The Montana Economic Development Industry Advancement (MEDIA) Act obligates the State to commission an independent evaluation of the tax credit program’s economic profile and of the film industry more broadly. The Montana Department of Commerce required that evaluation to satisfy statutory reporting on the overall impact of the credits, the dollar value issued, net new jobs created, compensation paid, and the names of State-certified productions.
Two conditions shaped what Commerce needed from this cycle. Senate Bill 326, signed in May 2025, had substantially revised the program: extending credits through 2045, expanding eligible production types, introducing a new annual allocation framework, and rendering productions filmed after 2024 ineligible under the prior structure. Separately, the Department of Revenue had completed audits of expenditures from earlier program years, making it possible for the first time to test how closely prior projections tracked validated actuals.
ESI was selected to analyze film and media production activity in Montana from July 2024 to May 2026. The team assembled production data from the Commerce Film Office, the Department of Revenue, and direct outreach to producers and the state’s production community, identifying 213 productions that filmed in Montana during the two-year window.
Economic impacts were modeled using 2024 multipliers. County-level models were built for the nine counties recording at least $1 million in Montana procurement and resident wages, with the remaining counties modeled statewide. Fiscal modeling captured local, county, and state tax revenue, and separately estimated compensation tax on non-resident wages at Montana’s effective income tax rate.
The retrospective component of this effort modeled audited expenditures for calendar years 2019 through 2024 and compared those results against the projections published in ESI’s three prior MEDIA Act studies, isolating where and by how much earlier estimates diverged from validated spending.
By reconciling six years of expenditures against previously published projections, the study established where prior estimates had run ahead of validated spending, most notably in 2023 and 2024, and attributed those gaps to industry-wide production disruption rather than to model error.
The work also quantified the program’s net fiscal position rather than reporting economic benefits alone. In several years, validated credits exceeded the combined state and local tax revenue attributable to Montana production spending, indicating that the State did not fully recover the revenue forgone through the credit. Presenting that finding alongside the documented job creation, county-level spending distribution, and film-induced tourism effects gave Montana policymakers a complete accounting of what the incentive delivers and what it costs.