Fifteen more New Jersey municipalities earned Film Ready certification in 2026, and if you have ever burned a week finding the right person at a town hall, you know why that is worth writing about.
The 2026 cohort: Edison, Fanwood, Garwood, Hamilton (Mercer County), Hanover, Highland Park, Hightstown, Lambertville, New Brunswick, Newton, Oceanport, Phillipsburg, Randolph, Robbinsville and Shrewsbury.
Correction, July 31, 2026. An earlier version of this article said the network stood at 58 certified communities. That figure was accurate when the cohort was announced but is no longer current. Checked directly against the State’s certified-localities page on July 30 and again on July 31, 2026, the list holds 66 entries: 59 municipalities and 7 counties. We have removed hardcoded counts elsewhere on the site for exactly this reason; this page was missed, and it is fixed here.
What certification actually means, stripped of ceremony: the town has adopted a formal filming ordinance or enforceable code of conduct, named designated film roles, and completed the State’s training. It does not guarantee your permit, your location or your parking. It guarantees a phone number that gets answered by someone who knows what a company move is, which, if you have produced in towns without one, is not a small thing.
It also does not mean the town has published its rules. We have now researched several certified municipalities whose ordinance, application, fees and lead times were not publicly available at all. Certification proves the process exists; it does not prove you can read it. Ask for the documents in writing.
A few standouts from a scout’s chair. Lambertville brings Delaware River town charm that reads as anywhere in small-town America, 1900 to now. New Brunswick adds a dense, walkable downtown with institutional architecture. Oceanport is worth noting for its geography: it borders the Netflix Fort Monmouth campus and certified the year before those stages are scheduled to open, joining the towns around major studio construction in establishing trained liaisons and formal processes ahead of the demand.
Three from this cohort now have full guides here. We have since verified Highland Park, Robbinsville and Lambertville contact-by-contact against their enacted ordinances, along with Hamilton Township. Where a town’s own documents contradict each other, and several do, our guides publish the conflict rather than pick a side for you.
The full network, with every cohort and the official program links, lives in our Film Ready directory, and our town guides go deeper on the communities we have verified. If your town is thinking about certification, the State program is at nj.gov/njfilm, and we help municipalities get production-ready too.
Information checked July 31, 2026