What the government paid farmers

The national picture in 2025

$24.4 billion

Paid out

$24,386,289,632

Net: a repayment is recorded as a negative payment, and 2025 has 0 negative payments.

1,030,325

Recipients

Name and mailing address as published. Under name alone there would be 964,772.

4,063,479

Payments

One row is one disbursement, and a recipient can take several in a day.

71

Programs

Accounting program codes, named in every row of the file, so this is the list and not a sample of it.

3,068

Counties paid

The county office that administered the payment, not where any land is.

$4.0 million

Largest single payment

$4,042,896

One disbursement, not one recipient’s year.

Figures come from the payment files USDA published for 2025, taken on September 23, 2026.

What stands out

Five findings. From the 2025 data and the twenty-two years behind it, each one a row from a query rather than a sentence written about one.

• Farm program payments peaked at $38.3 billion in 2020, against $24.4 billion in 2025 — 63.7% of the peak. 2020 →

• The largest 10.0% of recipients — 103,033 of 1,030,325 — took 64.2% of everything FSA paid in 2025. The largest 1.0% took 20.3%. The largest 10.0% of recipients →

• 1,030,325 recipients under the name-and-address key this site uses, against 964,772 under the name alone — a gap of 65,553. USDA publishes no identifier, so the gap is the size of the decision rather than an error. Counting a payee →

• The largest single disbursement in 2025 was $4,042,896. A row in USDA's file is one payment, not one year and not one program, so this is what left in one go. One disbursement →

• 2 programs of the 71 FSA paid under in 2025 carried 60.5% of the money: Emergency Commodity Assistance Program and Supplemental Disaster Relief Non-Specialty Crops 1. 2 programs of 71 →

Every year USDA has published

Every year’s figures, and what each file covers

The largest programs

The largest states

USDA also paid American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands of the U.S., which have no state entry on this site to link up to and so have no page here. Their payments are in every national figure above.

The largest counties

The county is the FSA office that administered the payment. It is not where the land is, and FSA’s county numbering is its own rather than the Census’s.

The largest recipients

Names are printed as USDA prints them, with capitals softened for reading. Some recipients are the agency itself: FSA, the Commodity Credit Corporation and a number of county offices appear in the published file, and this site does not delete rows from the record it was given.

Rankings

• Recipients by payments received
• Recipients by number of payments
• States by payments
• Counties by payments
• Programs by what USDA paid
• Programs by recipients reached

Analysis

Each brief is prose written around values a query returned. Every figure in one is re-checked against its query before it can merge, so a number in the text cannot drift from the data behind it.

• A tenth of farm payees received nearly two-thirds of the money

  In 2025 the Farm Service Agency paid $24.4 billion to 1,030,325 payees, across 4,063,479 separate payments. The largest ten percent of those payees, 103,033 of them, received 64.2% of the money. The other 927,292 shared 35.8%.

  American Factbook Research · September 25, 2026

• Farm payments' two biggest jumps were paid mostly under new program codes

  Farm program payments rose most, between one whole year and the next, in 2020 and 2025. In both years most of the money was paid under accounting codes that had never appeared in USDA's files before.

  American Factbook Research · September 25, 2026

• Two farm programs paid more than half of 2025's money

  The Farm Service Agency paid $24.4 billion in 2025 under 71 accounting programs. Two of them carried more than half of it.

  American Factbook Research · September 25, 2026