Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers tightened the subsidy that covers social insurance contributions for family farms. Decree 1144, adopted September 17 and published September 23, cuts the subsidy off after a single quarter paid late or paid short, and restores it no sooner than the first day of the month following the next quarter. The nearest payment deadline is October 20.
What the decree changes
The source is Cabinet of Ministers decree No. 1144 of September 17, 2026, which makes twenty-one amendments to the procedure approved by decree No. 565 of May 22, 2019. Most are housekeeping: budget terminology, an updated statute name, a revised register form.
Two amendments are substantive. A new clause 25-1 states that the subsidy stops when the contribution is paid late or paid short for a quarter, or for a year. The tax service marks the payer’s record in the insurers’ register and, no later than the next business day, sends the Treasury a list of payers whose transit account is to be blocked.
Restoration is automatic and slow. The subsidy comes back on the first day of the month following the quarter in which the farmer paid the contribution in full, meaning at least the statutory minimum insurance contribution.
How the subsidy works
The scheme runs for ten years and shrinks every year. The state pays a share of the minimum insurance contribution and the farmer covers the rest.
| Year in the program | State pays | Farmer pays |
|---|---|---|
| First | 0.9 of the contribution | 0.1 |
| Third | 0.7 | 0.3 |
| Fifth | 0.5 | 0.5 |
| Seventh | 0.3 | 0.7 |
| Ninth and tenth | 0.1 | 0.9 |
Under the social contribution statute, the minimum contribution equals the statutory minimum wage times a rate of 22 percent. The 2026 minimum wage is 8,647 hryvnia a month, about $193, so the contribution is 1,902.34 hryvnia, roughly $42 a month per insured person.
A first-year participant therefore pays about $4.24 a month while the state pays about $38. Over a year the subsidy is worth roughly $458 per person. A farm with a head and two family members collects three times that. Conversions use the National Bank rate of 44.8571 hryvnia to the dollar for September 24, 2026.
What one late quarter costs
Quarterly contributions fall due by the 20th of the month after the quarter ends. The next deadline is October 20, 2026, for the third quarter.
Take a first-year farm that misses that October payment. The subsidy stops. The farm clears the debt in full in November. Restoration arrives on January 1, because November falls inside the fourth quarter. For all three months of that quarter the farm pays the full contribution alone, about $42 a month instead of $4.24, an extra $114 per insured person.
Settle in January instead of November and the fourth quarter and the first quarter both pass without support, with restoration pushed to April 1. A month of delay costs a quarter. A quarter of delay costs half a year.
Three years of disqualification
The second new clause, numbered 28, covers enforcement. Where a controlling authority establishes that the subsidy was received unlawfully, it must be repaid within one month of that finding, and the members or head of the farm lose the right to the subsidy for three years from the date the violation was discovered.
The procedure does not define unlawful receipt and defers to general legislation. That is the weakest point in the document: broad wording attached to a hard penalty.
Who qualifies
Eligibility is narrow. The subsidy goes to members and the head of a family farm without legal entity status, formed under article 8-1 of the farming statute and registered in the fourth single tax group.
That last condition rules out most indoor growers. For a sole proprietor operating within a family farm, the Tax Code attaches the fourth group to a set of conditions, among them:
- farmland or water fund land owned or used by farm members totaling between 0.5 and 20 hectares, which is 1.2 to 49 acres
- no hired labor at all
- farm members drawn only from the immediate family as the Family Code defines it
- operations, other than delivery, carried out at the registered tax address
An acre and a bit of farmland is a threshold a rack-based microgreens operation in a city room will never meet. This support is written for farms with land: field vegetables, berries, greens under plastic on an owned plot. Anyone growing on 600 square feet indoors falls outside it.
For farms that do qualify, the action before October 20 is one line long: reconcile the third quarter figure and pay it in full. Ukraine’s Ministry of Economy does not publish how many farms currently draw the subsidy, so the reach of the change cannot be measured from open data. On the same day, September 17, the Cabinet adopted Decree 1157, which extends war damage compensation to the Kyiv region and the capital.
