British Columbia increases production incentive

British Columbia, Canada, has raised its Film Incentive BC (FIBC) tax credit, which supports Canadian-content productions, and the production services tax credit (PSTC) that provides a tax incentive for international projects made in BC.

The FIBC will increase from 35% to 36%, and the PSTC will increase from 28% to 36% for productions with principal photography starting January 1, 2025.

To further give major productions incentives in the province, projects with B.C. production costs of greater than $200 million will receive a 2% bonus.

The Province also intends to restore regional and distant location tax credits for companies with a bricks-and-mortar presence outside of Metro Vancouver, the Fraser Valley and Whistler/Squamish.

In British Columbia, internatoinal productions make up more than 80% of total production spending on average.

According to Creative BC, the film industry generated $2.7bn in GDP in 2022 which decreased to $2bn in 2023, in part due to the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes which led to a decrease in global production.

In 2023-24, B.C. provided $909 million in film and television tax credits.

Both the FIBC and PSTC are based on B.C. labour expenditures and can be stacked with other credits that support productions to use locations outside the Lower Mainland, hire B.C.-based scriptwriters, use specialized digital animation and related labour or provide approved training.

Productions recently filmed in BC include Disney's Percy Jackson season two, Jay Hernandez's directorial debut Night Comes.