ELM Payment Calculator

Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes replaced the EU's Basic Payment Scheme in England. The Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) pays farmers for environmental actions alongside food production, covering soil and nutrient management, hedgerows and cover crops. Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier handles habitat creation and restoration, and Landscape Recovery funds large-scale projects such as peatland and woodland. Most farms are working through SFI, where the payment depends on the actions chosen and the area they cover.

SFI payments are made per hectare or per metre of hedgerow or margin, depending on the action. Herbal leys pay £224/ha, very low-input grassland £151/ha and hedgerow management £13/100m for one side of the hedge. Legume fallow pays £532/ha and legumes on improved grassland £102/ha. Multiple actions can be stacked on the same land where compatible, and on a mixed holding that stacking is where most of the value appears.

Other SFI26 rates fill in the picture. Multi-species winter cover crops pay £129/ha, keeping arable crops free of insecticide £45/ha and companion cropping £55/ha, while pollen and nectar mixes pay £739/ha and winter bird food £648/ha. The old soil assessment action was dropped for SFI26. Buffer strips pay more per hectare than almost anything else, at £515/ha for a 4-12m grass buffer strip and £707/ha for a 12-24m watercourse buffer strip, which reflects the land taken out of production. A 200ha farm typically ends up somewhere between £8,000 and £25,000 a year.

This calculator estimates your annual payment based on the actions you select and the area or length of feature. It does not check which actions can share the same land, so enter each hectare only once. The Rural Payments service deducts area already under an incompatible action, but checking for overlaps remains the applicant's responsibility. Payment rates are set by Defra and reviewed annually, which means an agreement signed on one year's rates is worth rechecking against the next. An 80 ha arable holding taking legume fallow on 10 ha, winter cover crops on 20 ha, companion cropping on 30 ha, 2,000 m of hedgerow management and 4 ha of winter bird food comes to £12,402.

Applications go through the Rural Payments service on gov.uk, using the land details already registered with the RPA. For SFI26 the first window, for small farms and those without an existing agreement, closed on 28 August 2026, and the second window, for all farmers, closed early on 22 September 2026. You choose actions parcel by parcel, most actions run for 3 years, each agreement is capped at £100,000 a year, and the old management payment has gone. The RPA checks a sample of agreements and can reduce or recover payments where actions are not carried out.

The Basic Payment Scheme has already ended. Delinked payments replaced it from 2024, calculated from a 2020 to 2022 reference period and no longer tied to farming the land, and they are cut back every year. For 2026 and 2027 a 98% reduction applies to the first £30,000 of the reference amount and 100% above it, so no farm receives more than £600, and 2027 is the last payment. SFI and the wider ELM schemes are meant to replace that income.

Other money sits outside SFI altogether. The England Woodland Creation Offer pays up to £10,200/ha to establish woodland plus £400/ha a year for 15 years. Capital Grants fund hedgerow and boundary works up to £35,000 per business (the 2026 round has closed), and the Farming Equipment and Technology Fund offers £1,000 to £25,000 towards farm equipment. Solar and wind schemes on farm land are income streams in their own right and fall outside ELM entirely.