What the October Payment Looks Like on Colorado Ground

Posted September 25, 2026

ARC and PLC payments for the 2025 crop start going out after October 1, and they are the largest in years because the reference price increases passed through budget reconciliation are finally reaching farmers. Regional averages are circulating. Most of them are not Colorado's number, and it is worth understanding why before you plan around one.

Why the Regional Averages Do Not Fit Here

The figures moving around the southern plains are averaged across Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas. That pool is weighted heavily toward irrigated acres in the Texas Panhandle, where program yields run far above what dryland ground across Colorado carries on the books.

A per-acre average built on that mix will overstate what most Colorado corn base acres pay. The rate is national. The yield is yours. Only one of those travels.

The Part That Is the Same Everywhere

PLC pays on a national rate. This number is the same on every corn base acre in Colorado, and the same everywhere else:

One provision matters more than any of the others this year. For the 2025 crop only, you receive the higher of your ARC-CO or PLC payment regardless of which program you elected. For most corn base this year that has meant PLC. You do not need to have guessed right.

Working Out Your Own Number

The trap in that line is the PLC yield. It is not what you cut in 2025. It is a program yield established from historical records and sitting in your file at FSA, and on most Colorado farms it is well below what the combine saw. Colorado's statewide corn yield ran around 118 bushels in 2025, blending irrigated and dryland — running that number through the formula will give you a figure you are not going to receive.

Pull your actual PLC yield off your FSA paperwork, or call the county office and ask. Two minutes on the phone is the difference between a real estimate and a hopeful one.

ARC-CO is county by county, built on your county's benchmark revenue rather than a national rate, so it varies across the eastern plains in a way PLC does not. County-level figures are published on FSA's ARC/PLC program data pages.

That higher-of treatment applies to 2025 and to no other year. From 2026 you choose one programme again, before you know what the season will do. CCGA is lobbying to make the higher-of permanent →

Two Mechanics Worth Knowing Before the Deposit Lands

• Sequestration is applied before payment limits. The reduction comes off first, and the limit is then tested against what is left. If you have been assuming the order runs the other way, your number is off.
• Payments are issued alphabetically by state, then by entity or producer name. Colorado sits sixth in that order, so producers here should see movement early rather than late in the run.

On the Dates Going Around

USDA's published position is that 2025 ARC and PLC payments will be issued after October 1, 2026, with reporting pointing to early October. Tighter windows are circulating in coffee shops and on calls. We have not been able to source an official date inside October, and we would rather tell you that than repeat a date that turns out to be somebody's guess.

If you are budgeting against this money, budget against October, not against a day.

As of October 7 that is still where it stands. The date has not firmed up, nobody has published a day, and the schedule appears to be holding.

A Per-Acre Number, and Why Ours Will Be Smaller

The first per-acre estimates are out. The economists at farmdoc daily put total 2025 ARC and PLC payments above $13.5 billion, and the average corn payment at about $58 per base acre.

That figure is already circulating, so it is worth saying clearly what it is and what it is not.

If you want a number for your own operation rather than for the country, the AFPC decision aid runs your actual base acres and program yields. That is the only figure worth budgeting against.

The Money Arriving Is for 2025. The Decision In Front of You Is for 2026.

While the 2025 payments move, the election and enrollment window for the 2026 crop year is already open. It runs from September 16 to December 11, 2026.

That is the trap. Producers who are happy with their current election read “election changes are optional” and conclude there is nothing to do. There is: the enrollment itself. You can do it online at fsa.usda.gov with a Login.gov account, or by appointment at your county office. If you have never set that account up, here is how, in three steps.

USDA has now put that in its own words. From the September 15 announcement: if producers do not submit their 2026 election by December 11, their election remains the same as their 2025 election — “and the farm is ineligible for payments for the 2026 program year.” There is no softer reading of that sentence.

Four Things in the September 15 Announcement

USDA’s release carried detail that changes how some operations should approach this window.

Base allocation notifications have been available since September 16 at fsa.usda.gov/arc-plc with a Login.gov account, or from your county office. The landowner review window — for correcting an allocation, designating subsequent acres or opting out — closed August 31. If you did not respond, USDA treats your summary as accurate and the 3.69% factor applies. No landowner lost base acres through the process.

One more caution from the release, easy to miss: ARC and PLC election and enrollment can affect eligibility for some crop insurance products. These are not two separate decisions made in two separate rooms.

