PACT Act Reporting Requirements for Tobacco Sellers

The PACT Act’s reporting requirements obligate anyone selling cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, or electronic nicotine delivery systems across state lines to register with the ATF and with every destination jurisdiction, then file a monthly report with each state’s tobacco tax administrator by the 10th of the following month listing every shipment made. The report has to identify each recipient, each product, and each carrier, and you have to keep the underlying records for four years after the sale.

Who Has to File

The reporting rules apply to any person or business that ships cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, or ENDS products in interstate commerce for profit. The statute uses the term “delivery sale” to describe orders placed by phone, mail, or online where the buyer is not physically present with the seller at purchase.¹ Run a website that ships vape cartridges to another state? You are a delivery seller. Take phone orders for smokeless tobacco and mail them across a state line? Same answer.

The 2020 amendment that folded ENDS into the law casts a wide net. It covers e-cigarettes, e-hookahs, e-cigars, vape pens, advanced personal vaporizers, and electronic pipes, along with any component, liquid, part, or accessory sold for those devices, even separately.¹ A single bottle of e-liquid triggers the same filing obligations as a full vape kit.

Business-to-business interstate transfers are still covered. Certain narrower prohibitions ease when the recipient is a licensed manufacturer or distributor, but the core registration and monthly reporting requirements apply regardless of whether the buyer is a consumer or a retailer.²

Register Before You Ship

You cannot file a compliant monthly report if you have not first registered, and you cannot legally ship without doing both. Registration is a one-time filing with the ATF on Form 5070.1, plus a separate registration with the tobacco tax administrator in every state and locality where you intend to send products.³ Update it when your business details change.

The registration must include your business name and any trade name, the address of your principal place of business and each additional location, phone numbers for each location, a primary email address, any website addresses, and the name and contact information of an agent authorized to accept legal service in each state you ship to.⁴ Ship to 20 states, designate 20 agents.

What the Monthly Report Must Contain

Federal law spells out exactly what each monthly report must include for every shipment made during the previous calendar month:⁴

The full name and address of each recipient, organized by city or town and by ZIP code.
The brand and quantity of cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, or ENDS products in each shipment.
The name, address, and phone number of the delivery service that physically transported the package.

The ZIP-code sorting is not a formatting preference. State and local tax authorities use it to cross-reference your shipments against their own tax receipts. If you ship 400 units of a brand into a state but only 300 units generated excise tax, the gap is immediately visible. In practice, you need a transactional system that captures invoice data and exports in the format the destination state expects, even though the statute does not name a technology.

Filing Deadlines and Where the Reports Go

Reports are due no later than the 10th day of each calendar month, covering shipments from the previous month. There is no built-in extension. You file a separate report with each destination state’s tobacco tax administrator. When your shipments enter a locality or tribal jurisdiction with its own tobacco tax, you also send copies to that local or tribal tax administrator and to its chief law enforcement officer.⁴

Most states now accept or require electronic filings, and many use XML formats built on standards developed by the Federation of Tax Administrators. Portal, file format, and submission method vary by state; some still accept spreadsheet uploads for smaller volumes. Confirming that each jurisdiction actually received your report is your responsibility, not the portal’s.

Recordkeeping Tied to Your Reports

You must retain records of every delivery sale until the end of the fourth full calendar year after the sale.² A sale in March 2026 has to have records preserved through at least December 31, 2030. Those records must be available for inspection by the U.S. Attorney General or by state and local tax authorities on request.

What to keep, in practice: copies of every monthly report filed, the underlying invoices or shipping memoranda, age verification records, tax payment documentation, and carrier receipts. Digital storage works, provided you can pull everything tied to a customer, jurisdiction, or date range without delay.

Obligations That Travel With the Report

Reporting sits inside a wider compliance frame. Missing any of these will show up in, or be revealed by, the monthly report you file.

Tax prepayment. Every applicable state and local excise tax on cigarettes and smokeless tobacco must be paid, and any required tax stamps affixed, before the product leaves for the customer. A narrow exception applies for smokeless tobacco in states that require the seller to collect tax from the consumer and remit afterward; the prepayment and stamping requirements do not apply there, but the seller still collects and remits as the state directs.² State cigarette excise rates range from under $0.20 to over $5.00 per pack, so a delivery seller shipping widely needs a per-destination tax engine.

Age verification. Before accepting an order, collect the buyer’s full name, date of birth, and residential address and verify them against a commercially available, independent third-party database drawn primarily from government data. At delivery, the person signing must show a valid government-issued photo ID proving they meet the minimum legal purchase age in that jurisdiction.²

Package labeling. Every shipping package must carry, on the same surface as the delivery address, a clear and conspicuous statement: “CIGARETTES/NICOTINE/SMOKELESS TOBACCO: FEDERAL LAW REQUIRES THE PAYMENT OF ALL APPLICABLE EXCISE TAXES, AND COMPLIANCE WITH APPLICABLE LICENSING AND TAX-STAMPING OBLIGATIONS.” The same language must appear on any bill of lading.²⁵

Carrier limits. The PACT Act declared cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, and ENDS products nonmailable through the U.S. Postal Service, with narrow exceptions.⁶ FedEx prohibits tobacco and tobacco products entirely, including vaporizers and e-cigarettes.⁷ UPS bans all vaping shipments in its U.S. domestic network and bans cigarette and little cigar shipments to consumers, while carrying other tobacco products only under contract with adult-signature-at-21 delivery.⁸ The carrier field on your monthly report has to be filled with a real, willing carrier that can perform age verification at the door.

What Happens When Reports Are Missed or Wrong

Civil fines against delivery sellers reach up to $5,000 for a first violation and $10,000 for each subsequent violation. The alternative penalty is 2 percent of gross cigarette or smokeless tobacco sales during the year ending on the violation date, whichever is greater. Common carriers and delivery services face separate civil penalties of $2,500 for a first violation and $5,000 for later violations within a year.⁹

Anyone who knowingly violates the law faces up to three years in prison, a fine, or both.⁹ Knowingly mailing tobacco in violation of the USPS ban carries up to one year.⁶ Civil penalties stack on top of criminal penalties and on top of unpaid taxes owed to federal, state, local, or tribal governments. States impose their own late-filing penalties and interest on overdue excise taxes as well.

Then there is the ATF’s non-compliant list. The ATF publishes distributors it has determined are violating the PACT Act, and carriers that receive the list are prohibited from shipping cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, or ENDS products to anyone on it.³ UPS explicitly refuses service to anyone on that list.⁸ For a delivery seller, placement on the list closes off inbound inventory through mainstream channels, which tends to end the business faster than any fine.

1
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. United States Code Title 15 Section 375 – Definitions
2
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. United States Code Title 15 Section 376a – Delivery Sales
3
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Prevent All Cigarette Trafficking (PACT) Act
4
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. United States Code Title 15 Section 376 – Reports to State Tobacco Tax Administrator
5
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Tobacco Sellers Reporting, Shipping and Tax Compliance Requirements
6
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. United States Code Title 18 Section 1716E – Tobacco Products as Nonmailable
7
FedEx. Guidelines for Tobacco Shipping
8
UPS. Tobacco
9
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. United States Code Title 15 Section 377 – Penalties