SFI 2026: A Working Farmer’s Guide to the 71 Actions, Payment Rates and the June Window

Deadline planning: For the opening windows and claim dates, keep the UK farming grants deadline calendar 2026 alongside this SFI guide.

SFI 2026 Actions — Last updated: May 2026. This guide pulls together the new Sustainable Farming Incentive offer that opens to small farms and first-time applicants in June 2026, the 71 actions and their payment rates, the two-window application approach, and how SFI 2026 sits alongside the refreshed Capital Grants and the devolved schemes in Wales and Scotland. It is general information, not bespoke land-management advice. See the planning checklist at the end for what to do in the next ninety days.

Grant route note: This SFI guide is one part of the wider UK farming grants 2026 hub, which compares SFI, Capital Grants, Countryside Stewardship and FETF in one place.

The phone went around eight on a Monday in February. A neighbour two villages over, decent arable man, wanted to know if I’d seen the Defra blog post that morning. I had. The bones of SFI 2026 had landed and the questions had started to land with them. Could he get back into the scheme? What would the rates look like? Would the funding run out before he could click submit?

For the bones of two decades I’ve grown salad and veg on this Suffolk holding, and the last couple of years I’ve taken on a chunk of arable too. Both qualify for SFI actions, which is part of why I’ve been watching this scheme more closely than most. The 2024 version closed to new applicants in March 2025 with the budget exhausted, and the agricultural press has been running thin on hard answers ever since.[1] What landed on 8 January and 24 February 2026 is the answer.[2][3] The catch is that SFI 2026 is a leaner, more rationed scheme than the one we knew, and you only get a couple of clear shots at it.

This guide pulls together what the rules actually say, what each of the 71 SFI 2026 actions pays, when the windows open, how the new offer differs from SFI 2024, and where it falls short for working farms. It’s the conversation I’ve had with our agronomist, our land agent and most of the parish over the last few weeks, written down.

SFI 2026 in plain English

The Sustainable Farming Incentive is the standing agri-environment scheme for England, paid by the Rural Payments Agency and administered by Defra. It’s part of Environmental Land Management, the post-Brexit replacement for the Common Agricultural Policy’s direct payments. The 2026 version, branded “SFI26” in the official communications, was unveiled at the NFU Conference in Birmingham on 24 February 2026 alongside a wider package of grants and innovation funding.[3]

The bones of it look like this. Eligible farm businesses can hold a single SFI agreement worth up to £100,000 per year, drawn from a list of 71 actions across soil, hedgerows, integrated pest management, nutrient management, low-input grassland, agroforestry, moorland, organics and a handful of capital items.[2] Agreements run for three years, down from the five-year term used in SFI 2024. The minimum holding size is 3 hectares of agricultural land.[3]

There are three ways the new scheme has been tightened. First, the £100,000 annual agreement cap is new, and applies to the whole agreement, not per action. Second, the area of any rotational action is fixed at the year-one figure: in years two and three of the agreement the area can fall but cannot rise.[2] Third, ten of the most popular wildlife and flower-mix actions are now subject to a combined 25% land-area cap, applied across all SFI agreements attached to the holding from 26 March 2024 onwards.[3]

What’s gone, on the face of it, is the open door. Until March 2025 you could apply for SFI any time you wanted. From June 2026 the scheme runs on a two-window basis, with each window closing the moment Defra reckons the budget for it is committed.[3] The dressing-gown application at midnight is a thing of the past.

The 71 SFI 2026 actions, by category

The 102 actions in the SFI 2024 expanded offer have been pruned to 71 SFI 2026 actions in the new scheme.[2] Defra describes the cull as a focus on “high-value-for-money” environmental outcomes, and 31 actions have been cut on those grounds. The categories that survived are below, with the headline payment rates and the action codes you’ll see on the application portal.

