Louisiana Tax-Free Weekend: Second Amendment Holiday

Louisiana’s tax free weekend is the Second Amendment Weekend, held the first Friday through Sunday of September each year. It exempts firearms, ammunition, and hunting supplies from both state and local sales tax. If you’re waiting for a back-to-school weekend, there isn’t one: Louisiana suspended that holiday in 2018, and efforts to bring it back have not passed.

When It Happens

State law sets the holiday as the first consecutive Friday through Sunday of September every year.¹ In 2025, that was September 5 through September 7.² In 2026, it falls on September 4 through September 6. The Louisiana Department of Revenue publishes a Revenue Information Bulletin each year confirming the dates.

What You Can Buy Tax-Free

Three categories qualify: firearms, ammunition, and hunting supplies. The purchase has to be for personal use. Anything bought for a business is excluded.¹

Firearms include shotguns, rifles, pistols, revolvers, and other handguns that can be legally sold in Louisiana. Ammunition covers any projectile with propelling charges or primers fired from a firearm.³

Hunting supplies is the broadest category. The state’s administrative code lists dozens of eligible items, including:

Archery equipment: bows, crossbows, arrows, quivers, and shafts
Hunting apparel: camouflage clothing, jackets, gloves, face masks, thermal underwear, and boots designed for hunting
Optics and electronics: rifle scopes, binoculars, range finders, and impact-resistant shooting glasses
Firearm accessories: cases, holsters, belts, slings, and hearing protection
Field gear: tree stands, blinds, hunting chairs, decoys, game bags, and knives marketed for hunting use

The common thread is that items must be manufactured and marketed primarily for hunting. A knife sold as a kitchen tool doesn’t count. One packaged and sold as a hunting knife does.³

There is no price cap. Unlike some other states’ holidays that limit exemptions to a few hundred dollars per item, Louisiana’s applies regardless of the purchase price.

What Doesn’t Qualify

Several items that sound hunting-related are specifically excluded. Hunting dogs aren’t eligible. Animal feed, even feed marketed for game, is excluded. Off-road vehicles like ATVs and vessels like airboats don’t qualify either, even though the statute’s broad definition of hunting supplies seems to reach them.⁴ The Department of Revenue’s guidance is narrower than the statute reads, so follow the official bulletin rather than the raw statute.

Toy guns, children’s toy vehicles, golf carts, go-karts, dirt bikes, motorcycles, and any motor vehicle that can legally drive on Louisiana roads are also excluded.³ Chairs or furniture bought for household or general recreational use don’t count, even if you plan to take them hunting later.

State and Local Taxes Are Both Waived

The statute exempts eligible purchases from sales and use taxes levied by the state and by its political subdivisions, meaning parish and local taxes drop off too.¹ Louisiana’s combined state and local rates are among the highest in the country, so full exemption at both levels makes a real difference on expensive items like firearms and scopes. The 2025 Revenue Information Bulletin confirms the exemption applies to both.⁵

Online Orders, Layaway, and Rain Checks

You don’t have to buy in a physical store to get the tax break. The exemption applies as long as the timing lines up:

In-store purchases where you buy and take delivery during the weekend.
New layaway, where the retailer physically sets the item aside in inventory during the weekend. You don’t need to pay in full.
Layaway pickup, where you make final payment and take an item you placed on layaway before the weekend.
Online or catalog orders paid for during the weekend, even if delivery happens later, as long as you didn’t request a delayed shipment.¹

Rain checks work in one direction. If a retailer issued you a rain check before the weekend and you redeem it during the weekend on an eligible item, the sale qualifies. If a retailer hands you a rain check during the weekend but you don’t buy the item until after, you pay full tax.³

Why There’s No Back-to-School Weekend

Louisiana used to have a broader tax-free framework under the Annual Louisiana Sales Tax Holidays Act. It covered back-to-school items like clothing, school supplies, and electronics on the first Friday and Saturday of August, plus a hurricane preparedness weekend on the last weekend of May. In 2018, Act 1 of the Third Extraordinary Session suspended those holidays at the state level as part of a deal to close a budget shortfall, and the state kept collecting its full sales tax on items that would have been exempt.⁶

The suspension officially ran through June 30, 2025, but later tax reform work kept the back-to-school holiday from returning. A bill introduced in the 2025 session to create a new annual back-to-school holiday on the first Saturday of August was never brought up in committee.² As of 2026, the Second Amendment Weekend is the only sales tax holiday Louisiana actively holds. Families shopping for school supplies, clothing, or computers get no state sales tax break in Louisiana; neighboring Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi still hold their own back-to-school weekends.

If You’re Charged Tax by Mistake

Keep your receipts. If a retailer charges you sales tax on a clearly eligible item during the weekend, ask the retailer to correct it first. If that doesn’t resolve it, the Louisiana Board of Tax Appeals is an independent tribunal with district court authority that hears state and local tax disputes, including denied refund claims.⁷ That’s the last resort when a retailer or tax collector won’t budge.

1
FindLaw. Louisiana Revised Statutes Title 47 RS 305.62
2
Louisiana Department of Revenue. Louisiana Second Amendment Weekend Sales Tax Holiday
3
Louisiana Department of Revenue. Annual Louisiana Second Amendment Weekend Sales Tax Holiday – LAC 61:I.4425
4
Louisiana Department of Revenue. Hunters Get a Tax Break During the 2nd Amendment Weekend Sales Tax Holiday Sept 5-7
5
Louisiana Department of Revenue. Revenue Information Bulletin No. 25-017 – Sales Tax Second Amendment Weekend Holiday
6
Louisiana Department of Revenue. Revenue Information Bulletin 18-020 – Cessation of State Sales Tax Holidays
7
Louisiana Board of Tax Appeals. About the Louisiana Board of Tax Appeals