Drive past the Tesla plant near Del Valle or the Samsung complex rising in Taylor, and you are looking at billions of dollars of private investment that landed in Texas in part because the state and local governments agreed to forgo a chunk of the property taxes those companies would otherwise have paid. Those deals are real, they are large, and, importantly for a taxpayer, they are public record.
This piece walks through what some of Texas’s biggest employers actually received to build here, where the money trail lives, and how an ordinary Texan can look up the deal in their own school district. The numbers below come from the state’s own incentive records and contemporaneous reporting, not estimates pulled from the air.
How Texas hands out these breaks
For years, the main tool was a program known as Chapter 313, named for the section of the Texas Tax Code that created it. It let school districts cap the taxable value of a large new facility for a decade, sharply reducing the property taxes a company paid to the district, the single largest piece of most Texas tax bills. The Texas Comptroller maintained the program and still hosts the full archive of agreements on its Chapter 313 page.
The Legislature let Chapter 313 expire at the end of 2022 amid criticism that it gave away too much for too little, then replaced it in 2023 with a successor program. The Comptroller now administers that new incentive, the Jobs, Energy, Technology, and Innovation Act, through its JETI program page. Many of the largest existing deals, though, were signed under the old Chapter 313 rules and are still in effect.
Samsung in Taylor
Samsung’s massive semiconductor project in Taylor, northeast of Austin, was secured with one of the largest incentive packages in recent Texas history. As part of the company’s roughly $17 billion initial chip-plant investment, Taylor Independent School District approved a Chapter 313 agreement reported at about $292 million in property-tax savings to Samsung, as Community Impact reported when the Comptroller’s records became public.
That school-district break was layered on top of additional county and city incentives, and Samsung has since signaled far larger expansion plans for the site. The underlying agreements are documented in the Comptroller’s Chapter 313 agreement records for Taylor ISD, where the application, the value limitation, and the job commitments are all on file.
Tesla in Travis County
Tesla’s Gigafactory near Del Valle, southeast of Austin, came with its own stack of incentives. Del Valle Independent School District approved a Chapter 313 agreement that capped the plant’s taxable value at $80 million and was estimated to save Tesla roughly $46 million in school property taxes over a decade, with the company agreeing to pay the district nearly $1 million a year in supplemental payments. Tesla’s initial application had proposed a larger figure, reported at more than $68 million, as KXAN reported when the application was filed, but the agreement the board ultimately approved came in lower, a figure confirmed in the Comptroller’s official agreement record.
Separately, Travis County approved a property-tax rebate deal that, in 2020, the county estimated would save Tesla in the neighborhood of $14 million over its first decade, according to reporting from Austin’s NPR station, KUT. That agreement, which ties rebates to job and investment commitments, has drawn scrutiny: in 2026, Travis County voted to withhold a portion of a scheduled rebate over what officials called incomplete documentation, a reminder that these deals come with conditions companies are supposed to meet.
The watchdog view
Not everyone agrees these deals pay off. The national research group Good Jobs First maintains a Subsidy Tracker that compiles state and local incentive awards, including many Texas deals, and lets you search by company. Its broader research has repeatedly questioned whether large per-job subsidies deliver enough jobs and tax base to justify the foregone revenue, a critique that helped drive the Legislature’s decision to let Chapter 313 lapse.
Supporters counter that the plants would not have come to Texas without the incentives, that they anchor whole supplier ecosystems, and that even a capped facility eventually adds to the tax rolls when the agreement expires. Both views are defensible, and the honest answer for any single deal depends on whether the company hits its job and investment targets, which is exactly what the public agreements are supposed to track.
The other big names
Tesla and Samsung get the headlines, but they are far from alone. Texas has used Chapter 313 and now JETI to land or expand a long list of large manufacturers, energy projects, and data centers. Liquefied natural gas terminals along the Gulf Coast, petrochemical plants, semiconductor and electronics facilities, and major battery and renewable-energy projects have all carried school-district value limitations or other local incentives.
Texas Instruments, for example, has built and expanded semiconductor operations in the state, and a range of energy and industrial firms hold agreements in the Comptroller’s records. Rather than rely on any one summary, the most reliable way to see the full roster is to browse the agreement list directly. The Comptroller’s Chapter 313 agreement documents are organized by school district and company, and each entry links to the underlying application and value limitation.
What unites these deals is the same basic trade: a large capital investment and a set of job commitments in exchange for a decade of reduced property taxes from the school district, plus, in many cases, separate county and city sweeteners. The dollar figures attached to the biggest projects run well into the hundreds of millions in foregone or reduced taxes over the life of the agreements.
What companies promise in return
An incentive agreement is not a no-strings gift. Each Chapter 313 or JETI agreement spells out commitments the company is supposed to meet, typically a minimum level of investment and a required number of qualifying jobs at specified wage levels. Those terms are written into the public agreement, which is part of why a taxpayer can hold a deal accountable: if a company falls short of its job or investment promises, the agreement defines what is supposed to happen.
The Tesla example shows this is not just paperwork. When Travis County moved in 2026 to withhold part of a scheduled rebate over documentation it called incomplete, it was acting on the conditions baked into the deal. Whether you favor these incentives or oppose them, the conditions are the mechanism that is supposed to ensure the public gets the jobs and investment it was promised in return for the tax break.
How to look up a deal yourself
You do not have to take a press release or a critic at their word. For older deals, the Texas Comptroller’s Chapter 313 archive lets you search by company or school district and pull the actual agreement, including the value limitation and the promised jobs. For current deals, the JETI program page hosts the same kind of documentation.
For a cross-state picture, the Good Jobs First Subsidy Tracker pulls many of these awards into one searchable database. And because school districts and counties approve these deals in open meetings, your local school board and commissioners court minutes are another place the terms appear.
The bottom line for a Texas taxpayer is that these are not secret handshakes. They are negotiated, voted on in public, and documented by the state. The breaks are large, the conditions are real, and whether each one was worth it is a question you can investigate with sourced records rather than guesswork.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