Soil health (CSAM)

The headline soil action remains CSAM2, multi-species winter cover crop, at £129 per hectare per year on a three-year agreement.[4] The cover has to be in place to cover the soil through December, January and February, drawn from at least two species in two or more of the eligible plant families. CSAM3, herbal leys, has been retained but the rate has been cut from £382 to £224 per hectare. That’s a 41% reduction, and one of the sharpest in the new offer.[5] Defra’s argument is that the original rate was overpriced and risked taking productive land out of food production. Most of the herbal-ley acreage on commercial arable farms will not work at the new number. CSAM1, the assess-soil-and-write-a-management-plan action, has been removed entirely. Defra reckons it didn’t deliver enough environmental benefit to justify the spend.[2]

Hedgerows (CHRW)

Hedgerow management survives in skinnier form. CHRW2, manage hedgerows, pays £13 per 100 metres of hedge for one side managed.[6] If you manage both sides, you can claim it twice on the same length of hedge. CHRW1, assess and record hedgerow condition, and CHRW3, maintain or establish hedgerow trees, have both been removed.[7] Hedgerow tree planting has been pushed across to Capital Grants under codes BN11 and TE1, which is a tidier home for it but does mean a separate application.

Integrated pest management (CIPM)

The IPM plan action, CIPM1, is gone. What survives are the field-margin and flower-mix actions: CIPM2, flower-rich grass margins, blocks or in-field strips; CIPM3, companion crops on arable and horticultural land; and CIPM4, no use of insecticide on arable crops and horticultural crops. CIPM2 sits inside the new 25% area cap alongside CAHL1, CAHL2, CAHL3, CIGL1, CIGL2, WBD3, AHW1, AHW9, AHW11 and the newly added AHW7 enhanced overwinter stubble.[3]

Nutrient management (CNUM)

CNUM1, the nutrient management review report, has gone with the other plan-and-paper actions. CNUM3, legume fallow, has been retained at a reduced rate of £532 per hectare, down from £593.[5] The rotational rules apply here in particular: whatever you put under legume fallow in year one is your ceiling for the agreement.

Wildlife and bird food (AHW, CAHL, WBD)

The wildlife actions are the ones the 25% cap was written for. CAHL1, pollen and nectar flower mix, and CAHL2, winter bird food on arable and horticultural land, are the most popular. CAHL2 has been cut from £853 to £648 per hectare in the new offer.[5] AHW7, enhanced overwinter stubble, has been added to the capped list, which means farms that ran a stubble-heavy 2025 will need to size their applications carefully. AHW9 unharvested cereal headland and AHW11 cultivated areas for arable plants both remain available subject to the same 25% combined cap.

Improved grassland (CIGL, IGL)

CIGL3, four to twelve metre grass buffer strip on improved grassland, sits at £235 per hectare and is one of the few grassland actions that hasn’t moved much. CIGL1, take improved grassland field corners or blocks out of management, and CIGL2, winter bird food on improved grassland, are inside the 25% cap. GRH6, the species-rich grassland action, has been removed from SFI altogether and pushed across to the Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier scheme run by Natural England.[2] That’s a significant loss for the meadow restorers, and the CLA, the NFU and Buglife have all said so on the record.

Agroforestry (AGF)

The agroforestry actions are the ones Defra most wants more uptake on. AGF1, maintain very low density agroforestry of 30 to 50 trees per hectare on less sensitive land, pays £248 per hectare. AGF2, low density at 51 to 130 trees per hectare, pays £385 per hectare.[8] Both can be combined with arable cropping in the alleys (silvoarable) or with grassland (silvopastoral), and both stack onto the existing land use. The catch is that the establishment costs sit with the capital grant or the landowner, and the trees themselves are a 20-year commitment with no easy exit if the system doesn’t pay.

Moorland and uplands (UPL)

The eight moorland actions are the only category where rates have actually risen. UPL1, moderate livestock grazing on moorland, has gone from £20 to £35 per hectare. UPL2, low livestock grazing on moorland, from £53 to £89 per hectare.[3] Defra’s reasoning is that upland farmers have been undercompensated against the recent rise in livestock prices and the cost of shepherding. The increases apply to existing SFI24 agreements as well as new SFI26 ones, which is the right call for once.

