Ship a $60 candle to a customer in Denver and the state now wants 31 cents for the privilege — not sales tax, not shipping, a separate line item that exists purely because your delivery van used a public road. If that sounds like a niche curiosity, it isn't: two states already collect it, a dozen more are drafting bills, and the compliance mechanics are different enough from ordinary sales tax that "we'll handle it like sales tax" is exactly the mistake that draws a notice from the state revenue department.
Here's what's actually in effect right now, who's exempt, and how to keep the fee from quietly becoming a bookkeeping mess.
What a Retail Delivery Fee Actually Is
A retail delivery fee (RDF) is a flat, per-order charge — not a percentage — imposed when a business delivers taxable tangible personal property to a customer inside the state, typically by motor vehicle. States pitch it as a way to fund road and transit infrastructure that gets worn down by the delivery-truck boom, since gas tax revenue keeps shrinking as vehicles get more fuel-efficient (and electric).
The mechanics that make it different from sales tax:
- It's a flat fee per order, not a percentage of the sale. A $15 order and a $1,500 order owe the same fee.
- It applies to the whole order, not each item. One delivery, one fee, regardless of how many taxable items are in the box.
- It's usually the seller's fee to remit, though the cost is commonly passed to the customer as a separate line item — similar to how a shipping charge shows up, but it isn't shipping and can't be bundled into it.
- It has its own registration, return, and filing cadence, separate from your sales tax account.
Colorado pioneered this in 2022. Minnesota followed in 2024. As of mid-2026, they're still the only two states with a fee actually collecting revenue — but the list of states drafting similar bills has grown past ten.
Colorado: The Fee Just Went Up Again
Colorado's Retail Delivery Fee applies to any delivery by motor vehicle to a Colorado address that includes at least one item subject to state sales or use tax. It started at $0.27 in 2022, and has been adjusted for inflation most years since. Effective July 1, 2026, the rate is $0.31 per retail delivery.
Key details for sellers:
- Small business exemption: If your business had $500,000 or less in retail sales in Colorado in the prior year, you're exempt from collecting the fee. New businesses are exempt until their cumulative sales in the current year cross that $500,000 mark.
- State-level, not local: The fee itself isn't subject to additional state or state-administered local sales tax, though some home-rule cities may treat it differently — worth a quick check if you have concentrated sales in a home-rule jurisdiction like Denver or Boulder.
- Registration is automatic once you have an active Colorado sales tax license — the state opens a Retail Delivery Fee account for you; you don't apply separately.
- Filing happens through the same Colorado Department of Revenue portal used for sales tax, but on its own return (Form DR 1786), typically filed on the same schedule as your sales tax return.
The rate increase is a good trigger to check whether your invoicing system is still charging $0.28 — the prior rate — because a stale hardcoded fee either shorts the state or overcharges customers, and both are the kind of small discrepancy that's easy to miss for months.
Minnesota: A Higher Fee, a Higher Exemption Bar
Minnesota's Retail Delivery Fee, in effect since July 1, 2024, is steeper: $0.50 per transaction, applied to any delivery of taxable tangible personal property or clothing to a Minnesota address where the order totals $100 or more before tax.
The exemption thresholds work differently than Colorado's, and mixing the two up is the single most common error sellers make:
- Retailers under $1,000,000 in total retail sales (not just Minnesota sales) in the prior calendar year are exempt from collecting the fee.
- Marketplace facilitators get a separate carve-out: they don't need to collect the fee on behalf of a seller whose sales through that marketplace were $100,000 or less in the prior year — a distinct, lower threshold that only applies to the marketplace, not the underlying seller.
- Some categories are fully exempt regardless of business size, including certain food, drugs, and (since mid-2025) fuel products and road construction materials.
If you sell through Amazon, Etsy, or a similar marketplace and direct from your own site, you may owe the fee on direct sales even while the marketplace is exempt from collecting it on your marketplace sales. That split is easy to miss if you're tracking "am I exempt" as a single yes/no answer instead of a per-channel question.
The List Is Growing
Colorado and Minnesota aren't going to stay alone for long. As of 2026, retail delivery fee bills have been introduced or actively debated in more than ten states, including Hawaii, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. A few specifics worth watching:
- Maryland: Governor Wes Moore proposed a 75-cent delivery fee as part of the state budget, projected to raise roughly $225 million.
- New York: Lawmakers have floated a 25-cent surcharge specifically on deliveries within New York City, separate from any statewide proposal.
- Mississippi: A proposed 30-cent per-order charge on deliveries containing any taxable item.
None of these are law yet, but the pattern is consistent enough — a flat per-order fee, a small-business revenue exemption, marketplace-specific carve-outs — that if you sell into multiple states, it's worth budgeting time each quarter to check whether a new state has joined the list, rather than finding out from a customer complaint or a notice.
Why This Trips Up Bookkeeping More Than Sales Tax Does
Sales tax software and most e-commerce platforms have decades of built-in logic for percentage-based tax by jurisdiction. Retail delivery fees break several of those assumptions at once:
- It's not proportional to price, so a tax engine that calculates "rate × taxable amount" needs a separate flat-fee rule, not a rate adjustment.
- The exemption is based on your trailing sales volume, not the customer's location or the product category — which means the same order might be fee-liable in January and exempt in July if you cross (or fall under) the threshold mid-year.
- It has its own remittance account and return, so it can't just ride along inside your existing sales tax liability account without becoming invisible on your books.
- Passing it to the customer versus absorbing it are both legitimate choices, but they need to be recorded differently — a fee you collect from the customer is a pass-through liability, while a fee you absorb is an operating expense, and conflating the two understates either your revenue or your margin.
If your books don't separate "sales tax payable" from "retail delivery fee payable," reconciling either return at filing time turns into a manual reconstruction from raw transaction data — the exact kind of task that's fast when your records are structured cleanly by account, and slow and error-prone when they're not.
Keeping Multi-State Fees Straight
As you track delivery fees across states, having transparent, structured financial records makes all the difference when it's time to reconcile a return or answer an auditor's question about why a fee was or wasn't collected on a given order. Beancount.io provides plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency and control over your financial data — every liability account, every jurisdiction, version-controlled and auditable, with no black box between the transaction and the return. Get started for free and see why developers and finance professionals are switching to plain-text accounting.