SFI26 Window 1 by the numbers: 3,100 agreements live, £30m a year contracted, and 3,300 more in the queue

Defra's first SFI 2026 statistics are out. We joined them to the SFI26 payment rates to work out where the money actually went, what a typical agreement looks like, and how much of the pot is left for 22 September.

The Rural Payments Agency's records at 1 September give us three things: how many agreements exist across all three SFI schemes, who applied to Window 1, and what they put in their agreements. Defra publishes counts and areas but not money. We have joined the published areas to the SFI26 payment rates in our subsidy library to estimate the value, and the result lands within 1% of Defra's own average agreement value, so we are confident in the totals.

SFI now covers 38,300 farm businesses, up 5,700 since Defra's April 2025 count. That is roughly one in three of England's 102,300 holdings, still well short of the 70% coverage Defra has targeted for the end of the transition in 2027. SFI 2023 agreements are three-year deals, so the 25,000 still live start ending this autumn. That is the population Window 2's early-application rule was built for.

Window 1 was ring-fenced for two groups: farms of 3 to 50 hectares, and farms of any size with no existing ELM revenue agreement. Of the 6,900 eligible applications, 87% came from farms with no ELM agreement and 55% were small farms new to ELM. Only 900 applicants (13%) were existing ELM participants topping up. Just 100 applications were ineligible, which for a first-come-first-served window is a low error rate.

The other half of the story is the pipeline. At 1 September, 3,100 of those 7,000 applications were live agreements. Defra's own blog put offers issued at around 3,600 by the end of August, with an average of 24 days from submission to offer. So there are roughly 3,300 eligible applications still being processed or awaiting acceptance, and that matters for the budget maths further down.

Agreements contain 3.7 actions on average. One action, CLIG3 low-input grassland, appears in three-quarters of them. Divide the published areas by the agreement counts and you get a clear picture of the median farm: about 20 hectares of low-input grassland, 6.6 kilometres of hedgerow, 10 hectares under a haymaking supplement and, for the more ambitious, 17 hectares of herbal leys.

Two things stand out lower down. HEF1 traditional buildings made the top ten with 400 agreements, a heritage action that costs nothing to deliver if you already maintain the barn. And hedgerows: 1,200 agreements put 7,920 kilometres of hedge under management, more than five times the length of Britain end to end, at £13 per 100 metres.

Window 1 mixed two very different applicants: small farms of 3 to 50 hectares, and large farms of any size that had never held an ELM agreement. The action data shows both. Plot each action by how many agreements chose it against the average area per agreement and the two groups separate cleanly. Grassland and habitat actions cluster bottom-right: thousands of agreements, 5 to 20 hectares each. Arable and precision actions sit top-left: 200 or 300 agreements, but 60 to 150 hectares each.

For agents: the arable population in Window 1 was the "no ELM agreement" cohort, not the small farms. Combined arable, IPM and precision actions covered 63,000 hectares from a few hundred agreements. Window 2 opens to every farm, including the large arable businesses coming off SFI23 and Mid Tier. Expect the arable share of the pot to rise sharply.

Defra publishes areas, not pounds. Multiply each action's published area by its SFI26 rate and the 3,100 live agreements add up to about £29.8m a year. Defra's own figure, £9,700 average times 3,100 agreements, gives £30.1m. That is the contracted position at 1 September: live agreements only.

Defra's running updates measured something different. Its blog reported "around 25%" of the £60m allocated on day one, 50% by day three and 75% by 13 July, each time "based on applications received". That is pre-allocation on submission, before eligibility checks, offers or acceptance. Defra promised a further update if the budget was fully allocated; none came, and Window 1 closed on its fixed date. So the net figure after withdrawals and rejections sat somewhere between 75% and 100%. If every one of the 6,900 eligible applications converted at the average value, Window 1 would land near £67m, above the pot. In practice some will not convert, and the RPA continues to issue offers.

Put the two measures together: £30m contracted, at least £45m spoken for, and roughly 3,300 applications still moving from one column to the other. Whatever is left when the pipeline clears rolls into Window 2. Expect single-digit to low-teens millions, not half the pot.

The Window 2 arithmetic: £240m total, minus what Window 1 finally commits, plus the extra £50m announced in August. Call it £230m to £245m, opening 22 September to every farmer and land manager, with a £100,000 per year cap per agreement and one SFI26 agreement per business. Window 1 was three-quarters spoken for within a fortnight of opening. Window 2 opens to a far larger pool, including the 25,000 SFI23 agreements starting to expire.

Of the 71 actions on offer, 68 appear in the data and 12 of those have fewer than ten agreements. Nobody chose the two moorland grazing actions (UPL1, UPL2) or the extensive native-breeds supplement (SPM5), which tells you upland farms were not in Window 1's target groups: most already hold CS or SFI23 agreements. Organic conversion managed 54 agreements across five actions. Precision farming was a mixed picture: PRF1 variable-rate nutrients covered 29,300 hectares, but PRF4 robotic weeding had nine.