Organics (OR), low-input cereals and the rest

A clutch of organic actions sits under the OR codes for organic conversion and management on improved land, unimproved land, and horticultural land. The horticultural-organic actions are the ones that catch our salad and veg holding most directly, and the rates have held up better than the herbal leys did. The remaining slots are filled with water-management, boundary, soil-erosion and a handful of access actions.

The full table of all 71 actions with confirmed rates is on the Defra Farming Blog post of 24 February 2026.[2] If you’re sitting at a kitchen table with a holding map and a calculator, that’s the document to print.

How SFI 2026 differs from SFI 2024

If you held an SFI 2024 agreement, four things have changed and one thing hasn’t.

What’s changed. The rolling, open-all-year application approach has gone. Two windows a year, fixed in starting month, closed when the budget is committed. The agreement ceiling is £100,000, which is a meaningful constraint at the larger end. The agreement length is three years, not five, which makes the arithmetic on cover crop and herbal-ley investments less favourable. And payment rates on three of the most-claimed actions have been cut: herbal leys, winter bird food and legume fallow.[5]

What hasn’t changed. Existing SFI 2024 agreements run on at the rates they were signed at. Those agreements, of which Defra had around 37,000 on the books at the point the scheme closed in March 2025, are unaffected by the 2026 cuts and the £100,000 cap.[1] If you’re already in, sit tight.

The newly added 25% area cap is the change that has most upset the arable side of the trade. AHW7, enhanced overwinter stubble, has been brought into the capped list of ten actions for SFI 2026 applicants. On a 200-acre arable holding running stubbles plus a winter bird food strip and a pollinator margin, the combined cap will start to bite.

The removed actions also matter. The five “assess and write a plan” actions (CSAM1, CIPM1, CNUM1, CHRW1, plus the structural hedge survey) all delivered low value-for-money in Defra’s audit and have been cut. They were also, for many farms, the easy entry-point actions, the things you got paid to do that you should have been doing anyway. The new offer demands more land use change for the same money, which is the policy point.

Where I land on this is that SFI 2026 is a more honest scheme than SFI 2024 was. The original rates on herbal leys and winter bird food were tagged too high, and uptake outran any reasonable forecast of the budget. If we want a scheme that lasts the decade and not just two budget cycles, the rates have to be defendable. They are, just about, now.

The two-window approach

The single biggest mechanical change is the application timing. Defra calls it a two-window approach.[3]

Window 1 opens in June 2026 and is reserved for two groups. The first is small farms, defined as farm businesses with up to 50 hectares of agricultural land. The second is farms that do not currently hold an RPA-administered Environmental Land Management revenue agreement: in plain English, first-time applicants. To be eligible for Window 1 the business has to have been registered with the RPA by 1 January 2026.[3] The window is expected to remain open for around two months, but Defra has said it may close sooner if the budget allocated to Window 1 fills up.

Window 2 opens in September 2026 and is open to all eligible farms regardless of size or existing agreement status. Defra has not committed to a fixed end date for Window 2, and the official wording is that it will close when the budget is allocated. Public updates are promised at 25%, 50% and 75% commitment, so you’ll get warning, but the warning isn’t a guarantee.

The split is designed to give smaller and first-time applicants a clear shot at the scheme before the larger, professionally advised holdings come in and absorb the budget. That’s a reasonable bit of policy. It does mean that farms over 50 hectares with no existing agreement have to wait until September, which on a salad-and-veg holding with a heavy summer workload is awkward timing. We’ll be assembling our paperwork in May and have it ready to upload on day one of Window 1, because we’re under 50 hectares and that’s our window.

If I’m honest, the second window is the one that worries me. Window 2 is where the bulk of the application volume will land, the budget will be tighter than at Window 1, and the larger holdings will be in the queue first.

Capital Grants 2026: the £225m refresh

Sitting alongside the new SFI is the refreshed Capital Grants offer, which opens in July 2026.[9] The funding pot has been lifted from £150m in the 2025 round to £225m for 2026.[10] Defra warned in advance that demand could exceed the pot again and that early submission matters.

