🌾2025/2026 AMS Services Fee Increases and Business Impacts
The Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) is announcing the 2025/2026 rates it will charge for voluntary grading, inspection, certification, auditing, and laboratory services for a variety of agricultural commodities including meat and poultry, fruits and vegetables, eggs, dairy products, rice, and cotton and tobacco. The 2025/2026 regular, overtime, holiday, and laboratory services rates will be applied at the beginning of the crop year, fiscal year or as required by law depending on the commodity. Other starting dates are added to this notice based on cotton industry practices. This action establishes the rates for user-funded programs based on costs incurred by AMS. This year, cost-based analyses indicated the need to increase certain user fee rates when current rates are insufficient to cover the costs of providing the service. While cost-saving measures have and will continue to be implemented, user fee rate increases are necessary to offset rising operational costs. In cases where current rates are sufficient to cover the costs of providing the service, user fee rates remain unchanged. Furthermore, AMS is announcing the fees it will charge warehouse operators for voluntary services associated with the administration of the United States Warehouse Act, including the license action fees, service license fees, inspection fees, and annual user fees for warehouse services for fiscal year 2026, which begins October 1, 2025. This year, AMS will minimize the impact on industry by limiting any increases to cover inflationary costs only.
Learn More🧈New USDA Rule on Butterfat Testing
This final rule adopts amendments to the plant records requirement for the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) Dairy Grading and Inspection Program. The amendments allow butterfat tests to be performed at an in-house or approved third party laboratory and add a requirement for plants to maintain and make such records available for examination by a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspector. These amendments increase efficiency by conforming to current industry practice.
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