Senate Bill 5711 (S-1282.1), introduced in the 69th Legislature, 2025 Regular Session (read first time 02/10/25 and referred to the Senate Committee on Ways & Means), reenacts and amends RCW 82.04.050, the statutory definition of "sale at retail" for Washington's sales and use tax law. The amended text expands and clarifies what transactions are treated as retail sales—examples in the provided excerpts include explicitly treating the rental or lease of individual storage space at self-service storage facilities as a retail sale; presuming occupancy of real property for a continuous period of one month or more is a rental or lease (with lodging offered for periods of less than a month treated as a license subject to sales tax); including charges for athletic and fitness facility use and many recreational activities when discrete charges are made to the public; treating sales of prewritten computer software (including keys/activation codes and right-to-access charges) and digital goods/codes/automated services as retail sales; and including rental of tangible personal property when an operator is necessary for the property to perform its designed function. The bill also lists numerous express exclusions and special rules within the retail-sale definition—examples in the excerpts include certain agricultural and federal program-related transactions, some government and housing authority construction or maintenance services, admissions/ride charges at short-term fairs or carnivals (events not exceeding 21 days), charges by educational institutions to their students and staff for certain activities, and certain nonprofit or government day camps. Subsection (16) in the excerpt treats purchases of tangible personal property and specified construction/landscape services by recipients of certain tax-exempt or deductible grants as retail sales. No new crimes, penalties, or criminal procedures are created or changed in the provided text; the changes are definitional and tax-procedural in nature. The bill creates new sections stating legislative intent that revenue from the act be appropriated to agencies and programs to establish and preserve cooperatively owned manufactured home communities and to support affordable housing programs (Sec. 2), and it sets an effective date of January 1, 2026 (Sec. 3). The provided material is incomplete in places: some subsection definitions (for example portions of subsection (3)(g)) and portions of the lists of included activities are truncated, and the excerpts do not name specific agencies or programs that will receive appropriations.

If enacted, the bill expands what counts as a taxable "retail sale" in Washington to explicitly include things like rentals of individual self‑storage units, many recreational and fitness activities and facility fees, prewritten software keys and access, sales of digital goods and codes, and rentals of tangible property when an operator is necessary. That will likely require self‑storage operators, gyms, recreation businesses, event facilities, software and digital goods sellers, and similar vendors to collect and remit sales tax on charges that may previously have been treated differently; consumers of those services may see higher out‑the‑door costs and businesses will face added compliance and potential audit risk. The bill directs revenues from these changes to be appropriated toward establishing and preserving cooperatively owned manufactured home communities and programs to support affordable housing, with the act taking effect January 1, 2026; however the specific agencies or programs that will receive the appropriations are not named in the provided text, so the exact flow and uses of the new revenue are unclear.