# How and when do farmers in India get paid from carbon credits?

Canonical: https://senseible.earth/answers/how-do-farmers-get-paid-carbon-credits-india

Usually after credits are issued and sold, which comes after at least one verified monitoring period. The methodology decides how the tonnes are counted. The farmer's contract decides how much is paid, when, and whether anything comes earlier. Read that contract before the season starts, not after.

## The order money moves in

1. The farmer changes a practice and the project records it through the season.
2. The project writes a monitoring report from those records.
3. An accredited verifier checks it. Verra requires a site visit at the first verification after validation.
4. Verra reviews the request and can send up to three rounds of findings to the verifier.
5. The issuance levy is paid and the credits land in the project proponent's registry account.
6. The project sells the credits, then pays farmers as the contract says.

## Why the first payment takes time

- A Verra project has up to five years from registration, or from its last verification, to ask for the next verification approval. Some projects wait and verify several seasons at once.
- Soil carbon projects under VM0042 v2.2 that use the model approach must measure soil carbon at the start and again at least every five years.
- A sale can take longer than issuance if no buyer has signed in advance.

## What the contract should say

- Who holds the right to the reductions. Verra requires the project proponent to hold it, for example through a contract with the farmer.
- Whether payment is per hectare, per season or per credit sold, and the dates.
- Any advance, and whether it is deducted later.
- What happens if verification cuts the volume or the price falls.
- How costs and revenue are reported back. Verra's VCS Standard v5.0 makes projects that affect land or resource rights holders share projected revenues and costs, then report costs and revenue every year, for projects starting on or after 1 July 2027.

## What Senseible does here

Senseible's offline field app keeps each farmer's consent, plot boundary and batch records under a pseudonymous farmer id, so the records behind each payment are on file, and forward contract and milestone tracking follows the project's contract milestones.

- [Carbon removal projects](https://senseible.earth/carbon-removal/projects)
- [Farmer share of credit revenue](https://senseible.earth/answers/farmer-share-of-carbon-credit-revenue)
- [How long issuance takes](https://senseible.earth/answers/how-long-to-get-carbon-credits-issued)
- [Soil carbon credits for farmers](https://senseible.earth/answers/soil-carbon-credits-india-farmers)

Sources: [Verra, Registration and Issuance Process, v5.0 (16 December 2025)](https://verra.org/documents/registration-and-issuance-process-v5-0/), [Verra, VCS Standard, v5.0 (16 December 2025): Sections 3.6, 3.17 and 4.1](https://verra.org/documents/vcs-standard-v5-0/), [Verra, VM0042 Improved Agricultural Land Management, v2.2 (21 October 2025): Sections 1, 4 and 6, Box 1](https://verra.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/VM0042v2.2.pdf)

Last reviewed 2026-11-02.