thirty days later. A long-time Indiana owner explained the mechanism: miss a filing, and the state sends an "estimated tax bill" with very strong language, which clears once you file the actual return.

Two rules fall out of that:

1. If you're labor-only, don't register for sales tax at all. Nothing on your invoice is taxable, and registering creates a filing obligation you can then forget.
2. If you do register, because you sell coatings or mulch or parts, file every period even when the number is zero. A $0 return takes two minutes. A skipped one follows you for years.

If you do need to register

The certificate is called a Registered Retail Merchant Certificate. It costs $25 per location, lasts two years, and renews free if your filings are current. You apply through INBiz with the business tax application, then file and pay through INTIME, the state's online portal. The Department of Revenue sets your filing frequency from your average monthly liability, so a small goods line usually means quarterly or annual returns.

One pricing note from a detailer who does collect: give the customer a number they can hit with cash. Either charge about $320 for a $300 service and pass the tax through, or accept that $300 in hand is about $275 after tax. Don't make the receipt into arithmetic at the curb.

The invoice is the answer

All of this comes down to one habit: goods on their own line, labor on its own. Tax only the goods.

Do it on the quote, let the invoice match, and the sales-tax question answers itself on every job. An itemized quote the customer accepted is also the record you'll want if the Department of Revenue ever asks which lines were goods.