Cell phone taxes by state – money grab of legendary proportions

I typically fall onto the side of less taxes whenever possible. With a new cell plan for the family, I was amazed to see the amount of cell phone taxes that were tacked onto the bill. One cell phone tax that was interesting was the Missouri state tax. Who would have thought that my state would want a slice of my money through cell phone taxes?

Forbes had an article on cell phone taxes that talked about the implications and why states do this:

So far, cities and towns have gotten away with treating the country’s 182 million cell phone subscribers as easy marks. Cell phones taxes increased nine times faster than taxes on other goods and services between January 2003 and April 2004, according to one industry study. In a particularly egregious case, Baltimore just hit its residents with a new $3.50 per month tax.

The cell phone tax chart they had didn’t break it out by ranking, but it did have errors in it. Here is the state cell phone tax chart with errors corrected.

State cell phone tax by highest percentage:

This is state cell phone tax alphabetically: