Terms of use

To make sure you have as useful an experience as possible, we will make every effort to ensure that the content on this site is correct, up to date and relevant.

The information on the website does not constitute legal or professional advice and we cannot accept any liability for actions arising from its use.

However, in some cases where we rely on third parties to provide information or where regulations change at short notice, the information on this site may not be 100 per cent accurate and we cannot accept liability when this occurs.

For your part, we expect you, regardless of your reason for visiting, to behave in a responsible and legal way.

If we consider that you’re behaving in a way that could harm this site or anybody else making use of this service or in any way contrary to these terms of use, we may take action to restrict or terminate your access. We may do so without notice.

Your use of this service is at your own risk. We do not accept responsibility for any loss, damage or inconvenience caused to you, your computer or anything stored on it by your use of this site.

The Rural Payments and Services online system is delivered by the Scottish Government's Rural Payments and Inspections Division (RPID), the accredited paying agency in Scotland for all European Commission Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) schemes.

Customer support for RP&S is available from 8:30 to 17:00 Monday to Thursday and 8:30 to 16:30 on a Friday through your area office.

Contact details for your local area office can be found here.

For additional support, customers can book an appointment with their local area office where a member of the RPID team will help you.

We endeavour to avoid doing any maintenance and upgrade work during supported hours. However, if Rural Payments and Services is suspended during customer support hours, we will provide as much advance notice as possible. We will always inform our customers of any planned maintenance and upgrade outage.

Our support hours are as above, but should the service be interrupted for any reason outside these times, we will restore it as soon as possible.

It remains the customer’s responsibility to comply with all Common Agricultural Policy scheme application submission deadlines unless otherwise advised, even if Rural Payments and Services is interrupted for the reasons noted above. Details about all Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 CAP schemes are available here.

If it becomes necessary to suspend an individual customer’s access to the Rural Payments and Services service for any reason we will provide an explanation as to why this has occurred.

There is no need to seek our permission if you would like to link to our website from your own. However, you must not suggest in any way that we endorse your website or any of its content.

Likewise, you must not suggest that you are acting on our behalf or are otherwise associated with us.

We do not endorse or take responsibility for the content of any website that links to Rural Payments and Services nor shall we be held liable for any loss or damage that may arise from your use of them.

We include some links on this website to other government or third party websites. These sites will have their own terms and conditions for use and it is your responsibility to read and comply with them.

If you come to this website from another website, we may receive personal information about you from the other website.

You should read the privacy policy of the website you came from to find out more about this.

You can read our privacy policy here