Dallas Morning News Best in DFW: How Voting Works & How to Win

A metro-wide ballot next to six single-city Texas ballots

Texas runs "best of" ballots for El Paso, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Fort Worth and Dallas proper, each covering one city. Best in DFW is built differently: The Dallas Morning News runs it for the whole North Texas region rather than for a single city limit, covering food, drink, shops, services and things to do across the metro.

A business picking where to nominate should weigh that distinction directly. A single-city ballot judges only entries inside that one city's own results; Best in DFW's North Texas framing instead pools a business in with every other North Texas city inside the same metro-wide ballot.

Practically, that means a Fort Worth shop and a Dallas restaurant are not kept in separate lanes the way Best of Fort Worth and Best of Dallas Readers' Choice would sort them. Both compete for the same regional recognition on the same Best in DFW page, which is a different kind of contest than winning a single city's own readers' poll.

How many categories run, and how often one person may vote, is not stated; confirm on the live ballot each cycle before assuming last year's structure still applies.

A two-stage ballot run directly by the newspaper, not a third-party platform

Unlike a ballot hosted through an outside voting platform, Best in DFW runs on The Dallas Morning News' own site. Nominations open first, described on the confirmed page as opening April 20 for the 2026 round; a separate voting stage follows, with the most recent confirmed instance, the 2025 round, running through June 30.

That two-stage shape, nominate first, then vote, is common across readers'-choice ballots generally, but the exact gap between the two stages, and this year's own closing date, go beyond what is confirmed above. A North Texas business should treat both stages as separate deadlines rather than one combined window.

Running the ballot directly, rather than routing it through an outside voting vendor, also means The Dallas Morning News controls its own publishing calendar around Best in DFW. Nominations news, a voting-open announcement and a winners writeup each tend to show up as their own separate article on dallasnews.com rather than living together on one static contest page the way a third-party platform usually organizes things, which is part of why a single full-year schedule is not gathered in one confirmed place.

Why "Best of" plus a Texas city name invites mix-ups

Six other Texas ballots use nearly the same naming pattern for their own single cities: Best of Austin, Best of Dallas Readers' Choice, Best of El Paso, Best of Houston, Best of San Antonio, plus Fort Worth Magazine's own take, Best of Fort Worth. None of them settle a result alongside Best in DFW, and Best in DFW settles nothing for any of them.

North Texas is the boundary, not a single city

The confirmed page states its own coverage plainly: food, drink, shops, services and things to do in North Texas. That framing sits above any one city's own ballot, Dallas included, since Fort Worth, sitting inside the same North Texas region, has its own separate Fort Worth Magazine ballot running alongside Best in DFW rather than folded into it.

A business weighing where to nominate should read that coverage line for what it says, a regional ballot, rather than assume it works exactly like a single-city readers' poll. Three confirmed editions, 2024 through 2026, is not a long history by some standards, but it is enough to show the format has repeated rather than run once.

Building support around two deadlines, not one

Best in DFW's two-stage structure, a nomination period followed by a separate voting period, means a North Texas business effectively faces two deadlines in one cycle rather than one. The 2026 round's nominations opened April 20; the most recent confirmed voting round, in 2025, closed June 30. Exactly where the current cycle stands should be checked directly rather than assumed from those two data points; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Real customers, asked to nominate and later to vote, both more than once, are what actually moves a ballot with this shape. Fake or automated activity threatens the whole entry rather than helping it along, and that danger applies at either stage, not the voting one alone. A nomination is one thing; The Dallas Morning News alone decides the win once its own process wraps up. is buying votes legal separates a legitimate push from a risky one, buying votes online lays out what paid help usually involves for a two-stage format like this, and award-vote campaign planning is written around a people's-choice ballot shaped the way Best in DFW is.