What Are Direct Attribution Limits on Farm Payments?
June 16, 2026
Federal law sets limits on how much any individual farmer or entity can receive in certain USDA program payments each year. These limits are designed to ensure that public support flows to genuine family farming operations rather than large industrial enterprises. In practice, the rules are complex and often circumvented through legal but creative structuring.
Current payment limits (2018 Farm Bill)
Under the 2018 Farm Bill, the per-person limit for ARC and PLC payments combined is $125,000 per year. Separate limits apply to conservation programs, disaster programs, and loan programs. These limits apply per "person" — an individual or a qualifying farming entity.
The multiple-entity problem
A farming operation might be structured as several entities: a landholding LLC, a farming corporation, and perhaps a family partnership. If each entity meets the "actively engaged in farming" test, each can receive payments up to the per-entity limit. Large family farming operations sometimes structure ownership to receive several multiples of the nominal per-person cap.
Direct attribution rules
USDA has implemented "direct attribution" rules that attempt to trace payments through entities to the underlying individuals. If one person is a beneficial owner of multiple entities, payments to all those entities are attributed to that individual and counted against a single cap. These rules have been tightened over successive farm bills but remain a subject of ongoing policy debate.
Adjusted gross income limits
In addition to payment limits, farmers with adjusted gross income above $900,000 are ineligible for most commodity and disaster program payments. This AGI limit was intended to target benefits toward smaller operations but exempts conservation program payments, meaning high-income landowners can still receive CRP payments regardless of AGI.
What the data shows
Because individual farmers are privacy-redacted, SubsidyLookup's recipient data primarily shows corporate and partnership entities. These are often the entities through which complex farming operations receive payments, and looking at a recipient's total lifetime payments can reveal the scale of operations that have participated in federal programs over time.