Cash-grant programs at the state and city level — how the math works, who administers it, and what qualifies as Texas spend.
Texas runs a cash-grant program rather than a transferable tax credit. That structural choice matters: the money lands as cash post-production against verified, qualifying Texas spend — not as a paper asset a production has to broker on a secondary market.
The Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program, administered by the Texas Film Commission, is the headline instrument. It applies to feature films, television (broadcast, cable, streaming), commercials, video games, and visual-effects work. The grant is calculated against qualified in-state spend — principally Texas-resident crew wages and Texas-vendor expenditures — with the ceiling driven by program tier and project type.
The base grant pays back a percentage of qualifying Texas spend for productions meeting the minimum in-state spend and Texas-resident hiring thresholds. Tier published by the Texas Film Commission.
With program uplifts — including underutilized-area filming, veteran hiring, and content-classification bonuses — the effective cash-grant return for a qualifying production can reach roughly 31% of qualified Texas spend.
For productions shooting principally in Austin, the Austin Creative Content Incentive Program provides supplemental city-level support. It is gated: productions become eligible only after they have been awarded through TMIIIP at the state level. The Austin program is administered through the Austin Film Commission and the City of Austin's economic-development office, and it adds incremental cash on top of the state grant for qualifying Austin spend.
The practical sequencing is: a production qualifies and applies for TMIIIP first, then layers the Austin program against the same body of qualifying spend.
The grant is paid against verified qualifying in-state expenditure. In practice this covers:
Out-of-state cast and crew above the relevant caps, and out-of-state vendor spend, are generally non-qualifying. The published audit standards are strict.
The new Bastrop stages do not exist in a vacuum. A production weighing 204 Texas against soundstages in Georgia, New Mexico, Louisiana, or Atlanta-area Trilith is doing a comparison on three axes: stage availability, crew depth, and incentive arithmetic. Texas's stack — cash, not transferable credit, with city-level uplift in Austin — is the third axis. The new stages give Texas the first two; the incentive program keeps the third competitive.
"Soundstages don't book themselves — the math books them."