Capital Grants 2026 covers four broad item categories with their own per-application caps:

• Boundaries, trees and orchards, capped at £35,000 per application. Hedgerow planting (BN11), tree planting (TE1), stone walling, fencing, gateways for stock control.
• Water quality, capped at £25,000 per application. Concrete yards re-laid for slurry control, roof guttering and downpipes to separate clean and dirty water, watercourse protection.
• Air quality, capped at £25,000 per application. Slurry covers, low-emission spreading kit, ammonia abatement.
• Natural flood management, capped at £25,000 per application. Leaky dams, attenuation ponds, riparian buffers.[10]

You can submit one application per Single Business Identifier (SBI), and Catchment Sensitive Farming approvals must be in place before submission for the water-quality items. The full list of eligible items will be published in May 2026 ahead of the July opening.[9]

What I’d actually do is map the capital application against the SFI revenue actions you intend to claim. If you’re putting in for AGF1 agroforestry on the SFI revenue side, the establishment costs (trees, guards, labour) belong on the Capital Grants application. The two schemes are designed to dovetail. Most farms apply for them in isolation and miss money.

Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland

England isn’t the whole of UK farming. The devolved schemes are running their own timetables.

Wales rolled out the Sustainable Farming Scheme on 1 January 2026 after a long, fraught consultation.[11] The Universal Layer pays a habitat maintenance rate of £69 per hectare for 2026, a woodland maintenance rate of £62 per hectare, and a Social Value Payment of £107 per hectare across all eligible land.[11] A one-off Stability Payment of £1,000 is available to farms joining the scheme in 2026 with 100 hectares or less. The Basic Payment Scheme runs down on a five-year glide: 60% in 2026, 40% in 2027, 20% in 2028, ending in 2029.[11] Welsh farmers should be using the Welsh Government Ready Reckoner to model their numbers before signing.

Scotland’s main equivalent is the Agri-Environment Climate Scheme. The 2026 round opened on 23 February and closes on 20 June 2026.[12] Successful applicants start their commitment in January 2027, with the first management payment in 2028. AECS is a more capital-grants-and-targeted-options scheme than SFI: less of a flat-rate menu, more of a competitive scoring exercise. If you’re in Scotland, talk to your local Rural Payments and Inspections Division office before the deadline.

Northern Ireland operates its own Farm Sustainability Payment under the Programme for Government, with separate environmental scheme support administered by the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs. The cross-border position remains the messiest of the four, and Defra has been clear that SFI 2026 does not extend to Northern Ireland.

A worked example: 30 hectares of salad, veg and arable

Take a working example, because the actions list isn’t much use in the abstract. Imagine a Suffolk holding similar to ours: 30 hectares total, broadly half horticultural (salad and veg under polytunnels and field-scale), half arable that came in on a three-year tenancy two seasons ago. No existing SFI agreement. The holding is comfortably under the 50-hectare threshold for Window 1.

What might it apply for? On the soil side, CSAM2 multi-species winter cover crop on the 12 hectares of arable that aren’t in a winter cereal: 12 ha at £129 per ha is £1,548 a year. A pollinator margin under CIPM2 around the field edges, perhaps 1.5 hectares total once you net off the polytunnels and tracks: at the sort of rate this action carries, around £700 a year. CHRW2 hedgerow management on roughly two kilometres of boundary hedge, both sides managed, is 4,000 metres of qualifying hedgerow at £13 per 100 metres, or £520 a year. A small AGF1 planting in the alleys of the lighter arable land at 30 trees per hectare across, say, four hectares would be £992 a year, plus a Capital Grant for the trees themselves.

The numbers add up to roughly £3,750 a year on a holding of this size, before the Capital Grant items. That’s not a fortune, but it’s a fortnight of decent margin on the polytunnels in a half-decent year, and most of the actions sit comfortably with how we’d want to manage the land anyway. Multiply across a three-year agreement and you’re at £11,000 of revenue plus a separate four-figure Capital Grant. On a small horticultural and arable mixed holding, that’s worth doing.

The bit the worked example doesn’t capture is the time. Each action has its own evidence requirements: photographs, records, established dates, plant families used. Underestimate that and you’ll be on the back foot at the first inspection.

