The Texas Round-Up

We re-keyed every grant on the state’s paid-projects list, 1,259 of them. Where $372.2 million went, and what it says about the new program.

No, the Texas incentive is not a tax credit. It's a cash grant paid after the state reviews your file. Here is what that does to a $3M show's money, when it's a dealbreaker, and when it isn't.

The accountant owns the file and the producer verifies it. Here is what to ask for on day one so the Texas grant paperwork is assembled as you go, and the one metric almost nobody calculates.

It's not one number. It's two tests and a staircase, and the step you land on is set by the day principal photography begins. Everything explained, including the part that's a question for the Commission.

Forty-two jurisdictions will pay a production to shoot there in 2027 and eleven will not. Every program, floor, cap and instrument, read from the official sources.

The eight documents the rule requires at the end of a Texas grant, the 60-day clock, the no-additions trap, and what the Austin Film Commission told me in August about where productions actually lose it.

The same $3M show in three states, at base rates, with the rules that actually change the answer: transferability, caps, residency and crew travel. Including the cases where Texas loses.

Three Texas pictures at $252K, $2.5M and $5M, run against Georgia, New Mexico and California. The base each state counts decides more than the rate.

One state office runs the grant. Eleven regional commissions run the ground. 220 certified communities, on the Commission’s map in November 2026, have a local liaison. Who does what, and who to call.

What the program actually is, the three thresholds that decide whether you qualify, and the places productions lose money they thought they had.

Three hundred million dollars a biennium for a decade, a rebuilt tier ladder that tops out at 25% before uplifts, and about a hundred applications already in. The numbers, precisely.