Trump’s claim of tenfold return on film tax credit is unsubstantiated

Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post on 13 November 2026 that he was working with lawmakers from both parties on the Motion Picture, Television, and Entertainment Revitalization Act. He predicted that hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers would benefit and that the cost of the incentives would be “made up tenfold” by money flowing into the Treasury. He gave no timeframe or calculation for that claim.

The post follows Democratic gains in the midterm elections, with some party members publicly discussing how to work with Trump. He had made the same tenfold prediction on 31 August, after saying he had met actor Jon Voight.

Republican senator Tim Scott introduced the Senate bill on 24 September, with Democrats Adam Schiff and Raphael Warnock among its original co-sponsors. It was referred to the Senate Finance Committee and has not passed, according to legislative tracker The Lobby.

The proposed credit would go to qualifying production owners rather than directly to workers. It would be worth 20% of eligible compensation for services performed in the US, rising to as much as 30% in certain cases. Eligible compensation includes pay for actors, directors and producers as well as crew members.

Ordinary film and television productions would need to cost more than $1 million and have at least 75% of their principal filming days in the US. The credit could be sold to another taxpayer and would not be limited to productions returning from abroad. Separate provisions cover some visual-effects and post-production work.

Netflix listed the legislation among its lobbying topics in a federal disclosure signed on 20 October. The filing reported $940,000 in total lobbying expenses across all topics, not just the film bill.

What the projections show

Consultancy Olsberg SPI modelled an earlier industry-backed proposal for the Motion Picture Association. It estimated that an incentive could support an average of 143,500 additional full-time-equivalent jobs a year across the economy in 2027–35, and generate $249 billion in additional economic value over that period. The jobs figure includes work on productions, at suppliers and jobs supported by workers’ spending; it is not a count of individual blue-collar workers. The study did not calculate additional federal tax revenue.

The projections depend on assumptions about how much production would move. The model assumes the US share of the production spending it tracks would rise to 65% with a credit, but decline without it. Even the no-credit scenario forecasts more than half as much domestic production spending as the credit scenario.

To illustrate the scale of Trump’s Treasury claim, the model projects $277.49 billion in US spending on the productions it tracks over 2027–35 with a credit, and assumes 53% of that spending is labour costs. If all those costs qualified at the bill’s 20% base rate, the gross credits would come to about $29.4 billion. A tenfold return on that amount over the same period would require roughly $294 billion in additional federal receipts. The model’s $249 billion is economic value added, not tax revenue. The calculation is illustrative, not a forecast of the final bill’s fiscal cost or revenue.

A 2023 evaluation for Georgia’s state auditors projected a fiscal return of 19 cents for every dollar of the state’s film tax credit in fiscal 2024, after accounting for revenue that might have been generated by an alternative use of the money. The projection assumed 92.1% of associated activity would not have happened without the credit. State and federal tax systems differ, so that estimate does not predict the federal proposal’s outcome.

Where production has moved

Trump also said Hollywood had been virtually “emptied out” by foreign incentives and that the entertainment industry had largely moved abroad. There has been a substantial shift in some productions, but filming has not disappeared from the US.

An EY study for entertainment unions found that the share of film budgets at selected major US studios associated with productions with significant US filming fell from 74% in 1999–2001 to 42% in 2022–24. The study assigned whole budgets to location categories rather than measuring actual US spending, and did not establish what caused the shift.

FilmLA recorded 4,171 permitted on-location shoot days of all types in its Los Angeles-area jurisdictions from July to September 2026, down 4.8% from a year earlier. The figures exclude certified sound stages. FilmLA also quoted the showrunner of *Tracker*, Elwood Reid, saying California’s tax credit made it possible to move the series from British Columbia to Los Angeles.

California’s independent Legislative Analyst’s Office found that credits can influence location choices. It estimated that about two-thirds of projects receiving a credit in the programme’s early years would otherwise have filmed elsewhere, which could include another US state. But it found weak evidence that expanding the credit would grow the state economy as a whole.

The federal proposal may change where productions are made. What remains unproven is whether it would generate enough additional federal tax to cover its costs, let alone provide the tenfold return Trump promises.