Why This Year’s Timing Is Unusual, and Why It Helps

This election normally happens much earlier in the year. It slipped to the autumn because USDA needed time to implement the Working Families Tax Cuts Act — the reconciliation law — which added up to 30 million acres of base acres nationally, the first base acre increase in about twenty years.

The economists at the Agricultural and Food Policy Center make the point that the delay is a substantial benefit to producers, and it is worth understanding why. In an ordinary year you choose between ARC and PLC early, with almost nothing known about the crop. This year the 2026 crop has been harvested or shortly will be, so you are making the election with a real sense of your yields rather than a guess.

That is a rare advantage, and it is the argument for actually working the decision this year instead of letting the previous election roll.

A Tool for Working the Decision

The Agricultural and Food Policy Center at Texas A&M publishes a free decision aid for exactly this choice. Its 2026 FSA ARC/PLC Expected Payments tool runs a stochastic simulation — 500 possible realisations of market prices and county yields — and gives you the probability of different payment levels under ARC and under PLC, rather than a single guess. You create a farm, add your crops, and analyse each one.

It asks you to sign in, and the reason is practical rather than bureaucratic: the account saves your farms and your analysis. You can set a farm up, walk away, and come back to carry on where you left off rather than starting over. Worth knowing before you decide you have not got time to sit down with it in one go.

It is one of two efforts funded nationally by USDA to help producers with the sign-up decision, and AFPC staffs a helpdesk for it.

AFPC is the centre Dr. Joe Outlaw and Dr. Bart Fischer co-direct, and it is the same modelling they presented at the Southwest Council of Agribusiness annual meeting. The tool is explicit that it is educational and that none of the expected results are guaranteed — it tells you the shape of the risk, not what you will be paid.

Where This Analysis Comes From

The reading above leans on Southern Ag Today, which is worth knowing about on its own account. It is a free daily publication written by extension economists from thirteen land-grant universities, launched in 2023 and backed by the Southern Extension Economics Committee, the Agricultural and Food Policy Center at Texas A&M, and the Southern Risk Management Education Center at Arkansas. More than a hundred authors contribute.

It is aimed at farmers and policymakers rather than at other economists, which is the useful part — short pieces, published daily, on what a policy change actually does to an operation. The crop focus is Southern, so not every article will be about corn on the plains, but the farm bill and safety net analysis travels, and it is the same AFPC bench that presented at the SWCA annual meeting. It costs nothing to subscribe.

Two pieces worth starting with, both from the AFPC authors:

• Making the ARC/PLC Election for the 2026 Crop Year — the piece behind most of this page
• Upcoming Farm Policy Decisions for Producers — the wider set of decisions landing this year

We keep a short list of the outside sources worth reading — AFPC, Southern Ag Today and Farm Policy Facts — with the pieces to start with on each. Farm policy resources →

One Practical Warning

If your base acre update is not settled, get ahead of it now rather than after the payments start moving. County offices across the region have been carrying training absences and a backlog on base acre work, and an unresolved file is a slow way to find out your payment is held up. That is also the same counter your neighbours are standing at this week to beat the September 30 SDRP deadline.

The Bigger Point

This payment is larger than recent years for one reason: the statutory reference prices went up, and they went up in legislation. That did not happen by itself, and it is not a one-off disaster bill — it is written into law and it pays again next year.

It is also the clearest answer available to a grower who wonders what advocacy actually returns. The corn checkoff could not have worked on any of it.

Sources

• FSA, Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage: fsa.usda.gov/resources/income-support/arc-plc
• FSA, ARC and PLC program data, for county-level benchmarks and payment rates: fsa.usda.gov/resources/programs/arc-plc/program-data
• Reference price and guarantee changes enacted through the 2025 budget reconciliation law, H.R. 1
• Colorado yield context: USDA NASS Colorado crop production
• Fischer, Outlaw, Bryant, Nelson, Stewart and Raulston, “Making the ARC/PLC Election for the 2026 Crop Year,” Agricultural and Food Policy Center at Texas A&M University, Southern Ag Today, September 17, 2026 (syndicated copy)

This page is informational. CCGA does not administer ARC, PLC or any USDA program, and nothing here is a determination of your eligibility or your payment. Rates and price estimates quoted are as published at the time of writing and the final payment depends on the final marketing year average price, your farm's program yield and base acres, sequestration and applicable payment limits. Your FSA county office is the only source that can tell you your number.