Location Agreements and Permits in Texas: What It Actually Takes to Shoot Somewhere Legally

A producer scouts a great-looking storefront for a commercial. The owner is friendly, the light is perfect, and everyone assumes the paperwork is simple: get the owner's okay, show up, shoot. Then the grip truck parks half on the sidewalk, a stand-in for the lighting rig blocks foot traffic for twenty minutes, and a code enforcement officer walks over asking for a permit nobody applied for.

This is the single most common permitting mistake on a commercial shoot in Texas, and it's a distinction worth understanding before the location is booked, not after a city employee is standing on set.

Private Property vs. Public Impact Is the Whole Question

Texas doesn't run a single, statewide film permitting system. The Texas Film Commission, part of the Office of the Governor, actively supports productions and coordinates introductions to the right local contacts, but it does not issue permits itself. Permitting authority sits with whatever city, county, or property owner controls the ground the production is standing on, and the rule that determines whether a permit is required at all comes down to one question: does the shoot touch anything public.

If a shoot happens entirely on private property, a house, a private business interior, a privately owned lot, no city permit is needed. What's required instead is a location agreement directly with the property owner: written permission covering the dates, the specific areas being used, and the terms of use. No government office needs to be involved.

If the shoot is on private property but the production spills into public space, a grip truck parked on the street, a light stand on the public sidewalk, foot traffic diverted around a rig, both a location agreement with the owner and a city permit are required. This is the trap: a producer who correctly gets a signed location agreement for the interior of a restaurant, then parks the production's vehicles on the curb outside, has satisfied half the requirement and missed the other half.

If the shoot is entirely on public property, a city street, a sidewalk, a park, a government building, a formal permit from that municipality is required regardless of how small the footprint is.

What Dallas Actually Requires

The Dallas Office of Special Events handles film permitting for the city, separate from the Dallas Film Commission's role promoting the market and helping productions scout. A permit is required within Dallas city limits any time a production affects street traffic, lane closures, street closures, intermittent traffic control, or requests to film on city-owned property.

The practical requirements: applications should go in at least 10 business days before the shoot date, submitted through the city's online portal with a location map, shot list, equipment list, parking plan, and a certificate of insurance naming the City of Dallas as additional insured at a $1 million general liability minimum. There's no flat permit fee published as a single number; instead, a production budgets for the application fee plus separately billed costs like off-duty Dallas police officer overtime for a street closure or park-use charges, which can range from a few hundred dollars for a light-footprint shoot to several thousand for anything closing a real traffic lane.

Ten business days is the operative number to plan around. A location that looks perfect on a Tuesday scout but requires a Thursday shoot the same week is very likely not gettable through the formal process in time, regardless of how willing the city might be. Building permit lead time into the production calendar the same way crew availability and gear reservations get built in avoids finding this out the week of the shoot.

What Fort Worth and Arlington Actually Require

Fort Worth runs a friendlier baseline on paper: there is no charge for the film permit application itself or for the permit issued by the Fort Worth Film Commission. But that's the floor, not the whole picture. Individual locations and districts inside the city carry their own separate fees, notably Sundance Square and the Stockyards National Historic District, which each run their own permit process and their own charges on top of the city's free base permit. A production planning a Stockyards shoot should budget for that district's fee independently of the "no cost" headline for Fort Worth's general film permit.

Arlington requires a permit through its Office of Communications any time a shoot's footprint extends into areas the city controls, but published fee information is sparse. The right move for Arlington is a direct call to that office during location scouting rather than assuming the Dallas or Fort Worth structure carries over, since municipal permitting programs in Texas are set independently by each city and don't share a common fee schedule.

The wider point: DFW is not one permitting jurisdiction, it's a patchwork of at least a dozen incorporated cities, each with its own process, its own fee structure, and its own lead time. A multi-location commercial moving between Dallas, Fort Worth, and a suburb in a single week is really navigating three or more separate bureaucracies, not one regional system.

What Belongs in a Location Agreement

A permit governs the relationship between a production and a government body. A location agreement governs the relationship between a production and the property owner, and it's needed even when no permit is required at all. Industry standard practice treats a written location agreement as non-negotiable for any location beyond a public street, regardless of how informal the arrangement feels in the room.

A location agreement worth signing covers:

Dates and specific areas of use. Not just "the property," but which rooms, which exterior areas, and what hours, including load-in and strike time on either side of the shoot day itself. A verbal "we'll be out by 5" is not a location agreement.

Location fee and payment terms. What the owner is being paid, when, and whether a hold or scout fee applies separately from the shoot-day rate.

Hold harmless and indemnification language. The production agrees to be responsible for damage caused by the shoot and to indemnify the property owner against third-party claims arising from the production's activity there. This is the clause that connects directly to the general liability coverage described on this site's certificate of insurance post: a location agreement that promises indemnification without a policy behind it is a promise with nothing backing it up.

Restoration terms. What condition the space needs to return to, and by when. A location that gets moved, painted over, or has furniture rearranged for a set dressing pass needs an explicit restoration clause, not an assumption that "we'll put it back."

Exclusivity and cancellation. Whether the owner can rent the same space to another shoot during the same window, and what happens if either side needs to cancel or reschedule, with terms that should track the same notice-window logic covered in this site's piece on kill fees and cancellation clauses.

Insurance and additional insured status. A private property owner is exactly the kind of party who should be named as additional insured on the production's general liability policy for the duration of the shoot, the same mechanism a commercial venue would require.

Drones Add a Second Permitting Layer

A drone shoot is never governed by just one permit process. Federal Aviation Administration Part 107 certification and airspace clearance operate independently of any city film permit, and a location that's otherwise permit-free at ground level, a private ranch, an open field, can still sit inside controlled airspace requiring FAA authorization before a drone lifts off. On top of that, individual Texas cities and parks departments frequently carry their own drone-specific restrictions layered on top of standard film permitting, sometimes banning drone operation in city parks entirely regardless of FAA clearance. Any location scout that includes aerial coverage needs airspace and local drone-ordinance research as a separate line item from the standard ground-level permit check, done early enough that a "no drones in this park" discovery doesn't happen the morning of the shoot.

The Practical Rule

Treat every location the same way during scouting: confirm whether the footprint touches anything public, get the specific city's permit office on the phone rather than assuming last job's process still applies, and get a written location agreement signed regardless of whether a permit is required at all. The permit protects the relationship with the city. The location agreement protects the relationship with the person who actually owns the ground the crew is standing on. A production needs both conversations, and they are not the same conversation.

This is general information about how location permitting and agreements typically work in Texas production markets, not legal advice. Permit requirements, fees, and lead times change by city and by year; confirm current requirements directly with the relevant municipal office before finalizing a location, and have a Texas attorney review location agreement language for anything beyond a routine, low-risk shoot.