Alabama lawmakers tried for decades to cut the state sales tax on groceries and never got a bill to the governor’s desk.

State Sen. Andrew Jones (R-Centre) got one there in 2023.

His bill, cosponsored by all 35 senators and passed without a dissenting vote, cut the tax from 4% to 3% that September and set the course for the second cut in 2025 and the full repeal House and Senate leaders announced Friday will be their first order of business in 2027.

Jones said he will carry the repeal bill in the Senate when the 2027 session opens, provided the voters of Etowah, Cherokee and DeKalb counties send him back on November 3.

Those are the same people he credited with starting the push in the first place. Jones told Yellowhammer News in 2023 that his constituents were asking him for relief at the grocery store that would come back every year.

“To them, that’s much more meaningful knowing that there’s gonna be relief at the grocery store year after year,” he said then. The proposal landed in a session where Alabama was sitting on a record Education Trust Fund surplus and Montgomery was debating how to return some of it to taxpayers. Jones argued the grocery tax was the place to do it, and 34 colleagues put their names next to his.

The sticking point for every prior effort was the Education Trust Fund, which collects the grocery tax and counts on it for roughly $600 million a year. Jones wrote a bill that answered the objection. It used the federal SNAP definition of food, phased the cut in rather than taking it all at once, and tied each step to growth in the education budget.

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Jones had been at it since his first term.

In February 2020 he filed a constitutional amendment to abolish the grocery tax outright and replace the money by capping the deduction Alabamians take for federal income taxes.

“When all 35 senators signed on, it told me something had changed. Members who had never agreed on a tax bill in their lives agreed on this one,” Jones told Yellowhammer News in an interview this week. “Working Alabamians had been asking for it for a long time, and in 2023 we finally had the budget to do it responsibly and the votes to get it done.”

The measure moved in the final days of the session as House Bill 479, sponsored by Ways and Means Education Chairman Danny Garrett (R-Trussville), with Jones carrying it in the Senate. It cleared both chambers without a no vote.

Governor Kay Ivey signed the bill on June 15, 2023, calling it relief for Alabamians “grappling with tighter times.”

Jones called it something bigger.

“This $304 million tax cut is the largest in Alabama history and also the first step toward totally eliminating all state sales taxes on groceries,” he said. “This is a great day for all the men and women who drive Alabama’s economy.” The first penny came off on September 1, 2023.

With the first cut in place, the Legislature handed Jones the next question. He was named chairman of the Joint Study Commission on Grocery Taxation, the body charged with figuring out how to take the rest of the tax to zero without harming schools.

At its first meeting in November 2023, two months after the rate dropped, Jones laid out where he wanted it to go. “I’m just excited that we’re continuing to take gradual steps toward a day when there is no grocery tax in Alabama,” he said. “I hope a future where we’re at 0% for grocery taxes is on the way.”

The second penny came off on September 1, 2025, when House Bill 386 by Garrett, with Jones as Senate sponsor, took effect.

Ivey signed it in May, saying she was “pleased to sign House Bill 386 to take another notch off our state grocery tax.” With both cuts in place, the state’s grocery tax was half what it had been for the better part of a century, and the savings to Alabama families reached roughly $246 million a year.

Republican leaders counted it toward more than $1.5 billion in tax relief passed since 2022.

On Friday, Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter (R-Rainsville) and Senate President Pro Tem Garlan Gudger (R-Cullman) stood with the Alabama Grocers Association at Star Supermarket in Huntsville and committed to filing full repeal on the first day of the 2027 session.

RELATED: Alabama Republicans unveil plan to completely cut the grocery tax – for good

“Every Alabama family deserves to keep more of their hard-earned money, especially when it comes to putting food on the table,” Gudger said. “As elected leaders, we have a responsibility to make life more affordable for the people of our state, and fully eliminating the state grocery tax is one of the most meaningful ways we can deliver real relief to hardworking Alabamians.”

The 2027 bill Jones will carry finishes a phase-out he and fellow lawmakers put on paper in April 2023, when the state tax on groceries was 4% and no cut had ever cleared the Legislature. Every step since has followed the path his bill laid down: 3% that September, 2% in September 2025, and zero when the next quadrennium gavels in.

For Jones, every step along the way was meaningful, and it sends a strong message to working families across the state that leadership in Montgomery is united behind permanent relief he intends to close out himself.

“We built this to last. Every step was tied to growth in the Education Trust Fund so that teachers and students were never on the hook for it, and every step has been paid for by a state economy that keeps growing,” Jones told YHN.

“That’s why I’m confident about 2027. We aren’t guessing. We’ve watched it work for three years. Alabama has been one of the handful of states in the country still taxing food at the register, and we’ve carried that for far too long. The day the Legislature takes this to zero, we come off that list for good.

“I’m proud Republicans are leading the charge, and I’ll be proud to carry it across the finish line.”

Grayson Everett is the editor in chief of Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on X @Grayson270.