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A quiet policy change is generating loud complaints in the Granite State. When Vail Resorts disclosed in its investor presentation that it would begin separately charging a blended sales tax of approximately 3.2% on all multi-resort Epic Pass products, the company framed it as a compliance realignment — a tidy housekeeping exercise to bring its pricing architecture in line with applicable tax law across its sprawling portfolio of ski areas. Few outside the company’s finance department paid much attention. Then skiers in New Hampshire started noticing the Epic Pass sales tax on their receipts when they purchased the 2026-27 season pass.
New Hampshire doesn’t have a sales tax. Neither do Oregon, Montana, Delaware, or Alaska — the five states collectively nicknamed the “NOMAD” states. New Hampshire imposes no state or local retail sales tax, and the state is known for its strongly anti-tax political culture, having repeatedly rejected proposals to introduce one. For many Granite State residents, the absence of sales tax isn’t just a financial convenience — it’s a point of civic pride and a deliberate fiscal philosophy, funded instead through business profits taxes, interest and dividends taxes, real estate transfer taxes, and high local property levies.
Vail operates four ski resorts in New Hampshire: Attitash, Wildcat, Crotched Mountain, and Mount Sunapee. All four resorts are accessible through the Epic Pass family of products. When a skier in Manchester or Nashua buys an Epic Day Pass or full Epic Pass to ski those hills, they’re now paying an Epic Pass sales tax of approximately 3.2% at checkout, even though New Hampshire collects no such tax on retail transactions. The charge isn’t going to Concord. It reflects a blended rate derived from the taxable jurisdictions across the entire Epic Pass network, in states like Colorado, Vermont, California, and others where sales taxes on lift tickets do apply.
Vail’s position, as laid out to investors, is internally coherent. Multi-resort passes are sold as a single bundled product that grants access to resorts across dozens of states with wildly varying tax treatment. The combined state and local sales tax rate across the U.S. ranges from 0% in states like Montana and New Hampshire to over 10% in parts of Louisiana and Alabama, creating a genuinely complex compliance problem for any company selling a single national product. Historically, Vail had embedded applicable taxes into the pass price rather than separating them at checkout — making the tax treatment opaque and arguably inconsistent.
By shifting to a transparent, separately disclosed blended rate of approximately 3.2%, Vail argues it is actually being more honest with consumers. The rate is below the national average combined rate of roughly 7.5%, which means customers in high-tax states are arguably being subsidized by the blending mechanism. It also simplifies the company’s compliance architecture, replacing a patchwork of state-by-state calculations with a single methodology applied uniformly at checkout. For a company that has now recorded two consecutive years of declining Epic Pass unit sales and is under considerable pressure to streamline its business, administrative simplification has real appeal.
There is also a legal dimension. Tax authorities in states like Colorado and Vermont have grown increasingly assertive about digital and bundled product sales. A blended-rate methodology, properly disclosed and documented, provides Vail with a defensible and auditable position across its portfolio — reducing the risk of exposure in states where it does have taxable obligations.
From the consumer side, the objection in New Hampshire is straightforward: residents are being charged a tax that their state explicitly does not impose on a product they purchase to ski mountains on New Hampshire soil. It feels, to many locals, like a national corporation extracting money under the guise of a tax, with none of it flowing into state coffers.
That frustration is compounded by timing and trust. Vail’s most recent earnings report acknowledged that results from the past season were “below expectations” and that pass sales growth has been limited, with CEO Rob Katz conceding the company is “not yet delivering on the full growth potential.” Against that backdrop, a charge described as a “tax” that isn’t actually a tax payable to any New Hampshire government body reads, to critics, less like compliance and more like a revenue recovery mechanism dressed in regulatory clothing. The fact that it was implemented quietly — without a consumer-facing announcement or explanation — did little to help perceptions.
The broader context matters too. The Epic Unlimited Pass price increased by 3.6% for the 2026-27 season, continuing a multi-year trend of rising pass costs that has been a source of friction between Vail and its customer base. Adding a further 3% at checkout — even if technically presented as a tax — is the kind of incremental price increase that erodes goodwill, particularly in a state whose entire economic identity is bound up in being tax-free. For New Hampshire residents, this means the Unlimited Pass Price effectively increased nearly 7%
Perhaps the most legitimate criticism of Vail’s approach isn’t the policy itself, but the manner in which it was implemented. The blended tax methodology is not inherently unreasonable as a compliance solution for a complex multi-jurisdictional product. But introducing it without clear upfront communication — without explaining to New Hampshire customers why they are paying a “tax” in a state with no sales tax, and where that money goes — created an information vacuum that criticism quickly filled. Reddit channels have been filled with confusion and angry comments from Granite State residents over the Epic Pass sales tax in New Hampshire.
Transparent disclosure would have allowed Vail to make its legal and administrative case to consumers before they noticed an unexpected line item on their checkout summary. That case is not implausible: a national bundled product creates national tax obligations, and some mechanism for recovering those obligations across the customer base is legitimate. Whether a uniform blended rate is the fairest or most defensible mechanism is a reasonable question — but it’s a conversation Vail failed to invite its customers into.
NH Also does not have dividend and interest taxes. They were eliminated in the 2025 tax year. We do have high local property taxes, however.
Minor correction to the caption: “with New Hampshire in the distance and Vail sister resort, Mt. Sunapee, just off to the right. ”
Mount Sunapee is actually entirely out of frame, further to the right – that slope on the right edge of the photo is a back-country slope on the former ski resort on the north side of Mount Ascutney in VT. You would say far more white slopes if that was Sunapee.
Thanks Martin!