Texas Mixed Beverage Taxes: Bookkeeping for Austin Bars and Restaurants

Texas Mixed Beverage Taxes for Austin Bars and Restaurants

If you hold a mixed beverage permit and sell liquor, wine, or beer by the drink in Austin, the state taxes those sales twice, and the two taxes do not work the same way. One is a tax on you that you cannot pass to the customer. The other is a tax on the customer that you collect and hand over. They are different rates, they sit in different liability accounts, and treating them as one number on your books is how bar and restaurant owners end up paying tax out of profit they thought they had. Get the split right and both taxes flow through your books cleanly without ever touching your sales revenue. Get it wrong and you can owe the Comptroller money you never set aside, plus penalties and interest.

This guide explains the two Texas mixed beverage taxes, who pays each one, what you can and cannot put on a customer’s check, and how to record both so the numbers reconcile every month. It is general education for Austin operators, not tax or legal advice. Rates and rules change, so confirm the current numbers with the Texas Comptroller and run your specific situation past a CPA before you file. The guidance below is current as of June 2026.

Two Taxes, Not One

Both taxes are authorized under Texas Tax Code Chapter 183, and both apply to alcoholic beverage sales by a mixed beverage permittee. That is the only thing they have in common. Everything else about them is different, and the difference is the whole point.

The first is the mixed beverage gross receipts tax. This one is on you, the permittee. The second is the mixed beverage sales tax, which is on the customer and which you collect. The Texas Comptroller administers both and publishes the details on its mixed beverage tax pages. A bar or restaurant with a mixed beverage permit deals with both on every alcohol sale, side by side, which is exactly why the bookkeeping has to keep them apart.

The Mixed Beverage Gross Receipts Tax (6.7 Percent, On You)

The mixed beverage gross receipts tax is 6.7 percent of your gross receipts from alcoholic beverage sales, per the Texas Comptroller. The permittee owes this tax. It is a cost of holding the permit and selling by the drink, the same way rent or your liquor distributor invoice is a cost.

Here is the rule that trips people up: you may not add the 6.7 percent to the selling price as a separate charge to the customer, and you may not deduct it from what you receive. It cannot show up as a line item on a guest’s check the way sales tax does. The customer never sees it, never pays it directly, and never knows it exists unless they go looking. You build it into your menu pricing, you pay it from your own receipts, and on your books it is an expense and a liability, not something collected from anyone.

You are allowed to put informational language on a receipt or invoice noting the estimated gross receipts tax the business will pay, or a combined statement of the mixed beverage taxes that apply, but that is disclosure, not a charge. The 6.7 percent is yours to absorb.

The Mixed Beverage Sales Tax (8.25 Percent, On the Customer)

The mixed beverage sales tax is 8.25 percent on sales of mixed beverages, per the Texas Comptroller. This one behaves like the ordinary sales tax you already know. The customer pays it, you collect it, and you hold it in trust until you remit it. It is not your money at any point.

Unlike the gross receipts tax, you can separately state the mixed beverage sales tax on the customer’s check. The Comptroller allows a few approved ways to handle it: state that the tax is included in the sales price, state the specific amount of mixed beverage sales tax on the sale, state the combined mixed beverage taxes, or state the combined sales and mixed beverage taxes. Pick a method and apply it consistently across your point-of-sale system. What you cannot do is pocket it or let it blur into revenue.

One point of confusion worth clearing up: this 8.25 percent mixed beverage sales tax replaces the ordinary state and local sales tax on those alcohol-by-the-drink sales. You are not stacking the regular Texas sales tax on top of the mixed beverage sales tax on the same drink. Your food sales and your non-alcohol sales still run under ordinary sales tax rules. Only the alcohol sold under your mixed beverage permit runs through the two mixed beverage taxes. Keeping those sales streams separate in your point-of-sale system is the foundation everything else sits on.

Why the Split Matters on Your Books

Run the two taxes together and the math goes wrong fast. Picture a bar tab where the alcohol total is 100 dollars. The 8.25 percent mixed beverage sales tax adds 8.25 dollars that the customer pays you and that you owe the state. Separately, the 6.7 percent gross receipts tax means you, the permittee, owe 6.70 dollars to the Comptroller out of that 100 dollars in receipts, whether or not the customer ever knew about it.

