A Film Permit for a 30-Person Crew in L.A. Costs $350

The standard city permit is $931 before a single closure, fire officer or notification fee gets added on top of it.

You're wondering whether the $350 permit you heard about is real. It is. The catch isn't the price, it's the fence around it: FilmLA's Low Impact Tier charges a $350 application fee, and to qualify a shoot has to keep 30 or fewer cast and crew on set, work three or fewer filming locations across three consecutive days, and stay inside the city of Los Angeles. The money paying for that discount was pledged through October.

Everything larger files under the Standard Tier, and the Standard Tier application fee is $931, covering up to five locations within seven consecutive days. That's the figure most people mean when they say an L.A. film permit runs about a thousand dollars, and we wrote about its shape in August: it's charged per application, not per location, so five addresses in one week cost what one alley costs. It's also the figure that undercounts the bill, because the application fee only buys the permit. The street is priced separately, line by line. We read FilmLA's published rate lists for the city of Los Angeles and added up one ordinary three-day shoot — a lane closure at one location, a fire safety officer for a day — and the application fee came to 38 percent of what the shoot owes.

The two tiers, and the single line that moves you between them

Both tiers are priced on FilmLA's basic fee list, and the cheap one is genuinely cheap. Low Impact permits come with notification at $156 per location rather than the standard $232 per radius, free cast and crew parking and base camp locations, and a waiver of the Los Angeles Fire Department's spot-check surcharge, which FilmLA's Los Angeles city fee page carries at $287 a permit. FilmLA says the tier processes in three business days, four if a city park is involved.

Then read the exclusions, because one of them will decide this for most people. A Low Impact shoot can't do traffic control or interfere with the public right of way. No driving shots. No aerial work, drones included. No special effects that need an LAFD permit, and no stunts.

Put plainly: if your plan includes closing a lane, you are not a low-impact shoot, however few people you're bringing. The most common request on a Los Angeles street and the cheapest permit in the city can't ride on the same application, and that is worth knowing before you scout a location you'll need to hold.

The clock on the $350

FilmLA started taking Low Impact applications on April 27, 2026, and its board pledged money from its own operating reserve to pay for it. The launch notice puts the commitment in one clause: reserve funds cover the staff and technology cost of the program "through October, 2026." Six months, to test application volume, customer satisfaction and whether a reduced-price permit can pay for itself.

That six months runs out this month. FilmLA's program page, last published on August 14, says all film activity permitted through the pilot "must conclude by the program sunset date" — and then doesn't name the date. If your shoot is in November, ask what tier you're applying under before you write $350 into a budget.

What stacks on top of the application fee

These are the lines FilmLA publishes for the city of Los Angeles, and they're where a shoot gets expensive. Notification, $232 for the base radius — the signs and the door-knocks that tell a block you're coming. Lane closure administration, $78 per involved location, and the city's own lane and street closure fee, $312 per involved location, on top of it. The same $78 administration charge applies per location for gunfire, for explosion and smoke effects, for a drone and for a helicopter. Posting runs $69 per 300 feet of curbside and is paid to the provider rather than to FilmLA.

Personnel is the other half. An LAFD fire safety officer is $127 an hour with a four-hour minimum plus an hour of travel, so the floor is five hours, or $635, before anyone shoots a frame. An off-duty LAPD officer runs $67.19 to $77.90 an hour against an eight-hour minimum, paid directly to the provider; an active-duty officer is $74 an hour on a two-to-four-hour minimum; a motorcycle adds $75 a day. A FilmLA monitor is $44.50 an hour and shows up an hour before your permit starts, which is an hour you pay for.

The arithmetic on that three-day shoot, every figure from the two fee pages above: $931 to apply, $232 to notify, $78 in closure administration, $312 for the closure itself, $287 for the fire department's spot check and $635 for the five-hour minimum on a fire safety officer. $2,475, and not a minute of overtime in it.

The cheaper permits most people never ask about

A still photo application is $104, and it covers 15 cast and crew combined across up to five locations in seven days. Bring a sixteenth person, shoot B-roll, add special effects or close a street or a sidewalk, and the $931 motion-picture fee applies instead. Fifteen is the whole allowance, and it counts cast and crew together.

A student permit from an accredited program is $52 for a simple shoot and $134 for a complex one. A non-profit public service announcement is $73 to apply and $36 a rider. Riders are what you buy when a permit needs amending: $148.75 during business hours, $208 after them, and $31 on a still photo permit.

