Who to call about shooting in Texas.

There are about two dozen organizations in this state with the word “film” in the name, and a producer new to Texas usually calls the wrong one first. The wrong call costs a week. The office you reached will be helpful, will answer the question it can answer, and will not think to tell you that the answer you needed lives somewhere else.

Here is the whole map. One state office runs the grant money and the certification programs. Eleven regional commissions run the ground. Two hundred and eighteen communities have a designated local liaison who picks up the phone.

This is a reference, compiled from each office’s own website on September 5, 2026, and it is dated for a reason. Several of these pages contradict each other. A few are wrong, and the last section says which.

DOWNLOAD GUIDE FREE

The Texas Film Commission is the state office. It runs the grant.

The Texas Film Commission sits inside the Governor’s Office of Economic Development and Tourism. It has served the public since 1971. It is one office in Austin with about sixteen people, and it has no regional branches, so every state-level question in Texas arrives at the same building.

It administers the Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program, which is the reason most producers call. TMIIIP is a cash grant paid after the production ends and the spending is verified. It is not a transferable tax credit, so it cannot be sold, and it cannot be financed against the way a Georgia credit can. For film and television the base rate runs 5 to 25 percent of eligible Texas spending, tiered by budget, starting at $250,000 in state. Commercials start at $100,000. Video games also start at $100,000, which surprises people who assume the film floor applies everywhere.

Two qualification tests matter more than the rate. Sixty percent of the total production has to be completed in Texas. And for film and television, 35 percent of paid crew and 35 percent of paid cast including extras have to be Texas residents. Those are two separate tests, not one blended pool, and productions lose the grant on the second one after passing the first.

Write the 35 percent down with a date next to it. It is a scheduled figure, not a constant. Under the statute it steps to 40 percent for projects beginning principal photography on or after September 1, 2027, then 45 percent in 2029, then 50 percent in 2031. The trigger is the date principal photography begins. The Commission’s own program page shows 35 percent with no staircase on it, so anyone reading only that page in the summer of 2027 will be reading a number that has already moved.

Uplifts are the other place people get hurt. The Commission’s Additional Grant Awards page now states in its own words that a project may be eligible for multiple additional grants and that the total may not exceed 31 percent of eligible in-state spending. It also says the selections must be made on the project application and that awards will not be granted retroactively. That last sentence is the expensive one. An uplift you did not select at application is gone, no matter how well you documented it.

Do not model off 31 percent. It is a ceiling, not an entitlement, and each of the seven uplifts carries its own test. Quote the base rate, then call the Commission before you commit anything to a budget. We walked through the program in more detail in the plain-English version of the Texas incentive.

Texas Film Commission. 400 W 15th St, Austin, TX 78701, by appointment. Mailing: P.O. Box 12428, Austin, TX 78711. (512) 463-9200. Contact is routed by topic through a dropdown on the Commission’s about page, not a single inbox.

In April 2026 the Commission published this, and it is worth quoting exactly: “the Texas Film Commission is the first, last and only source you should trust when it comes to anything TMIIIP-related.” That is the rule. Every interpretive question about the program goes to 512-463-9200. Not to us, not to a payroll company, not to a consultant.

The same office runs four things that are not the grant.

Most producers never find these, and two of them are free.

The Texas Production Directory lists crew and support services in separate searchable databases. Listing requires one paid, verifiable credit per category. As of February 2026 it also carries veteran status, which connects directly to the veterans uplift.

Location services. The Commission keeps a statewide locations database and takes property submissions from anyone. This is the library staff search when a production asks what Texas has.

The Media Production Development Zone Act is a sales and use tax exemption for building, expanding, or renovating a production facility, for up to two years. Sound stages, post houses, animation and game studios, production offices. It takes five approvals and a long calendar, and it is real money if you are building something permanent. We covered the state of stage space in Texas separately.

Sales tax exemptions are separate from the grant and stack with it. The Commission’s page carries its own warning that taxes are administered by the Comptroller and that this is not the complete text of the law. Read it with your tax person.

Eleven regional commissions run the ground.

The regional commissions are not branches of the state office. They are city departments, convention and visitors bureaus, and chambers, funded locally, and they do the work the state office cannot do from Austin: permits, local locations, crew and vendor lists, and the phone call to the police department about a street closure.

These are the eleven the Commission lists, with the contacts as the state publishes them.

