Wyoming alcohol tax
State alcohol excise, per gallon · tax year 2026 · federal tax excluded
Beer
$0.02
a gallon
Wine
not published
a gallon
Spirits
$0
a gallon
Among control states
16
no national rank — see below
How Wyoming taxes a drink
- Wyoming does not tax spirits at all. Not lightly — not at all. The state sells them itself, so what would be a tax somewhere else is simply the price the state charges. Beer is different: that carries $0.02 a gallon, because private brewers sell it. ⚠️ So a table showing nothing in the spirits column here is not showing you a bargain.
- Wyoming does not publish a rate for every kind of drink, because for some of them the state is the seller rather than the taxman. Where a figure exists it is shown below. Where none does, it is missing because there is nothing to publish — not because it was left out.
- Something unusual about Wyoming: the state is in the liquor business. It buys and sells wholesale itself. So its alcohol income is partly profit and only partly the tax shown here. ⛔ That is why there is no national ranking on this page. What can be compared honestly is one control state against another, and among those Wyoming sits 16 on spirits.
- Wyoming levies no excise on distilled spirits. The figure is a genuine zero rather than an unpublished value: the state operates as the retail and wholesale seller, so its entire take is realized in the markup rather than through a rate. Beer, sold privately, carries $0.02 per gallon. ⛔ A cross-state comparison that reads this zero as a low tax burden inverts the position — the state's extraction on spirits is not lower, it is simply not collected as excise.
- Wyoming publishes no excise rate for at least one beverage category, which in a control jurisdiction is structural rather than a data gap: where the state operates as the wholesaler, its revenue arises as trading margin and no per-gallon excise exists to report. ⛔ A zero would misstate this as an untaxed beverage, which is the opposite of the position.
- As a control state, Wyoming exercises the wholesale monopoly directly, and the excise figures reported here capture only the levied component of its alcohol revenue. ⛔ No national rank is assigned: ranking a control state's published rate against license states compares a partial figure with a complete one, and the data source behind this page warns against exactly that. ⭐ Among the 17 control states, where the comparison is structurally sound, Wyoming ranks 16 on spirits.
At the register
A $75,000 salary
| Tax added | $3.23 |
|---|---|
| You hand over | $63.23 |
| Rate here | 5.39% |
Uses this location’s stored combined rate and category rule. Clothing is one item; address-level coverage varies.
Wyoming against Texas
A $75,000 salary
| Measure | Wyoming | Texas |
|---|---|---|
| Take-home pay | $61,593 | $61,593 |
| Worth after local prices | $67,797 | $63,383 |
| Share of pay taxed | 17.88% | 17.88% |
| State sales tax | 4% | 6.25% |
| Groceries exempt here | Yes | Yes |
| Clothing exempt at $100 | No | No |
| Property tax rate | 0.57% | 1.49% |
| Price level | 90.8 | 97.2 |
| Housing prices | 75.9 | 97.4 |
| Fuel tax | 23¢ | 20¢ |
| Tobacco tax | $0.60 | $1.41 |
City income tax excluded. Sales-tax row: state-only. Exemptions: Wyoming, Statewide average; Texas, Harris County (Houston). Clothing: one $100 item; higher prices can change tax.
Beer, wine and spirits, per gallon
All three are charged per gallon of drink, which makes them directly comparable with each other — though nobody buys a gallon at a time, and per glass the gaps look much smaller. Federal tax is charged on top and is not included.
| Drink | Per gallon | On 10 gallons |
|---|---|---|
| Beer | $0.02 | $0.20 |
| Wine | state is the seller — no rate published | — |
| Spirits | $0 | $0 |
What this page cannot tell you
- ⚠️ These are per gallon, which is not how anybody buys a drink. Per glass the differences between beer, wine and spirits look much smaller than they do here.
- Federal alcohol tax is charged on top of all of this, and general sales tax usually lands on the final price as well. Neither is included in Wyoming's figures here.
- Some cities and counties add their own drink taxes too, and those are not counted here.
- ⚠️ Rates are per gallon of beverage, not per unit of alcohol or per serving. Normalizing by ethanol content or by standard drink compresses the beer-to-spirits differential substantially, so per-gallon figures overstate the disparity a drinker experiences.
- Federal excise applies in addition and is excluded, being uniform nationally. General sales tax, where Wyoming levies one, also applies at retail on a price that already embeds the excise — so the two compound, and neither layer is included in these figures.
- Local alcohol excise and on-premise drink taxes exist in a number of jurisdictions and are excluded; these figures cover Wyoming's state-level rates only. On-premise sales are also frequently taxed differently from off-premise, which this dataset does not distinguish.
Questions people ask
Is the alcohol tax added at the checkout?
Charged by the gallon, upstream, and already in the price. Beer, wine and spirits carry different per-gallon rates, so two bottles at one price can carry very different tax.
Is this a cheap state for this?
Among the lower ones — 16 of 17. A low per-unit levy does not necessarily mean a low shelf price, though: what a thing costs is mostly supply, transport and retail margin, and tax is only the part the state sets.
Why does this state run the liquor shops itself?
Because it chose to be the seller rather than only the tax collector. In a state like this the government controls spirits distribution or retail directly, so part of what you pay is a margin rather than a tax — which makes a straight rate comparison against a licensing state misleading.
At what stage is alcohol excise levied?
Alcohol excise is levied per gallon at the producer or wholesaler stage and is embedded in retail prices. Rates are set separately by beverage class, so effective tax per container varies with alcohol content and volume rather than with retail price. General sales tax may apply additionally at the point of sale.
Where does this state sit in the national distribution?
This state ranks 16 of 17, in the lower third. ⚠️ Excise rank is a poor proxy for retail price: production, distribution and retail margin dominate the final figure, and the tax component is the only part under state control.
How does a control jurisdiction differ from a license jurisdiction?
This is a control jurisdiction: the state participates directly in spirits distribution or retail rather than licensing private operators exclusively. Revenue accrues partly as trading margin rather than as excise, so published excise rates are not comparable with license-state rates without adjustment. ⚠️ Rankings here are computed against other control states only, for that reason.