RICS farm business tenancy agreements

Since the introduction of the original suite of farm business tenancy (FBT) agreements, there have been a number of updates, with the most recent in 2020, 2021 and 2024.

  • The February 2020 updates were primarily to take account of the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union.
  • The 2021 review was primarily to incorporate some specific Welsh legislative/regulatory references where relevant.

For the 2024 update, a new set of user notes has been created to accompany the FBT suite. These user notes supersede all previous accompanying guidance and notes, and are intended for all users of the FBT suite, who are strongly advised to access them before using any of the agreements.

All agreements, including the Grazing licence, have been comprehensively reviewed and updated.

The updates and changes since the last version of the suite include the following:

  • updates to the provisions concerning subsidies, entitlement and environmental schemes
  • changes to the provisions concerning the subletting of dwellings
  • the introduction of provisions for the payment of interest in the two ‘short-form’ FBTs and the Grazing licence
  • the addition of reference to RICS’ Rural Conflict Avoidance Process (Rural CAP) Service in the provisions concerning dispute resolution
  • minor amendments to the Land Registry clauses at the beginning of the fixed-term FBT, and
  • various other minor drafting changes.

The 2024 FBT suite includes the following downloadable documents:

The entire suite is accessible from here.