So on one alcohol sale you have two distinct liabilities pointed at the same agency: 8.25 dollars you collected and 6.70 dollars you owe yourself. If you dump both into a single tax account, or if you treat the 8.25 you collected as revenue, your sales numbers inflate, your profit looks better than it is, and your liability balances do not match what either return says you owe. When the gross receipts tax comes due, the cash to pay it has to come from somewhere, and if you never set it aside, it comes out of operating cash you were counting on.

Setting Up the Liability Accounts

The fix is structural. Build separate accounts before you ring up your first drink, the same discipline a short-term rental operator uses for the two layers of hotel occupancy tax:

• Mixed Beverage Sales Tax Payable for the 8.25 percent you collect from customers on alcohol sales and remit to the Comptroller.
• Mixed Beverage Gross Receipts Tax Payable for the 6.7 percent you owe on your alcohol gross receipts.

Pair the gross receipts payable account with a Mixed Beverage Gross Receipts Tax Expense account on your profit and loss. That expense account is where the 6.7 percent shows its true cost, so you can see what the tax actually does to your alcohol margin instead of pretending it is free.

When you record a shift’s sales, the alcohol receipts post to alcohol sales revenue, the 8.25 percent collected posts to Mixed Beverage Sales Tax Payable, and you accrue the 6.7 percent gross receipts tax by debiting the expense account and crediting Mixed Beverage Gross Receipts Tax Payable. Food and non-alcohol sales run through your ordinary sales revenue and regular sales tax payable account, untouched by any of this. When you remit, you debit the matching liability account and watch it return to zero for the period. A liability account that keeps climbing month over month means you are not paying over what you have set aside, which is a problem to fix now, not at audit.

Filing and Deadlines

Both mixed beverage taxes are reported and paid to the Texas Comptroller, and both are due on the 20th day of the month following the reporting period. The mixed beverage gross receipts tax is reported monthly on Form 67-100, with March activity due April 20, April activity due May 20, and so on down the calendar. The mixed beverage sales tax is reported on its own return on the same 20th-of-the-month cadence. Two taxes, two returns, one agency, one due date pattern to track.

Put both filings on your calendar alongside every other recurring obligation, the way you would track each deadline in a Texas small business tax calendar. Late filing on either tax draws penalties and interest, and persistent problems with mixed beverage tax can put your permit at risk, so the 20th is not a soft deadline. Confirm your exact reporting frequency and due dates with the Comptroller, because filing details can be assigned to your account.

Records to Keep

The Comptroller generally expects Texas tax records to be kept for at least four years, and mixed beverage permittees are watched closely because alcohol-by-the-drink is a frequent audit target. Your records should tie out the full chain: total alcohol sales by period, the 8.25 percent mixed beverage sales tax collected, the 6.7 percent gross receipts tax accrued on those receipts, your purchase and inventory records from distributors, point-of-sale reports separating alcohol from food, and copies of every filed return with proof of payment.

Reconcile both liability accounts every month so the balances you carry match what the two returns report. Because mixed beverage operators face pour-cost and sales-ratio scrutiny in an audit, clean books that connect your liquor purchases to your reported sales are your first line of defense. This kind of monthly tracking is exactly what our monthly bookkeeping service handles for Austin bars and restaurants.

Where This Fits When You Are Opening

If you are standing up a new bar, brewery taproom, or full-service restaurant in Austin, the two mixed beverage taxes belong on your launch checklist next to your TABC permit, your entity setup, your bank account, and your point-of-sale configuration. The cheap moment to get this right is before you open, when you can build the alcohol sales category and the two liability accounts into your system from day one. The expensive moment is after a year of mixed numbers, when you are reconstructing what you should have set aside. The broader setup steps for a new Austin venture are covered in our guide to bookkeeping for new businesses.

Get Both Taxes Out of Your Revenue

The mistake that costs Austin bar and restaurant owners is treating mixed beverage taxes as one tax, or as part of sales, or as something to sort out later. It is two taxes under one Tax Code chapter: a 6.7 percent gross receipts tax you pay and cannot charge the customer, and an 8.25 percent sales tax the customer pays and you collect. Neither one belongs in your revenue. Build the two liability accounts before you open, accrue the gross receipts tax as the real expense it is, and reconcile both every month.

Our monthly bookkeeping service keeps your two mixed beverage tax liabilities separated and reconciled, and our tax preparation support hands your CPA clean numbers when the returns and the franchise return come due. If you run or are opening a bar or restaurant in Austin and want your mixed beverage taxes handled correctly from the first pour, contact us to talk it through. And browse the full library of bookkeeping resources and guides for the rest of your Texas tax calendar.