Capital Grants 2026 is closed. DEFRA said so on 1 September, in one line: "The Capital Grants 2026 offer is now closed as the budget has been allocated." No deadline was ever set, and we have been saying since August that this was the catch — a window that ends when the money ends does not tell you when it is nearly over. It lasted five weeks.
If you did not get an application in, there is nothing to do on this scheme now. If you did, there are three things worth knowing, and the first one has a clock on it.
The numbers, as DEFRA published them
- £225 million, a 50% increase on the 2025 budget.
- About 17,000 applications, "from every corner of England".
- About 9,500 of those were applying for a Capital Grants agreement for the first time.
- One-third of applications came from farms under 50 hectares.
Opened 30 July, three-quarters allocated by 1 August, closed 1 September. If you want the caps and the six item groups, they are in our brief from when it opened.
If you applied: the evidence deadline has not gone away
The post is explicit: "All supporting information should be provided to the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) within 10 days of your application form being submitted." That is the blog's wording. The applicant's guide, which we quoted in August, says 10 working days. Either way the clock started when you pressed submit, not when the scheme closed, and it is the quotes, consents and photographs behind the items you asked for. An application without them stalls.
Two more lines from the same post decide what happens next:
- Applications "started but not submitted before the offer closed will not be processed". A half-finished application in the portal is not in the queue.
- Because of the volume, "it's likely that agreement offers will continue to be issued throughout the remainder of the year". In the comments, the RPA added that the plan is to process applications in the order they were received — so an application from late August should expect to wait.
If your plans have changed
DEFRA asks anyone who has received a Capital Grant offer — this round or a previous one — and no longer intends to do the work or claim the money to contact the RPA. It does not say what happens to that money, and we will not guess.
What about 2027?
Nothing yet. "We do not yet have a confirmed opening date for the 2027 Capital Grants offer but we will share details on the blog as soon as they are available." Given that this year's offer allocated three-quarters of its budget in the first three days, the useful preparation for 2027 is the same as it was for 2026: the items priced, the quotes in hand, the photographs taken, before the window opens rather than after. We will publish the date the day it appears; the grants page is where the whole picture lives.
For drainage specifically — a question that came up under the post — DEFRA points to the water actions in SFI26, whose second window is expected from 22 September, and to Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier.
Sources
- DEFRA Farming Blog — Capital Grants 2026 now closed (Oliver Munn, 1 September 2026) (every figure and quotation above; the order-of-receipt point is from the RPA's reply in the comments).
- GOV.UK — Capital Grants 2026 guidance (the 10 working days evidence rule, the caps, the item groups).
This is a summary, not advice. If you have an application in, the RPA's own correspondence about it takes precedence over anything written here.