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Washington did not limit sales/use tax only to physical business purchases before ESSB 5814. The Department of Revenue says sales or use tax applies to all digital products regardless of access method, including digital goods, digital automated services, and remote access software. Its IT tax guide also lists prewritten software and applications, digital goods, remote access software, and digital automated services as items that were already generally subject to retail sales or use tax.

ESSB 5814, effective October 1, 2025, expanded taxability to certain additional services, but that is different from saying the old rule was only about physical items. Official state guidance contradicts that broader claim.

This claim is too broad in two ways.

1. Not every digital/tech purchase is taxable. Washington's Department of Revenue expressly excludes several common categories from retail sales tax, including web hosting, storage, and backup. Its advertising guidance also excludes web hosting services and domain name registration from taxable advertising services. So it is incorrect to say the state now taxes 100% of purchases like "shopify, aws, google, etc." across the board.

2. Location still matters for concurrently used digital services. The Department's ESSB 5814 FAQ says buyers can use the multiple points of use (MPU) exemption for qualifying digital advertising services used both inside and outside Washington, and must apportion use tax based on where the service is first used. More generally, the digital products guidance says businesses using qualifying digital products concurrently inside and outside Washington may apportion tax based on the ratio of in-state to out-of-state users. That directly contradicts the statement that a remote team pays tax on 100% of purchases "no matter where people are located."

So while Washington did expand taxation of some services in late 2025, the official guidance does not support a blanket rule that all such purchases are taxed in full regardless of where the users are located.

Washington's own guidance contradicts this example. For disseminated advertising, the Department of Revenue says the purchaser receives the service where the advertising is disseminated and that the location of dissemination can be shown by information such as ad-placement instructions or viewer IP addresses. Its FAQ further says that for digital advertising used inside and outside Washington, tax must be apportioned based on where the advertising is first used, which for advertising is generally where the viewers or interactors are located.

So an ad campaign run to users in Germany is not automatically a Washington-taxable sale simply because the business is Washington-based. Under the state's published guidance, the location of the ad audience/use matters.