Application order: what to do first, second, third

Don’t apply piecemeal. The order matters.

First, register on the Rural Payments service if you aren’t already, and confirm your land parcels are mapped correctly. The 1 January 2026 RPA registration cut-off applies to Window 1 applicants; if you missed that, Window 2 in September is your route. Land mapping errors are the single most common reason applications get bounced.

Second, scope the actions you want to claim against your land use plan, your rotation, and the 25% combined area cap on the wildlife actions. A spreadsheet does this in an afternoon. Get the rotation right before you commit to a three-year action that pins the year-one acreage as a ceiling.

Third, line up the Capital Grants application alongside the SFI revenue application. Tree guards, hedge planting, fencing, slurry kit, leaky dams: capital. Cover crops, herbal leys, hedge management, agroforestry maintenance: revenue. Map them together so you’re not paying for trees out of cash flow when there’s a £35,000 capital cap sitting unused.

Fourth, if you’re an SFI24 agreement holder, leave that agreement alone. Don’t try to terminate and reapply under SFI26 for a marginal gain on one or two actions. The administrative drag isn’t worth it, and the rate cuts on herbal leys and winter bird food make it a worse bargain in 2026 anyway.

Fifth, submit on day one or as close as you can manage. Window 1 has historically over-subscribed and Window 2 is expected to do the same. The 25%, 50% and 75% commitment notifications give some warning, but applications take days to draft and the warning may compress to hours.

Common mistakes and what to avoid

A handful of traps catch new applicants every cycle.

Treating the £100,000 cap as a target rather than a ceiling. Most working farms won’t get within shouting distance of £100,000 of SFI revenue. Designing the application to push for it can leave you locked into rotations that don’t suit the soil.

Stacking the rotational actions to year-one maximum and finding out year two that you wanted to expand. The rotational area limit is a one-way ratchet down. Take a slightly conservative year-one figure if you’re unsure.

Missing the 25% combined cap on the ten wildlife and flower-mix actions, particularly with AHW7 stubble now inside the cap. Add up the area first, then trim. A 100-hectare arable farm cannot put 30 hectares into combined CAHL1 and AHW7, even if the agronomy would otherwise work.

Underestimating the evidence burden. Each action has documentation requirements (planting dates, seed mixtures used, photographs, livestock numbers). The RPA’s payments depend on the records, not just the inspection. Set up the file at the start of year one and update it monthly.

Forgetting the inheritance tax interaction. Land managed under SFI agreements has been within Agricultural Property Relief since 6 April 2025, so an SFI agreement doesn’t knock the land out of APR. From 6 April 2026 the new £2.5 million APR/BPR cap applies to all qualifying assets including SFI-managed land.[13] On larger family holdings the SFI revenue can also boost taxable trading profits in the BPR test, so check the trading-status arithmetic if your diversification income is substantial.

What I’d actually do, if you’re new to SFI, is start small. Three or four actions in year one, well evidenced, pays better than nine actions you can’t keep track of. Add more in year two of the agreement only if the recordkeeping has held up.

Where SFI 2026 falls short

The official communications make SFI 2026 sound like a clean and rational scheme. From this side of the gate, it has three real weaknesses.

The first is the disappearance of the species-rich grassland action and the broader hollowing-out of the grassland offer. Pushing GRH6 across to Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier means the meadow restorers now compete in a different scheme with a much more limited budget and a competitive scoring system. That’s a backward step for biodiversity, and Buglife and the CLA have both said so on the record.[2]

The second is the 41% rate cut on herbal leys. Herbal leys do real soil work, particularly on the lighter Suffolk land we farm. At £382 a hectare they were attractive on a marginal arable field. At £224 they aren’t, and most of the acreage that went under herbal leys in 2024 will not renew at the new rate. That’s a lot of soil structure work that won’t happen.

The third is the £100,000 agreement cap and the three-year term. For a tenanted holding or a contract-farmed estate the cap is workable. For an owner-occupied family farm doing real environmental work, the cap is a soft constraint that pushes you to keep the agreement narrower than you might otherwise. The three-year term is too short to amortise establishment costs on agroforestry, hedgerow planting, or major rotational change.

