England is retiring the 25-year-old Cattle Tracing System for a new service called the Livestock Information Service. Here is what is actually changing, whether it touches your farm yet, and what stays exactly as it was.
Most farms do not need to do anything yet. England's cattle tracing system, run by BCMS on the Cattle Tracing System (CTS), is being replaced in phases by a new service called the Livestock Information Service (LIS). You stay on the current system until your holding is actually migrated, and you will be told when that happens. When it does arrive, LIS brings near real-time movement reporting, one combined action for reporting an animal off one holding and onto another, and a digital record for each animal. It does not change the statutory deadlines: the 27-day passport window and the 3-day movement reporting rule are exactly the same either way. Full migration is currently expected by mid-2027, alongside a move to mandatory electronic identification, but that timetable has already slipped once, so treat it as a direction of travel rather than a promise.
The underlying change is called the Livestock Information Transformation Programme, a Defra-led project to replace the Cattle Tracing System with something built for how farms actually work now rather than how they worked in the late 1990s. CTS, and the BCMS service that sits on top of it, has been the backbone of English cattle traceability for roughly 25 years. It does its job, but it was built for a different era of connectivity and a much narrower idea of what a livestock database needed to do.
Its replacement, the Livestock Information Service, is a multispecies system, meaning the same underlying platform is designed to eventually handle more than cattle. For now, the practical change on the ground is that the system processing your births, movements and deaths in England is swapping from CTS/BCMS to LIS. Software providers, including farm apps, have been able to build against the new LIS API since 2025, which is why you may start seeing it mentioned in places before your own holding is actually moved over.
It is worth being precise about scope, because this is easy to misread as a UK-wide change. It is not. This migration replaces BCMS/CTS in England specifically. Scotland continues to run its own system, ScotEID. Wales runs EIDCymru. Northern Ireland runs NIFAIS. None of those three are being replaced or touched by this programme. If your holding is registered in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, this guide's timeline does not apply to you at all, though the direction of travel, more digital and more real-time reporting, is one every UK nation's system is broadly heading in.
For the great majority of English cattle keepers reading this today, the honest answer is not yet. You continue to report births, movements and deaths through CTS Online or BCMS exactly as you do now, using the same forms, the same deadlines, and the same helpline if something goes wrong. Nothing about your day-to-day reporting changes until your specific holding has been migrated onto LIS, and that migration is something that happens to you, not something you have to request or set up yourself.
The rollout began with a small number of selected cattle keepers from December 2025, and it is being widened through 2026 in phases rather than switched on for everyone at once. If you have not been contacted about moving to LIS, you are almost certainly still on the current system, and that is completely normal at this stage. There is also a practical reassurance built into the programme itself: England's cattle keepers will continue to have an online service to report through either way, and if you cannot or do not want to use technology to report movements, support to report another way is set to remain available. Nobody is being left with no route to comply.
What is sensible right now is awareness rather than action. Knowing the switch is coming, roughly what it changes, and that the current rules do not move an inch in the meantime, is enough. There is no form to fill in today, no account to migrate yourself, and no reason to change how you record a calving or a movement this week.
When your holding is migrated, the practical differences are mostly about speed and friction rather than new obligations. The headline changes:
That last point matters beyond LIS itself. The new service is explicitly designed to pave the way for Bovine Electronic Identification, BEID for short, which is due to become mandatory from 2027. Electronic tags read by a wand rather than eyes reading a plastic tag only work well if the system behind them can process reads quickly and reliably, which is a large part of why LIS exists as a separate build rather than a patch to CTS.
Here is the schedule as it currently stands, published by Livestock Information Ltd and Defra: the LIS API opened to software providers in 2025, so systems like FarmHQ could start building and testing against it. The cattle service rollout is happening in phases through 2026, beginning with a small number of selected cattle keepers from December 2025 and widening from there. Full migration of all English cattle keepers onto LIS is currently expected by mid-2027, timed alongside the BEID mandate.
This is the part worth remembering above everything else in this guide: the switch from BCMS to LIS is a change of IT system, not a change of law. The statutory deadlines that govern cattle recording in the UK are set in separate legislation, and neither one moves because the software behind them does.
The 27-day passport rule still applies exactly as it always has: an application for a calf's passport must reach the system within 27 days of birth, with the day of birth counting as day one. The 3-day reporting rule for movements is unchanged too, whichever system ends up processing that report. What LIS changes is how fast that report is processed and how much friction is involved in submitting it, not how many days you have to submit it in the first place.
If you take one thing from this guide, make it that. Farmers understandably worry that a system switch of this size will quietly reset the clock on rules they have built habits around for years. It will not. Keep doing what you already do, on whichever deadline you already work to, and the migration will simply change the plumbing underneath it when it reaches your holding.
The most useful thing a farm can do between now and migration is avoid building any workflow that assumes one system or the other. FarmHQ's compliance layer is built against the LIS API from day one, and bridges to CTS/BCMS for the holdings that have not migrated yet, so the switch happens behind the scenes rather than as something you have to manage. A movement or birth recorded in the app goes to whichever system your holding is actually live on, without you needing to know or check which one that is on any given week. When your holding does move to LIS, nothing changes about how you use the app, only which government system receives the record on the other end.
Beyond that, the practical advice is simple: keep an eye on official updates rather than second-hand ones, do not change any reporting habit in anticipation of a date that has already moved once, and treat any specific date you read, including the ones in this guide, as current at time of writing rather than guaranteed. For the wider set of statutory deadlines FarmHQ tracks on your behalf, the farm paperwork guides section covers the other rules that sit alongside this one.
For most keepers, no. You stay on the current CTS/BCMS system until your holding is actually migrated to the Livestock Information Service, and you will be told when that happens. Keep reporting births, movements and deaths exactly as you do now.
No. Both statutory deadlines are set in law, not by the IT system that processes them. LIS changes how a report is submitted and how quickly it is processed, not the legal windows themselves.
No. This migration replaces BCMS/CTS in England only. Scotland keeps ScotEID, Wales keeps EIDCymru, and Northern Ireland keeps NIFAIS, and none of those are part of this switch.
Rollout is phased through 2026, and full migration for all cattle keepers is currently expected by mid-2027 alongside mandatory electronic identification. This timetable has already slipped once, so check Livestock Information Ltd's own site for the current schedule rather than treating any date as fixed.