The brain receives constant tactile input, but only a subset guides ongoing behavior. Actions associated with tactile stimuli thus endow them with behavioral relevance. It remains unclear how the relevance of tactile stimuli affects processing in the somatosensory (S1) cortex. We developed a cross-modal selection task in which head-fixed mice switched between responding to tactile stimuli in the presence of visual distractors or to visual stimuli in the presence of tactile distractors using licking movements to the left or right side in different blocks of trials. S1 spiking encoded tactile stimuli, licking actions, and direction of licking in response to tactile but not visual stimuli. Bidirectional optogenetic manipulations showed that sensory-motor activity in S1 guided behavior when touch but not vision was relevant. Our results show that S1 activity and its impact on behavior depend on the actions associated with a tactile stimulus. Display omitted •A tactile-visual cross-modal selection task for head-fixed mice•Sensory and motor activity interact in S1 to promote tactile detection•S1 activity is gated based on the relevance of touch vs. vision Finkel et al. use a cross-modal detection task for mice with single-unit recordings and optogenetic perturbations to investigate the relationship between the early cortical processing of a tactile stimulus and its behavioral relevance. S1 activity and its impact on behavior depend on the relevance of tactile stimuli to specific actions.