Looking back, I’d say the new SFI is policy designed for a Treasury that’s lost confidence in its own department. The rate-cuts and the cap are a way of saying “we’re paying less for the same actions, and we’re capping how much any one farm can claim”. That’ll save money. It won’t deliver the environmental outcomes the original ELM ambitions promised.

A planning checklist for the next 90 days

Whether you’re a small horticultural holding like ours or a 400-hectare arable estate, the next ninety days look similar. Run this list before Window 1 opens in June.

1. Get your RPA registration and land mapping clean

Open the Rural Payments service, check every parcel is correctly mapped to the right land cover, and fix any errors now. Window 1 closed for new RPA registrations on 1 January 2026, but mapping corrections are still possible. If your application is bounced for a mapping error, you’re back at the start.

2. Map your land use against the 71 SFI 2026 actions

Print the action list from the Defra Farming Blog of 24 February 2026. Walk the farm with it. Identify which fields could carry which actions without disrupting the rotation. Rule out anything that fights the cropping plan; pick the actions where the agronomy works and the payment rate justifies the change.

3. Sense-check the 25% combined area cap

If you’re claiming any of the ten capped actions (CIPM2, CAHL1, CAHL2, CAHL3, CIGL1, CIGL2, WBD3, AHW1, AHW9, AHW11) plus the new addition AHW7, sum the proposed areas and check they don’t exceed 25% of the farmed area across all your SFI agreements. Trim where needed.

4. Cost the agreement against the £100,000 cap

For most farms this is a non-issue. For larger holdings, model the rate × area for each action and confirm the total is under £100,000 a year. If it isn’t, drop the lower-payment actions or the actions that fit the rotation worst.

5. Plan the Capital Grants application alongside

Capital Grants 2026 opens in July 2026 with a £35,000 boundary cap and £25,000 caps on water, air and natural flood management. List the capital items you’d need (trees, fencing, slurry covers, downpipes) and submit a separate Capital Grants application. Don’t fund tree guards out of cash flow when the grant is sitting there.

6. Set up your evidence folder before day one

Photographs, planting dates, seed certificates, mixture records, livestock numbers. Each action has its own evidence list. Set up a monthly diary entry to update the file. The RPA pays on documentation, not on intent.

7. Talk to the agronomist and the land agent before submission

A second pair of eyes catches the obvious mistakes. The agronomist will tell you which cover crop and herbal ley mixes will actually establish on your soils. The land agent will spot the rotational and tenancy issues that a desk review misses.

8. Diary the Window 1 opening date and submit on day one

The Defra blog will announce the Window 1 opening date in May 2026. Block out the first two days of the window for submission. If you’re under 50 hectares or a first-time applicant, this is your shot at clean budget; don’t hold the application back.

Done properly, the eight steps above will take a fortnight of evenings. The applications that succeed in Window 1 will be the ones drafted in May, ready for upload on day one in June.

Where this is heading

The Government has committed to the SFI offer for the rest of this Parliament. The rates published in February 2026 are the rates that apply to agreements signed during 2026, and Defra has said that future-cycle adjustments will be flagged in advance.[2] The £225m Capital Grants pot for 2026 is the largest annual capital allocation since the scheme’s existence, and the political signalling is that it stays at this level for at least the 2027 round.

Two things to watch. First, the speed of Window 2 closure in September will tell us whether the £100,000 cap and the rate cuts have eased budget pressure or whether the new offer is still over-demanded. If Window 2 closes in October, expect another round of action-level rate adjustments by the end of 2027. Second, the Land Use Framework published alongside SFI26 sets out a longer-term ambition to integrate food production with environmental delivery on a county basis. The framework is not law, but it’s the policy direction, and the next five-year cycle of SFI is likely to draw from it.

For now, the rules are the rules, the windows are fixed, and the applications that get funded will be the ones submitted on day one of Window 1 by farms that did the homework in May. If you’ve been sitting on the fence since the 2025 closure, the fence is no longer a comfortable place to be.