The new SFI offer for 2026

Credit: Becky Briggs

The new Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) offer will launch this year. It will continue to support sustainable farming in England and help encourage growth.

In response to feedback, we are improving the new SFI offer to:

make it simpler and more focused improve fairness and accessibility provide certainty and transparency

These changes will deliver an SFI that is simpler and fairer, so farmers can plan with confidence.

We will work with stakeholders now to get these changes right before the new SFI offer launches, and we will publish full scheme details before the first application window opens.

Simplicity and focus

To make the new SFI offer simpler and more focused, we are streamlining it by reducing the number of actions.

There will still be a broad offer to suit different types of farms and plenty of choice, with greater emphasis on actions that support sustainable food production.

This will include: 

limiting how much land can be put into actions that take land out of production. Previously, there were 10 ‘limited area’ actions in SFI. We are exploring whether more actions should be limited to a small proportion of the farm so they work alongside food production reviewing payment rates for actions that take land out of production where uptake has been particularly high. Fairness and accessibility

We want as many farmers as possible to benefit from SFI. This will help us achieve the government’s target of doubling the number of farms providing sufficient year-round resources for farm wildlife by December 2030, compared with 2025.

We are considering ways to do this and will publish further details before we launch the new SFI offer.

Certainty and transparency

We know you need certainty to plan ahead, so we can confirm there will be two SFI application windows this year.

Opens Who can apply First window June Farmers with small farms

Farmers without existing environmental land management agreements Second window September All farmers

We will publish clear definitions of these two groups before the first window opens.

We will set clear budgets for each window and provide regular updates so you can see when a window is close to being fully subscribed.

We will not close application windows without warning.

Stay informed

This morning, we published a blog post summarising the Secretary of State's OFC2026 speech. It includes a number of announcements to support farmers in England.

Subscribe to the Farming blog to receive updates on the SFI offer and information from the Farming and Countryside Programme.

https://defrafarming.blog.gov.uk/2026/01/08/the-new-sfi-offer-for-2026/

seen at 11:41, 8 January in Farming.