Your lease quote's tax rate is probably wrong. We checked 4,966 ZIP codes to get ours right.

Every lease quote you see assumes a tax rate. If that rate is wrong, your payment is wrong, and you won't find out until you're at checkout.

The trouble is that a single statewide sales tax rate barely exists in practice. Counties add to it, cities add to it, and transit and special-purpose districts stack on top of that. Two ZIP codes twenty minutes apart can be more than a point different.

Our estimator quotes a rate for your specific ZIP, so we owed you a check against the only source that actually matters: what Tesla's own checkout bills. We've been running that comparison since June. As of August 10 we have 5,170 dated readings covering 4,966 ZIP codes across 29 states.

1,006 ZIP codes now carry a correction, meaning the rate actually billed didn't match the best public data we started from. Most of those were small, a few tenths of a point. Some weren't.

The worst miss was Doniphan, Missouri, where the statewide rate we'd been using over-quoted that ZIP by 2.185 points. The strangest find was a real zero: in the Santee Sioux Nation's ZIP in Niobrara, Nebraska, Tesla's checkout charges no lease tax at all. We didn't believe that one either, so we ran it twice before filing it.

A few other oddities worth knowing about. Several Arizona ZIPs on tribal land tax your monthly payment and your down payment at different rates, which almost no published table accounts for. Louisiana's parish system produced a long tail of over-quotes. Kansas hides tiny transportation districts inside single cities. And New York, across the 628 ZIP codes we've checked there, has been off exactly once, by half a point.

Beyond the ZIPs we've checked one by one, every rate we serve in the 18 states where we quote per-ZIP traces back to one we confirmed directly. That covers 99% of the ZIPs in those states.

Eleven more states run on a verified statewide rule instead. Missouri alone has 216 individually verified ZIPs, because its district add-ons make any single statewide number unreliable. Chicago gets handled entirely on its own, since its lease tax isn't really a rate in the normal sense.

And it doesn't stop. Every week we re-check a rotating batch of 45 ZIPs against Tesla's calculator. Anything off by more than half a point gets flagged, read again, and fixed the same day.

Pulled straight from our live coverage numbers. The state-by-state coverage map and the full cost table live on the Lease Index.

If a lease quote anywhere, ours included, assumes a flat statewide rate, treat the payment as a rough estimate. It can be off by full percentage points in either direction, and not always in your favor. Our estimator uses the verified rate for your ZIP, each state guide shows when it was last checked, and the raw coverage numbers are public on the lease index if you want to see the work.

How we check: we price a lease on Tesla's own site for that ZIP and compare the tax Tesla quotes against the rate we serve. It's the same figure any shopper sees when they price a lease. Anything more than half a percentage point apart gets flagged, and we price it again before changing anything. Each correction is stored with its date, its source and the value it replaced, so we can always retrace how we got there.

These figures are the August 10, 2026 snapshot of something that runs continuously, so the live numbers on the lease index will have moved on since. "Verified" means our rate matched Tesla's at the moment we checked it. Rates change, which is exactly why the weekly re-check exists.