Do mobile mechanics charge sales tax in Ohio?

The Revised Code taxes the act of repairing

Section 5739.01 defines what a sale is for Ohio sales tax purposes, and it is a long list. Most of it is what you would expect, transfers of property and the like. Then division (B)(3) adds a set of transactions that are sales because of what is done rather than what is handed over, and the first of them is repair.

The exception attached to it is narrow and worth reading. Repair is a sale except where the property being repaired is one whose purchase would not have been taxable in the first place. In other words the repair follows the thing: tax an item, tax its repair.

This is a structurally different design from a state that taxes parts and exempts service, and it is the reason the answer to the question at the top of this page is not the answer next door.

The Department of Taxation says it in one line

The statute is the authority, but a statute is not what somebody reads at eleven at night before quoting a job. The Department of Taxation publishes a plain list of what is and is not taxable, and repair has a single line: taxable unless the item being repaired is exempt.

The same page settles the other half of the chain by defining tangible personal property and naming motor vehicles in the list. There is no separate motor vehicle repair regime to look for. A car is tangible personal property, repair of tangible personal property is taxable, and that is the whole argument.

The Department also has a tax education page specifically on auto repair. We could not read it: the page loads its body through the site portal and returned no content to us, so nothing on this page is quoted from it.

With no fixed premises, each vehicle counts as a place of business

Ohio vendor licenses are issued by county, one for each fixed place of business, which raises an obvious problem for somebody whose place of business is a van that crosses county lines all week. Section 5739.17 answers it directly, in a sentence that has clearly been sitting there for a long time.

Where a vendor has no fixed place of business and sells from a vehicle, each vehicle intended to be used within a county counts as a place of business for licensing purposes. The rule turns the van into the premises rather than pretending the premises question does not arise.

That is a fact about how Ohio counts, not a statement about what any particular mobile mechanic has to do. Whether a given operation is selling from a vehicle in the sense the section means is a question for the Department of Taxation and the county auditor, and both are easier to ask before the first job than after the first audit.

The transient vendor license is the statewide alternative

The same section offers a second route. Rather than collecting a county license everywhere it has no fixed place of business, a transient vendor may apply to the tax commissioner for one license that authorizes retail sales in any county where it has no fixed premises.

The definition of transient vendor is specific and is worth reading before assuming it fits. It is written around vending machines, titled vehicle leasing, and a person who transports stock to a temporary place of business, and a temporary place of business is defined in turn as somewhere occupied temporarily to make retail sales to the public.

We are describing what the section says rather than telling you which license applies to you. The section also gives the commissioner power to require a vendor to be licensed as a transient vendor where that suits administration of the tax, so this is not purely the vendor choice it first appears to be.

The fee changed in 2025, and the Department says so on its own page

Fees on tax pages age badly, and Ohio is a live example. The Department of Taxation notes on its general sales and use information page that the vendor license application fee went up in April 2025, and names the old and the new figure.

The reason to quote the change rather than the number alone is that older Ohio pages and a great many third party guides still print the previous figure. If you find two different numbers, the Department page carrying the date is the one to trust, and the statute sets the same amount for both a county license and a transient vendor license.

Is there an Ohio license for repair itself?

This page answers a tax question, and the licensing question is a different one that we have not tried to close. We looked at the state pages below and did not find a state license for general automotive repair, but we did not read the Revised Code exhaustively and are not claiming that none exists.

Ohio does license and register plenty of vehicle adjacent activity, from dealers to salvage, and county and city rules are their own layer on top. What is quoted above is about collecting tax, and it is not a statement about a right to do the work.