$1.5B
Over 10 years
Every soundstage rising east of Austin traces back to one number: $1.5 billion. In 2025 Texas rewrote its film-incentive program with Senate Bill 22, turning a stop-start rebate into a decade-long, predictable fund. Here is what the money actually is, who qualifies, and why it made Bastrop County pencil out.
The Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program (TMIIIP) is a cash-grant rebate run by the Texas Film Commission out of the Governor's office. It has existed since 2007, but it lived hand-to-mouth — funded a session at a time, drained early, and unreliable enough that studios couldn't plan around it.
Senate Bill 22, signed in June 2025 and effective September 1, 2025, changed the arithmetic. It commits $1.5 billion over ten years and, crucially, creates a statutorily directed transfer of roughly $300 million every two years into a dedicated fund through a sunset date of August 31, 2035. Predictable, decade-long money is what a company signs a 600-acre lease against — and it is the single clearest reason the Central Texas studio boom is happening now rather than someday.
The first installment unlocked on September 1, 2025. Projects that begin after that date can apply for a rebate on their qualified Texas spending.
The base grant scales with in-state spend; the ceiling is reached by stacking targeted bonuses. Reaching 31% is deliberate — the state is paying extra for the things it wants.
The program caps total incentives at 31% of qualified in-state spend. Most projects earn a base percentage and climb toward the cap with the bonuses below.
Productions must clear a minimum Texas spend (scaled to budget), meet quotas for Texas cast and crew, and complete at least 60% of the project in-state.
Extra credit for shooting in rural areas, at historic sites, having at least 5% veteran crew, or being faith-based — bonuses that reward exactly the Hill Country locations around Bastrop.
TMIIIP is broader than feature film. Eligible categories include television series, commercials, animation, and even Texas-made video games — a scope that lets a rental campus like 204 Texas or a Volume stage like Stray Vista keep its stages booked between features.
The tradeoff productions accept is real: hit the Texas spend floor, hire the Texas quota, and keep the majority of the work inside the state. For a studio operator, those strings are a feature, not a bug — they are precisely what fills a soundstage, a mill, a grip house, and a payroll.
Texas launches its moving-image incentive — but funds it session by session, and it repeatedly runs dry.
Lawmakers pass a $1.5B, ten-year commitment; the bill is signed into law in June 2025.
The program takes effect. Projects starting after this date can apply for the rebate on qualified Texas spend.
A statutory biennial transfer keeps the fund topped up to a sunset date of Aug 31, 2035 — the predictability studios build against.
The studios didn't come to Bastrop for the scenery alone. They came because, for the first time, the state put a ten-year number on the table — and a rural county with cheap land and Austin-adjacent crews is the most efficient place in Texas to spend against it.