Additional ARC/PLC Payments for 2025: Value of Receiving the Maximum Program Payment

By Nick Paulson and Henrique Monaco et.al

Program enrollment decisions for the Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) programs were made in March of 2025. However, the One Big Beautiful Bill (OB3), which was not passed and signed into law until July, resulted in farmers receiving the higher of the PLC or ARC payments for 2025.  Total ARC/PLC payments for 2025 are currently projected at more than $13.5 billion with nearly $3.2 billion, or 24%, of those payments due to receiving the maximum payment rather than the payment of the program elected for 2025. These estimates are based on current price projections, and much can still change over the course of the 2025 marketing year.

Projected Payments for 2025

A recent article released payment projections for the seven covered commodities with the largest number of base acres (see farmdoc daily from November 18, 2025). Projected marketing year average (MYA) prices for 2025/26 used to arrive at the payment estimates are based on USDA projections in the latest WASDE report and ARC/PLC program data provided by the Farm Service Agency (FSA), both of which were updated and released on November 14^th, 2025.

Per acre payment rate estimates for both ARC-CO and PLC are computed using simulation methods (see the Policy Design Lab webpage for additional visualizations of projected ARC-PLC payments). County-level data on enrolled base acres from FSA is then used to aggregate the projected ARC and PLC program payment rates for each county to total payment estimates.

Table 1 reports enrolled base acres by program for each crop and average projected payment rates for ARC-CO and PLC for the 7 largest base acre commodities.  Enrollment in ARC-CO and PLC varies across the commodities.  The majority of corn (83%) and soybean (94%) base acres were enrolled in ARC-CO for 2025.  PLC enrollment dominates long grain rice (100%), peanut (99%), and seed cotton (89%) base acres.  Enrollment for grain sorghum and wheat base acres for 2025 is more balanced across the programs (49% in ARC-CO for grain sorghum, 57% in ARC-CO for wheat).

The payment rate estimates in table 1 are measured in $ per base acre and account for the 85% payment factor. Projected payment rates ($/base acre) are lowest for soybeans and largest for long grain rice. Average projected payment rates from PLC exceed those from ARC-CO for all of the commodities.  Note that this does not imply that all farms are expected to receive the payment from PLC for 2025.  There is variation across counties and farms.  For some farms, projected payment rates for ARC-CO could exceed those from PLC.  These national averages are provided to give readers some sense of the average levels of support currently projected to be triggered from both programs at the national level.