Greater Amarillo. Sherman Bass, Film Commissioner. (806) 414-2576. sherman@visitamarillo.com

Arlington. No named contact. (817) 459-6777. film@arlingtontx.gov

Austin. Brian Gannon, Director. (512) 583-7230. bgannon@visitaustin.org

Brownsville Border. Eva Millan, Film Commissioner. (956) 546-3721. eva.millan@brownsvilletx.gov

Conroe. No named contact. (936) 522-3503. info@visitconroe.com

Corpus Christi Film & Music. Drew Mayer-Oakes, Commissioner. (361) 561-2000. film@visitcorpuschristi.com

Dallas. Katie Schuck, Commissioner. (214) 571-1050. katie.schuck@filmdallas.org

El Paso Film & Creative Industries. No named contact. (915) 534-0698. film@destinationelpaso.com

Fort Worth. Taylor Hardy, Film Commissioner. (817) 709-7601. taylorhardy@fortworth.com

Houston. Alfred Cervantes, Executive Director. (713) 853-8957. acervantes@houstonfilmcommission.com

San Antonio. Christine Hill, Film Commissioner. (210) 207-6730. christine.hill@sanantonio.gov

Three things are worth knowing before you call any of them.

Almost none of them issue your permit. Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston coordinate; a city department issues. Austin says so twice on its own site, in bold. San Antonio and El Paso are the exceptions and handle permits directly. If you assume the film office is the permitting authority, you will lose the days between the call and the discovery.

Three of the eleven run their own local incentive on top of the state grant. Austin, San Antonio and Houston. Each has its own minimum spend, its own residency test, and its own application window, and at least one of them sets a Texas-resident threshold higher than the state’s. The rates are published on the cities’ own pages and they change; the PDF below links each one rather than quoting a number that will be stale by winter.

Five of them share a locations platform. Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio all run Reel-Scout, so the search behaves the same way in five cities and your crew listing has to be entered five times. El Paso runs its own directory and issues access by emailed link.

“Cities in the program” means Film Friendly Texas.

This is the question people are usually asking when they ask which cities are in the state program, and the answer is a different program from the grant.

Film Friendly Texas, established in 2007, certifies communities rather than productions. A community gets certified by doing four things: designate a liaison employed by the city or county government, send that person to a Commission workshop, pass administratively enforceable filming guidelines, and submit photos of at least five local filming locations to the state database.

What certification gets a production is narrow and useful. There is a named local person whose job includes your call, there are written filming rules instead of an improvised answer, and the Commission can push a location request or a casting call to the entire network in one email.

What it does not get you is money. Certification has no effect on your grant, no effect on your rate, and no bearing on whether your project qualifies. A production in an uncertified town is just as eligible.

There are 218 certified communities on the Commission’s map as of September 5, 2026. The full list, grouped by the state’s own regions, is in the PDF below.

Where the published information is quesionable.

Five things were checked this week that a producer would otherwise find the hard way.

The Commission’s regional film commissions page has a dropdown offering twelve commissions above a page listing eleven, and they are not the same eleven. Conroe is on the page but not in the dropdown. Northeast Texas Regional is in the dropdown and nowhere on the page. South Padre Island is in the dropdown and its anchor is an empty heading with no contact information. Selecting Corpus Christi jumps nowhere, though its contact block is further down the page and is fine. Scroll instead of using the menu.

The state’s open data portal publishes a Film Friendly certified communities dataset with 206 entries. The Commission’s own map carries 218. Twelve communities are on the map and not in the dataset, among them Garland, League City, The Colony, Haltom City and Fulshear. The map is the current source.

There are no Film Friendly Texas workshops scheduled. The page reads “Upcoming Film Friendly Texas Workshop dates to be announced.” Workshop attendance is a required certification step, so a community that wants to certify right now cannot finish until dates are posted.

El Paso’s incentives page still calls the pre-2025 state program current and says the new incentives take effect September 1, 2025, a year after they did. The office also has an open Film Commissioner posting and lists no staff. Use the state page for numbers, email the office for the ground.

Fort Worth publishes no phone number anywhere on its own film pages. The state page publishes one: (817) 709-7601. When a regional office’s own site comes up short, the Commission’s directory is often the better source, which is not the direction most people assume information flows.

The next call.

If your question is about the grant, the residency tests, the uplifts, or whether your project qualifies, call the Texas Film Commission at 512-463-9200 and let them answer it. That is their stated position and it is the correct one.

If your question is about a street, a building, a permit, or who in a particular city can actually say yes, call the regional commission for that city, or find the Film Friendly liaison for the town you are looking at.

If the question is who runs the whole thing on the ground once you have the answers, that is the part we do. Goldsmith Production Services is a production services company in Austin. We do not sell incentive advice. We produce the show, execute the compliance work as part of producing it, and hand you the file at the end. If the honest answer is that you do not need us yet, that is the answer you will get. What that looks like for a production coming into Texas.

Download the PDF directory. Twenty-five pages: every office above with its full contact block; the permit process for all eleven cities, with who actually issues, how to apply, the lead time, the fee and the insurance each one wants named; the routes for state property, state parks, county roads and campuses; the local incentive programs with links; all 218 Film Friendly communities grouped by region; and fifty more city and county film offices. Checked September 5, 2026, and re-verified quarterly.