How to find incentives with Funding

The Funding page compares your production with a list of film incentive programs and estimates what each is worth against your own budget lines. The programs are updated from their official sources once a week. Use the page to see which places are worth a call, then confirm everything with the film office.

What it needs from the project

• Locations with real addresses. Matching reads the address for a state, province, or country.
• A budget, set up or uploaded on the Budget page. The estimate is built from its lines.
• Budget view access to see the page, and budget edit access to track a program.

Steps

1. Open Funding under Financing and stay on the Incentives tab.
2. Read the list. Programs are grouped by jurisdiction, with the best estimate on each group's heading. Show more opens the rest of a group.
3. To see what another place would be worth, open Filters and pick one under "Add a state or country". The same popover filters by type and can hide programs whose minimums are not met.
4. Click a row to open its detail. Read the estimated credit, the qualified spend, the effective rate, and the minimum, then the Rates applied and Qualified spend by class tables.
5. Under Assumptions, set the share of the budget spent in that place and the share of labor paid to residents. Tick the optional rules, such as a logo or zone bonus, only if this project will meet them. The estimate recalculates as you go.
6. Open the links under Sources and read the program's current rules.
7. Click Track. The program moves to the Tracked tab.
8. On Tracked, set the status. A program set to Applied or Awarded counts in the budget, and its total shows under "Applied and awarded" in the summary strip.

Get a closer estimate with tags

The two share assumptions are rough. For a figure built line by line, tag the budget for the program with Auto tag on the Budget page. Once a budget is tagged for a program, the detail here says the estimate comes from the budget's incentive tags, and the two share fields are replaced by that note. See how to tag a budget for incentives.

How the estimate is worked out

Each budget line is sorted into above-the-line labor, below-the-line labor, goods and services, post, visual effects, overhead, or excluded. Story rights, contingency, the bond, and publicity are excluded. The program's rates, caps, and minimums are then applied.

Say the budget totals $1,000,000 and shoots in a state with a 20% base rate and a $500,000 minimum spend. Rights, contingency, and the bond come out, leaving $720,000 of qualified spend. That clears the minimum, and 20% of $720,000 is $144,000. If the qualified spend were $412,000 instead, the row would carry Minimum not met and the detail would give both figures.

Every figure on the page is an estimate. Annual fund limits and allocation rankings are not modeled, and application windows are not in the data. Add those as your own deadlines on the Tracked tab.

If it doesn't work

• No jurisdictions yet means no location has an address the page can read. Add one on Locations, or compare a state or country from Filters.
• "Set up a budget to see an estimate" in the detail means the project has no budget.
• Funding access restricted means your role has no budget access. Ask the project owner.
• A program shows Not taking applications or Ended: it stays listed so you know, but check the source for what replaced it.
• The net total on the budget did not change after tracking: only Applied and Awarded programs count. Watching does not.

For how the credits themselves work, see tax credit and qualified spend. The Funding guide covers the whole page, including grants and labs.