Diaper tax needlessly harms Mississippi families, public health advocate says

By Chelesa Presley | Originally published by Mississippi Today

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The 2026 Mississippi legislative session is over. Lawmakers went home. And Mississippi’s babies are still being taxed.

Every family with an infant in this state is paying a 7% sales tax on diapers – every pack, every week.

Every time a parent — working, striving, doing everything right — walks to the checkout line, Mississippi takes its cut.

It is a cut taken not from a luxury purchase, not from an optional indulgence, but from diapers. And this session, the Legislature had the opportunity to stop it. Legislators chose not to.

Think about that for a moment because other actions have been taken in recent sessions making the choice not to exempt diapers from taxation difficult to explain.

Mississippi is in the process of phasing in a reduction of the grocery tax, dropping it from 7% to 5%. That policy was grounded in a straightforward moral recognition that taxing food is an undue burden on working families. It was the right call. I supported it. The advocates who fought for it should be proud.

But someone needs to ask the obvious question. If Mississippi has acknowledged that taxing what families need to survive is wrong — if we moved, however incrementally, on food — why are we still taxing diapers?

A diaper is not a luxury. A baby does not wait. The logic that justified grocery tax relief applies with equal, if not greater, force to infant necessities. And yet, when this session ended, diapers remained fully taxed at 7% while in recent years the Legislature has found room for income tax cuts, targeted exemptions and other relief measures that will largely benefit those who need help the least.

The Legislature also has moved to exempt firearm safes from the sales tax during a designated holiday weekend. The reasoning was sound: Families should not be penalized for purchasing a product that serves a legitimate purpose. A firearm safe sits in a closet. Diapers are used — and discarded — up to 10 times a day.

A family with a newborn will change approximately 2,500 diapers in the first year alone. At Mississippi’s 7% rate, that translates to $70 to $100 annually in taxes on diapers alone — before accounting for wipes, formula or any other infant essential. For a family earning $25,000 a year, that is not a rounding error. That is a week of groceries that are now taxed at a slightly lower rate while the diapers those same families purchase are not.

Mississippi is the poorest state in the nation. We have one of the highest rates of child poverty in the country. We also have one of the highest rates of infant mortality. These are not unrelated facts. They are connected by a policy environment that consistently places the burden of the state’s fiscal choices on the shoulders of those least able to carry them.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has documented what economists have long understood: Sales taxes are regressive. Sales taxes consume a far larger percentage of income for low-wage earners than for the wealthy. The diaper tax is among the most regressive applications of this principle, because diapers are not optional and their purchase cannot be deferred.

Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia have already eliminated the sales tax on diapers. Some of those states are more conservative than Mississippi. Some are more progressive. What they share is a recognition that taxing infant necessities is an indefensible policy that is fiscally negligible to the state and materially significant to families.

The revenue impact of diaper tax elimination is modest. It is far smaller than the income tax cuts the Legislature has enthusiastically pursued, and a fraction of the fiscal footprint of the grocery tax phase-down currently under way.

The Legislature has already demonstrated it can absorb that kind of change when it chooses to.

The question has never been whether Mississippi can afford to eliminate the diaper tax. The question is whether Mississippi is willing to.

This session answered that question. The answer was no.

But sessions end. And they begin again.

To every legislator who voted for grocery tax relief and then let the diaper tax bill die: I am not here to shame you. I am here to tell you that the families you serve will remember the consistency — or the lack of it — in how you apply the principle that necessities should not be taxed. Carry that into 2027.

To Mississippi’s families: The fight is not over. It never is. The babies who wore diapers when we started this campaign are walking now. There will be new babies next year, and the year after, and the year after that. And until this state makes a permanent, principled decision that the necessities of infancy are not taxable, we will be back.

We will be back every single session until Mississippi gets this right.

Chelesa Presley is executive director of the Diaper Bank of the Delta, where she leads efforts to support families across Mississippi facing diaper needs and economic hardship. An experienced community health worker, she has a background in public health with a focus on maternal and child health, menstrual health, childbirth education and lactation support. Through her work in outreach, advocacy and nonprofit program development, she serves diverse communities across the Mississippi Delta.

This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Source: Original Article