Austin City Council in favor of removing state sales tax on menstrual and diaper products

AUSTIN — City council members advanced a resolution that will direct the city manager to include Austin in favor of exempting menstrual and diaper products from state sales tax in Texas’ next legislative session.

Council member Harper-Madison said during the city hall meeting that moving the resolution up to the city’s legislative agenda was “another step in the right direction for menstrual equity.”

Harper-Madison, co-sponsored the item during a city hall meeting June 16, along with Mayor Pro Tem Alison Alter, Paige Ellis, Vanessa Fuentes and Kathie Tovo.

However, this is not the first time city leaders and citizens have called for action in exempting sanitary products like pads and tampons from sales tax. Texas Rep. Donna Howard has proposed similar bills to the Texas Legislature since 2017.

Howard’s bill to exempt “certain feminine hygiene products” from state sales tax in 2021 was the first to advance to the state House Ways and Means Committee. In April 2021, the Legislative Budget Board said in a statement that the bill would “have a direct impact of a revenue loss” of roughly $42 million in the state’s two-year budget.

Texas is one of the 26 states that charges sales-tax on menstrual products such as tampons, pads and liners. The financial barrier is one of the many factors that contributes to period poverty, which is “a lack of access to menstrual products, hygiene facilities, waste management, and education,” according to the Journal of Global Health Reports.

Hannah Cukierman, 18, co-founded Period Pals, a student-led nonprofit organization at Anderson High School, that addressed period poverty in Austin by hosting fundraisers to purchase and donate menstrual products to homeless shelters in 2020.

Cukierman branched off from Period Pals a year later to start an organization called Menstrual Fairies, where she recruited a team of students from her high school to put free menstrual products in the restrooms of public schools in Central Texas.

“It puts so many people in a horrible position when you know these products should be available to everyone for free. And especially at my school it’s like such a wide variety of socioeconomic classes people come from all over the city,” Cukierman said.

Cukierman said she wasn’t sure how successful Menstrual Fairies would be until she went back a few weeks later to check on the bins and found them empty.

Photo of Menstrual Fairy’s product bins. Courtesy of Hannah Cukierman

Along with menstrual poverty, diaper poverty causes parents and children in Texas to have missed an average of four days of school or work because they did not have the financial means to access affordable diapers, according to a 2020 study by the National Diaper Bank Network.

Holly McDaniel, executive director of Austin Diaper Bank, said that “one in three families in Central Texas go without enough diapers for their babies each month.”

McDaniel said that diaper poverty can cause families to resort to rationing diapers by limiting the number of times they change their child, reuse disposable diapers and use t-shirts and paper towels as diaper alternatives.

“They’re not a luxury item. They’re a necessity for every family. It’s nice to see the city and hopefully the state eventually treat them as such,” McDaniel said.

Cukierman said Austin City Council’s move to share their position on the issue with Texas legislators is “a really good move towards some sort of progress,” but she said she still remains skeptical if the tax exemption will get passed by state legislators.

“I doubt that Texas will exempt the state tax on tampons, and other menstrual products and even diapers, but it does show that Austin, as a city, is with our menstruators, which is a really huge step,” Cukierman said.