At the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation Board of Directors meeting held on August 13-15, 2025, the Board approved changes to Dairy Revenue Protection sales period rules, effective with crop year 2027 (first sales date: July 1, 2026).
Under current rules, sales period is defined as:
Sales period – The period of time that begins when a daily set of coverage prices and rates are posted on RMA’s
website and ends at 9:00 AM Central Time the earlier of Sunday or the following business day in which you can purchase quarterly endorsements.
This stands in contrast to Livestock Gross Margin and Livestock Risk Protection rules, where the sales period always ends in the morning of the following calendar day. For example, LRP Basic Provisions defines the sales period as:
Sales period – The period of time that begins when the coverage price and rates are posted and ends at 8:25 AM
Central Time the following calendar day.
Friday’s sales period lasts for approximately 41 hours, while sales periods for other weekdays last only 17 hours (3pm to 9am the following morning). Despite this difference in sales period length, Friday is the second least busy weekday in terms of DRP sales volume, with just of $1.5 million in premium sold on average.
| Day of the week | Average DRP Premium |
| Monday | $1,510,253 |
| Tuesday | $1,757,684 |
| Wednesday | $1,693,939 |
| Thursday | $1,820,319 |
| Friday | $1,531,939 |
The ability to purchase DRP through the holiday window also results in Thanksgiving Day sales window running from approx. 3pm CT on Wednesday before Thanksgiving to 9am CT the following Sunday. Long sales windows jeopardize actuarial soundness of insurance rates, as likelihood of after-hours breaking news is higher.
Rapid increase in premium sold under Livestock Risk Protection over the last few years suggests that lack of ability to buy insurance over weekends and holidays is not an impediment to adoption by livestock producers.
Taking all these factors into consideration, we have requested from FCIC that the sales period for DRP be more closely aligned to LRP rules. The language proposed in our submission would revise the sales period definition to:
Sales Period – The period of time that begins when a daily set of coverage prices and rates are posted on RMA’s website and ends at 9:00 AM Central Time the following calendar day.
The FCIC Board approved our request and the changes will take place for crop year 2027. This modification does not impact the current crop year 2026 – all sales until June 30, 2026 will follow the language in 2026 Basic Provisions under which the weekend and holiday sales are allowed.
As usual, the FCIC Board delegates to RMA Administrator to make any necessary modifications to make the change legally sufficient and properly implemented, so the final language that will be implemented in 2027 Basic Provisions may be phrased differently than stated above. Agents are also reminded that RMA rules prohibit marketing of program changes before the official RMA announcement, which is traditionally issued around the contract change date, April 30, 2026.
Why isn’t LGM available daily like DRP? I don’t understand why LGM is only available once per month.
I would love to do that, Brian! We actually petitioned the FCIC Board of Directors to approve daily LGM sales a few years ago, but it didn’t get approved. If more producers start requesting it from RMA, it might eventually happen. A good example is the LRP reforms, which now allow producers to purchase endorsements as soon as they have a forward contract to buy livestock. We initially asked the FCIC to approve that back in 2022, but it didn’t pass. However, after more producers wrote letters to the RMA administrator in the summer of 2024, the FCIC finally approved it in the fall of 2024.
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