When Georgia's film office released its fiscal year 2024 production figures, the headline number was striking: $2.6 billion in direct film and television spending within the state in a single year. More telling still was the cumulative figure — $11 billion in direct production expenditures over the three fiscal years from 2022 through 2024, according to the Georgia Department of Economic Development. These are not projections or modeled estimates. They represent certified, audited spending by productions that chose Georgia over every other state in the country. For Nevada, which has spent several legislative sessions debating its own film incentive framework without establishing a permanent, competitive program, Georgia's three-year record is the most comprehensive real-world data set available — and one of the most instructive.
How Georgia Built the Nation's Leading Film Economy
Georgia's dominance in film production did not happen overnight, and it was not accidental. The state's Entertainment Industry Investment Act, which established the framework for its film tax credit, has been in place since 2005 and was substantially strengthened in 2008. The credit offers qualified productions 20% of eligible in-state expenditures, with an additional 10% available to companies that include a Georgia promotional logo in their content — a detail that has made Georgia branding ubiquitous in major studio releases. That combined potential of 30% is among the most straightforward structures in the country, with a $500,000 minimum spend threshold and no annual credit cap, making it workable for productions ranging from independent features to nine-figure studio tentpoles.
The results of that consistent policy environment are visible in the revenue data. Georgia's direct production spending peaked above $4 billion in fiscal year 2022, dipped alongside broader industry contractions driven by the 2023 writers' and actors' strikes, and rebounded to $2.6 billion in FY2024 — a figure that, on its own, would rank as a significant economic sector for most states. The $11 billion three-year total represents a sustained economic infrastructure, not a single lucky year. Studios have built permanent facilities, training pipelines have matured, and the local vendor ecosystem now captures spending that once left the state entirely. That ecosystem self-reinforces: every dollar spent on a Georgia production is more likely than ever to stay in Georgia.
The BLS Employment Gap Nevada Cannot Ignore
Perhaps the most direct evidence of what Georgia's program has produced — and what Nevada has foregone — comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. BLS data tracking motion picture and video industry employment from 2011 to 2021 found that Georgia led the entire nation with a net gain of 15,611 jobs in the sector. No other state came close. Louisiana, which has operated a film tax credit program since 2002, added 1,685 jobs. Texas gained 1,651. Tennessee added 1,455.
Nevada? The state added 112 motion picture and video jobs over that same ten-year period — less than 1% of Georgia's gain. That is not a small difference; it is a structural one. Nevada entered the decade with Las Vegas, one of the most televised cities in the world, a deep hospitality workforce with transferable production skills, and proximity to the Los Angeles studio system. It exited the decade with essentially the same number of film production jobs it had before. Meanwhile, the BLS data also reveals that California — long the default home of the industry — lost 1,962 motion picture jobs in the same window. The industry was moving, and it moved to states with competitive tax incentive programs. Nevada was not among them.
The Multiplier Effect on Georgia's Total Economic Output
Direct production spending understates the full economic impact of a mature film industry. Georgia's economic development agency has historically applied an expenditure multiplier of 3.57x to direct film spending when calculating total economic output — meaning each dollar spent on production stimulates additional rounds of spending across local businesses, suppliers, service providers, and workers who in turn spend their income locally. Applied to Georgia's $2.6 billion FY2024 direct figure, that multiplier produces a total estimated economic impact of approximately $9.3 billion in a single fiscal year. Even skeptical analysts who use lower multiplier assumptions — the academic literature typically suggests 1.5x to 2.0x as more conservative figures — still arrive at total FY2024 impacts in the range of $3.9 billion to $5.2 billion from that single year's productions.
The mechanism is not complicated. When a studio production spends $50 million in a state, that spending reaches catering companies, construction suppliers, hotels, rental equipment yards, payroll processors, transportation companies, and local talent agencies. Those businesses pay their own employees, who pay rent, buy groceries, and spend locally. The multiplier captures those downstream effects. What matters for policy analysis is that the multiplier only activates at scale — it requires a consistent volume of productions, year after year, to generate the vendor ecosystem that keeps spending local rather than importing it from out of state. Georgia reached that threshold years ago. States like Nevada, which have lacked consistent incentive frameworks, have not.
What This Means for Nevada
Georgia's three-year data set provides the most rigorous available answer to a question that Nevada's legislators have debated repeatedly: does a film tax credit actually generate economic return proportionate to its fiscal cost? The answer, at Georgia's scale and program maturity, is clearly yes — though the timeline matters. Georgia's credit required years of consistent policy before the production infrastructure, trained workforce, and studio investment reached the self-sustaining level visible in today's data. Nevada would be entering later in the game, with the advantage of learning from Georgia's program design and the disadvantage of having already ceded more than a decade of compounding workforce development.
The BLS data makes the opportunity cost concrete. Had Nevada gained even a fraction of Georgia's job growth — say, 2,000 to 3,000 additional motion picture and video industry positions over that same decade — the state would today have an established production workforce capable of servicing mid-budget and large-budget productions. That workforce doesn't exist yet at the necessary depth, which is precisely why establishing a competitive incentive framework now, while the industry continues to seek lower-cost production environments outside California, remains a time-sensitive economic development decision.
Readers interested in how Nevada's proposed credit structures compare to Georgia's — and where the design differences create risk — should see LVMS Research's analysis of transferable vs. refundable credit mechanics. For a broader look at the multiplier economics underlying all film tax credit programs, see the Economic Impact category.
