Applications for the 2026 round of the Texas STEP export grant are due Thursday, September 10, before 5:00 p.m. Central, submitted online through TDA-GO. Mailed, emailed, and faxed applications are not accepted, and the Texas Department of Agriculture will not review a proposal before the deadline — there is no informal check-in, no second opinion, no partial credit for having meant to finish. That date is the one every announcement leads with. For a company that hasn’t already registered, it’s close to fictional.
Needless to say, none of this bends after the fact. A company gets one application per program year, and a determination of late or ineligible is final — TDA does not entertain appeals.
Here’s why the filing date isn’t the real deadline. A first-time applicant needs a Unique Entity Identifier and an active SAM.gov account, and SAM.gov registration can take up to two weeks — longer if the federal system is backed up, which it tends to be in the weeks before a deadline everyone else noticed at the same time. A company without a Tax Identification Number or Employer Identification Number needs up to two more weeks to get one of those. On top of that, TDA-GO — the state’s own application portal — asks for 48 to 72 hours to approve a new profile, and the agency is explicit that last-minute registrations aren’t guaranteed. Call it the registration tax: two federal registrations and one state approval, stacked in sequence, that have nothing to do with a company’s export readiness and everything to do with whether it started the paperwork three weeks early. It’s the most likely reason a qualified applicant could miss a grant window entirely.
Stack those windows against September 10 and the deadline that actually governs a company’s chances isn’t the filing date. It’s the day, roughly three weeks earlier, that someone checks whether the company has a UEI.
(I’ll say this once, plainly, and move on: check today, not next week.)
Registration is a logistics problem with an easy fix: start early. The scoring problem is harder, and it’s the part almost nobody writes about.
What actually gets scored
Assume the registration is handled and the application is in front of a reviewer. What is that reviewer actually grading? Not, as it turns out, whether the paperwork is complete. TDA publishes its rubric, and it grades the applicant’s export thinking, not its filing hygiene. Each question scores 1 to 5, Very Poor to Very Good, across four sections:
| Section | Weight |
|---|---|
| Applicant overview and information | 10% |
| Product and export activity | 50% |
| Project impact, proposal and budget | 30% |
| Project budget narrative | 10% |
Eighty percent of the score sits in two sections that have nothing to do with whether the paperwork is complete and everything to do with whether the company has a coherent plan for selling abroad.
The 50% section — product and export activity — asks for a clear description of the company’s products, whether and how it’s already represented in foreign countries, the known barriers to exporting those products, the business’s capacity and management commitment to increasing export activity, and its export and distribution plans. None of that is fill-in-the-blank. A company that hasn’t thought past a one-line ambition to sell abroad is going to read, to the reviewer, like a good opportunity to save the taxpayer a few dollars by withholding an award — no matter how clean the rest of the submission looks.
The 30% section — project impact, proposal and budget — asks what internal resources the company will actually deploy, how the proposed activity supports its one-year goals and overall export strategy, and, in what TDA calls the Stipend Activity Detail, how great the need is, how effective the specific activity will be at establishing or increasing exports, and what the long-term benefit looks like. This is where a grant application stops being an application and starts functioning as a short export strategy document. Companies that treat it as the former tend to read that way to a reviewer who’s read a hundred of them.
It appears TDA built these incentives to reward planning discipline over paperwork habit. First-time applicants — companies that have never received a Texas STEP award — get four bonus points automatically. Previous recipients, on the other hand, carry a risk rating that can subtract up to fifteen points, built from late or incomplete reimbursement requests, late performance reporting, and unspent funds returned to the program. Whatever the state calls a rubric, it functions here as a mild credit history: the newcomer starts ahead, and the sloppy repeat applicant starts behind.
The shape of a good application
The program has been around long enough that we titled our own 2017 post on it “Free money for small exporters.” It isn’t quite that. This is a cost-reimbursement grant, not an advance: the company pays the eligible expense first and gets 90% of it back afterward, against a 10% cash match that can’t come from another federal source. That’s a mechanical detail, but it’s the kind that separates a company genuinely ready to spend on an export push from one applying because a headline once said “free money.”
The $20,000 cap for Market Expansion and $10,000 for New to Export, and the September 1, 2026 to June 30, 2027 grant period, are fixed regardless of how well an application is written. What isn’t fixed is the score — and the score is decided almost entirely by whether the company can explain, specifically, what it’s trying to do abroad and why STEP money is the right lever for it right now.
A company that doesn’t yet have that explanation — that knows it wants to export more but hasn’t put a shape on it — is better served working that out before September 10 than after. Swift Passage offers a free export readiness consultation for exactly that stage. A UEI gets a company into the application. It’s the plan that gets the grant.