Best In Dfw: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Best In Dfw is and who runs it

Best In Dfw is the people's choice awards program run by The Dallas Morning News, the daily newspaper of Dallas, Texas. The paper describes it as the people's choice awards for the best food, drink, shops, services and things to do in North Texas, which places it firmly in the best-of vertical: readers first nominate the businesses they believe deserve the title, then vote for them field by field. Unlike many regional ballots that rent space on a dedicated contest platform, this newspaper hosts the ballot itself, so the voting page, the nomination form and the winners coverage all sit under the dallasnews.com domain.

Where a typical best-of contest is a single list of favorites, this program is built at scale. The paper's 2026 announcement explains that within its categories it identified 129 subcategories meant to encompass nearly every aspect of life in D-FW. A diner can back its favorite barbecue joint, a homeowner its favorite plumber, and a parent its favorite kids' activity, all on the same ballot.

The facts below summarize the program as the newspaper presents it.

Dates, editions and what the paper leaves unpublished

The newspaper has run Best In Dfw in 2024, then again in 2025, and again in 2026, making three straight cycles of the program. Each cycle follows the same two-phase shape: a nomination phase, then a public voting month.

The dated anchors the paper has published are specific. For the 2025 round, voting opened in June and ran through June 30, with the paper urging readers to cast ballots for the best businesses in North Texas over that window. For the 2026 cycle, the paper announced that nominations for Best in DFW: People's Choice opened April 20, and that the year was already gearing up with over 30,000 nominations received, from which the top five nominees in each subcategory were selected for the ballot.

What the newspaper has not printed anywhere in its published coverage is the full nomination and voting calendar for the 2026 cycle; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. No eligibility terms for voters are spelled out on those pages either, and the complete subcategory roster is not listed alongside the counts. Those gaps are worth knowing before you plan a push, because a business that assumes a window that has already closed loses its whole runway.

Treated as a series, the program has run in consecutive recent years with the voting month landing in the early summer. The next expected edition would fall in 2027.

How a supporter votes on the Best In Dfw ballot

The literal mechanic is simple and deliberately repeatable. A supporter opens the ballot at dallasnews.com/best-in-dfw/, browses the subcategories, and casts a vote for a named business in any field. The paper's own instruction, published with the 2026 voting announcement, is that you can vote in each subcategory daily over the following month to help your favorites rise to the top. That daily reset is the core of the design: one visit counts once, and a favorite climbs only if its supporters keep coming back.

Before the voting phase, the nomination phase determines who appears at all. Supporters submit businesses through the nomination form while it is open, and the newspaper then selects the top five nominees in each subcategory to form the ballot. A business that misses that cut cannot be voted for, no matter how loud its customers are, which is why the nomination window matters as much as the voting month.

After voting closes, the paper publishes the outcome on its site. The 2025 cycle produced both a winners-revealed article collecting North Texans' top picks and a roundup of every business that won Best in DFW in 2025, so a winning business gains a permanent, linked mention from the region's major daily rather than a fleeting social post.

Nothing on the ballot pages indicates any cost to vote, and the program is presented as open public participation throughout.

Where Best In Dfw sits among Texas best-of ballots

Dallas readers have more than one local ballot to choose from, and knowing the difference keeps a campaign focused. The closest neighbor is the Best of Dallas Readers' Choice, a separate program from a different publisher that courts the same shoppers under a separate rulebook and a separate ballot of its own. A business nominated in both is effectively running two campaigns, and support earned on one stays with that ballot alone.

The Dallas Morning News' program is the only one of this group that belongs to the metro's major daily. The others cover different Texas markets: the Best of Austin Readers Poll in the capital, the Best of Houston in the state's largest city, the Best of San Antonio in South Texas, and the Best of El Paso on the western border. Closer to home, Best of Fort Worth covers the western half of the metro under Fort Worth Magazine.

What distinguishes Best In Dfw within that field is scale and stakes. With 129 subcategories reaching into everyday life, the ballot runs deeper than a typical readers' poll, and a win carries the imprimatur of the region's newspaper. The trade-off is discipline: with a top-five nomination cut and a daily-vote mechanic, a scattered push in the final days does less for a nominee here than steady organizing from the day nominations open.

Strengthening support in a daily-vote newspaper ballot

Because this ballot resets daily in every subcategory, the campaigns that win in North Texas are the ones built for repetition rather than for a single announcement. A restaurant that prints the ballot address on receipts, a salon that texts its regulars each morning of the voting month, a shop that reminds its email list daily: each converts the paper's own mechanic into momentum. The 2026 nomination figure of over 30,000 submissions shows how competitive the entry point already is, so starting during the nomination phase matters as much as the voting month that follows.

On outside help: the ballot pages available do not publish any organizer rule about purchased or automated votes for this program, so the honest position is that no published stance exists. What is certain is the mechanic, a fresh daily vote per subcategory from real supporters, and any support strategy works best when it feeds that pattern instead of fighting it. Businesses weighing options can read our guide to getting more votes online, which covers daily-vote ballots specifically, and should study the terms printed on the live ballot before the window opens.