When a global semiconductor maker or an electric-vehicle plant decides to build in Texas, the announcement usually comes wrapped in big job numbers and civic pride. What gets less attention is the deal underneath: hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes that the company will not pay, taxes that other Texas homeowners and small businesses ultimately help cover. Texas has long been one of the most aggressive states in the country at handing out these corporate subsidies, and the biggest of them dwarf anything an ordinary taxpayer will ever see.
This piece explains how Texas’s corporate-subsidy machine actually works — the programs, the dollar amounts, who benefits, and what it means for the local tax base — and it puts a real ranked list next to the headline, not just a general explainer. The figures here come from the Texas Comptroller and the subsidy-tracking nonprofit Good Jobs First, because the goal is to look at the real Texas record rather than a national headline.
How Texas gives away taxes: Chapter 313 and its successor
For two decades, the main tool was a program known as Chapter 313, which let school districts grant large property-tax breaks to attract major projects. According to the Texas Comptroller, Chapter 313 agreements accounted for billions of dollars in tax breaks for some of the largest companies in the state. The program drew steady criticism that it subsidized investments companies would have made anyway, and it expired at the end of 2022.
It was replaced in 2023 by a new program: the Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation Act, or JETI. As reporting on the program notes, JETI added more oversight, job and salary requirements, and roughly halved the size of the property-tax cuts compared with Chapter 313. The Comptroller plays a central role: a school district that wants to grant a break forwards the application to the Comptroller, who evaluates whether the deal meets the law’s criteria before approving it. Because JETI only started approving agreements in 2024, the true “biggest deals of the past year” almost all trace back to older Chapter 313 agreements that are still being paid out — new JETI deals so far are smaller by design.
The biggest deals in the Texas record, ranked
Here is what the public record actually shows, ranked by total local tax savings over the life of each agreement — not by construction cost or press-release investment figures, which are a different (and usually much bigger) number:
- Texas Instruments, Sherman — an estimated $2.36 billion. The company’s four-fab expansion northeast of Dallas drew abatements and rebates from the school district, city, county, and local community college combined, running over roughly 35 years. Good Jobs First and multiple outlets have called it the largest subsidy package in Texas history, larger than the Samsung deal below. It was approved under the old Chapter 313 program before that program expired.
- Samsung Electronics, Taylor — $981 million. Local, county, and state incentives for Samsung’s Williamson County chip plant were described by Good Jobs First as the biggest incentive package in Texas history when it was approved in late 2021 — a record the Texas Instruments deal in Sherman has since surpassed. The total excludes roughly $260 million in additional public infrastructure spending tied to the project.
- Tesla, Travis County — about $64.5 million. Tesla’s Giga Texas factory near Del Valle, a roughly $1.1 billion capital investment, came with a Chapter 313 school-district abatement plus a separate county property-tax rebate, per Good Jobs First’s Subsidy Tracker. It is a marquee project, but a much smaller subsidy in dollar terms than the two chip deals above.
The honest caveat: these are the biggest deals still on the books, not necessarily deals signed “last year.” Both the Texas Instruments and Samsung agreements were approved in 2021–2022, under Chapter 313, and they still show up as the largest active subsidy commitments because the tax breaks run for decades — a company can be “receiving” a nine-figure abatement in the current tax year from a deal signed several years ago. Neither the Comptroller’s JETI tracker nor Good Jobs First’s Subsidy Tracker publishes a single clean “biggest deals approved in the last 12 months” ranking; the public data is organized by program and by company, not by a rolling one-year window. If a bigger JETI deal has been approved more recently than these, it would appear on the Comptroller’s JETI applications page, which lists every executed agreement — that page, not a press release, is the way to check for a new record-holder.
Why a property-tax break is a cost to everyone else
Here is the part that matters for an ordinary Texas household. A property-tax break for a corporation does not make the cost of local government disappear. Schools, counties, and cities still need to fund their budgets. When a large taxpayer’s bill is abated, the revenue either has to be made up elsewhere, comes partly from state funds, or the local services adjust. For the school portion in particular, the financing involves complex state formulas, but the underlying point holds: a dollar a company does not pay in property tax is a dollar the system has to find somewhere else.
That is why subsidy watchdogs frame these deals in terms of the local tax base. The nonprofit Good Jobs First maintains databases tracking economic-development subsidies by company and location, including in Texas, so taxpayers can see who is receiving breaks in their own area.
The jobs-versus-cost debate
Supporters argue these subsidies bring high-paying jobs, construction activity, and long-term tax revenue once the abatement period ends. Critics counter that the per-job cost can be enormous and that companies are often choosing among locations they were always going to build in. The JETI program’s added job and salary requirements were a direct response to that criticism — both sides are arguing about the same trade-off: how much foregone tax revenue is worth how many jobs, and whether the subsidy actually changed the company’s decision. We will not assign a single verdict, because the answer genuinely varies deal by deal. What is clear is that the dollar amounts are large and the cost falls, at least indirectly, on the broader Texas tax base.
Federal subsidies layer on top of the state breaks
State and local property-tax breaks are only one layer. Many of the same companies courted by Texas also collect federal support — semiconductor grants under the CHIPS and Science Act, clean-energy tax credits, and federal contracts. You can see federal awards flowing to Texas recipients on the USAspending.gov Texas profile. For a project like a chip plant or an EV factory, the total public support can combine a state property-tax abatement, local incentives, and federal grants or credits — a stack that is rarely presented in one place. That layering is part of why the true public cost of a marquee project is hard for an ordinary taxpayer to total up, and why looking at a single number from a press release usually understates it.
What to ask when a new deal is announced
When the next big plant is announced in your area, a few plain questions cut through the celebration. How many permanent jobs, not construction jobs, are promised, and what is the average wage? Over how many years does the tax break run, and how much revenue does it forego? Did the company say the incentive was the deciding factor, as the law generally requires? The answers are usually in the public agreement and the school district’s filings, and the Comptroller’s approval process documents the state’s review.
How to see the deals in your own area
You do not have to take any company’s press release at face value. The Texas Comptroller publishes information on the state’s economic-development incentive programs, including the agreements approved under Chapter 313 and now JETI. The Good Jobs First subsidy databases let you search by company and locality. For local property-tax impact, your county appraisal district and school district budgets show how abatements factor into the numbers.
For a Texas taxpayer, the arithmetic is straightforward even if the deals are not: the biggest corporate subsidies in this state run from the hundreds of millions into the billions, they are granted through a public process you can look up, and the taxes a corporation skips do not simply vanish. Knowing where to find the data lets you judge for yourself whether a given deal earned the break — rather than relying on the version told at the ribbon-cutting.
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.
