About TagTally

TagTally is an independent reference site about one number: the out-the-door price of a car in the United States — the vehicle price plus every tax and fee added between the handshake and the keys.

The problem we work on

Car prices are advertised without the items that routinely add thousands of dollars to the contract: state and local sales tax, title and plate fees, registration, and the dealer documentation fee. Those items follow fifty different state rulebooks, plus county-level variation, plus dealer-level discretion. Most shoppers meet them for the first time at the finance desk, when it is hardest to push back.

The information is public — it lives in state statutes, department of revenue bulletins, and DMV fee schedules — but it is scattered, inconsistently formatted, and frequently out of date on the sites that summarize it. TagTally's job is to collect it, keep it current, and present it in a form you can verify.

What this site is

• Itemized: every calculator shows its line items and formula in plain text, not a single opaque total.
• Sourced: every rate and fee links to the statute or agency page it came from, with the date it was last checked.
• State-specific: trade-in credit rules, doc fee caps, EV surcharges, and value-based registration are handled the way each state actually handles them.

What this site is not

TagTally does not sell cars, broker loans, or take referral fees from dealers or lenders. It does not offer financial, tax, or legal advice — figures here are estimates for general information, and your state motor vehicle agency and your contract paperwork are the final word on what you owe. It also does not claim insider expertise: the value of the site is in the sourcing and the arithmetic, both of which are published so you can check them.

How the data is maintained

Data collection principles, rounding rules, and the update schedule are documented on the methodology page. Corrections are taken seriously: if an official source has changed and a page here has not caught up, write in and the figure will be re-verified against the primary source.