Written by on Jan 3, 2013. Posted in Incentive News

Fiscal cliff deal extends America’s federal location filming tax break

America’s federal filming tax break is among the programmes to be extended by the fiscal cliff deal approved by Congress earlier this week. Politicians avoided the real danger of recession as a series of tax cuts was set to expire at the end of 2012.

A short-term deal has avoided deepening America’s economic woes for the moment and the country’s federal location filming tax credit is one of the immediate winners. Section 181 is designed to keep US productions in America by enabling them to write down the first USD15 million of their corporate tax.

Kate Bedingfield is with the Motion Picture Association of America and spoke to the LA Times: “The combination of the state production incentives and the federal incentive over the past decade has been a successful counter to very aggressive incentives in foreign countries."

The federal incentive over the past decade has been a successful counter to very aggressive incentives in foreign countries.

Kate Bedingfield, Motion Picture Association of America

She added: “The accompanying growth of production in the United States over that same time is great evidence of that.”

California, New York, Louisiana and Georgia have become four of America’s main regional production hubs, primarily because they offer the most generous regional location filming incentives.