City property: the fees the city waives, and the people it doesn't

FilmLA's incentives page says the city of Los Angeles waives most use fees for filming at city-owned facilities and for parking in city-owned off-street lots. Read the next sentence too, because it's the one that costs money: the waiver "does not extend to fees for use of City personnel, who may be required during filming for on-site supervision."

Those people are priced. A Recreation and Parks monitor is $38 an hour plus $76 a shift to report. A Department of Water and Power monitor is $50 to $70 an hour. A Port of Los Angeles police officer is $112 an hour. Where the departments do price the property itself, FilmLA lists that as well: parks film use at $450 a day, a park base camp at another $450, crew parking at $100 a day up to 15 cars and $300 at 16 or more, catering at $225 a day under 75 people and $450 above it; DWP film use at $800 to $2,000 a day; Port of Los Angeles use at $300 a day.

Some marquee locations got much cheaper this year. The city cut the fee to film at Griffith Observatory from $100,000 to $30,000 — a 70 percent reduction, back to 2008 pricing — and reopened the Central Library to productions for the first time in more than a decade, TheWrap reported on March 11. "Working hand-in-hand with the industry, today we are making filming easier and more affordable in Los Angeles," Mayor Karen Bass said at the announcement, per TheWrap.

The free permit that doesn't exist yet

You may have read that L.A. is creating a free permit for very small shoots. The City Council did vote for one, unanimously, on March 4, as part of a seven-motion package Councilmember Adrin Nazarian introduced in December 2025 under the name "Keep Hollywood Home." One of those motions directs the City Attorney's office to draft a free "micro-shoot" permit for filming in public spaces that meets criteria the city would set, The Eastsider reported.

A motion directing staff to draft an ordinance is not a price. FilmLA's current fee list for the city of Los Angeles carries no micro-shoot line, and until it does, the cheapest motion-picture permit in Los Angeles is the $350 one with the October clock on it.

How long it takes, and what you don't get back

Budget the calendar before the money. FilmLA's quick-start page puts a basic permit at three to seven business days depending on jurisdiction and complexity, high-impact activity or locations outside the city at five to ten, and a public school location at a minimum of five. There is no rush option at any price: "Permit processing cannot be expedited," and every application gets the same review.

The application fee is non-refundable. The one exception is a 30-day grace period for rescheduling, which is a different thing from a refund and worth understanding as such before you file against a date you're not sure of. Adding locations later is free if they fit inside the window and the location count you already paid for; step outside either one and it's a new application fee.

What changed on July 1, and what held

FilmLA's own service fees didn't move. Its board elected not to raise any of them for fiscal year 2026/2027, which runs from July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2027.

Several jurisdictions FilmLA permits for did raise theirs. A Los Angeles County road encroachment fee went from $387 to $401 a permit and county road inspection from $468 to $484 a day. Diamond Bar's film and still application climbed from $582.78 to $644.27, and its student application from $133.96 to $234.33, which is more than four times what a simple student permit costs in the city of Los Angeles. Los Angeles, Culver City, Gardena, Industry, Lancaster and South Gate all held their pricing.

All of this is happening in a shrinking year. On-location production across greater Los Angeles came to 4,711 shoot days in the second quarter, down 12.7 percent from the same quarter of 2025, FilmLA reported on July 23. Feature films accounted for 443 of those days and commercials 543, both down about a fifth year over year.

The order to do it in

Count your crew first, because 30 is the number that decides which tier you're in, and then check your plan for a lane closure, a driving shot, a drone or a stunt — any one of them moves you to the $931 tier no matter how small you are. Then price the personnel, because a single fire safety officer carries a five-hour floor at $127 an hour. File at least three to seven business days out; nothing on the fee list buys a faster read. And if the shoot is in November, ask FilmLA which tier is open before you budget it, because the money behind the $350 was pledged through October.

Every fee above was checked on October 3, 2026 against FilmLA's basic fee list, its common-fees page for the city of Los Angeles, its Low Impact Permit Pilot Program page, its quick-start page on fees and timing, its incentives page, its April 27, 2026 launch notice, its July 2026 notice of client-jurisdiction fee increases and its July 23, 2026 quarterly production release. Rates set by city departments and by other jurisdictions are the figures FilmLA publishes for them and can change without that page changing. This page is not legal advice; where a linked source and this page disagree, the source wins. It is re-verified and updated in place at this address.