Assistance program
Voluntary Public Access and Habitat Incentive Program
$57.5 Million committed in FY2020–FY2026
- Agency
- Natural Resources Conservation Service, Agriculture, Department of
- Assistance
- Formula Grants
- CFDA number
- 10.093
- What it does
- The primary objective of VPA-HIP is to encourage owners and operators of privately-held farm, ranch, and forest land to voluntarily make that land available for access by the public for wildlife-dependent recreation, including hunting or fishing, under programs implemented by state or tribal governments.
- Who benefits
- The beneficiary eligibility is extended to the public for the purposes of expanding existing public access programs or create new public access programs or provide incentives to improve habitat on enrolled program lands.
- Who applies
- Not Applicable
- Authorized by
- 16 U.S.C. § 3839bb-5
Committed by fiscal year
* FY2026 is year-to-date — the fiscal year is still in progress, so its total is still filling in. The striped band and dashed line mark that provisional stretch.
Top recipients
By dollars committed.
How to read these numbers
- Committed through this program
Money committed under this assistance listing (its CFDA program), counted in the year each action happened.
- How it's paid
Most programs pay out one way — a grant, or a direct payment to individuals; the flow bar only appears when a program genuinely mixes types.
- Some recipients aren't itemized
For entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government reports one aggregate instead of naming tens of millions of people, so the recipient roster isn't part of the public record.
- Awards, counted once
An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, however many times it was amended.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct payments