NRFC Forestry Growth Fund

NRFC Forestry Growth Fund

Funds Australian wood manufacturers with concessional financing for timber-based products used in domestic housing.

The NRFC Forestry Growth Fund is a AUD 150 million sub-fund of the National Reconstruction Fund Corporation (NRFC), targeted at wood product manufacturing in Australia with a specific emphasis on supporting domestic housing construction. The fund provides concessional financing — below-market-rate debt — rather than grants. It represents the smallest of NRFC's three sub-funds, alongside the AUD 1 billion Economic Resilience Program and the AUD 5 billion Net Zero Fund, within a total NRFC mandate of AUD 15 billion.

Eligible activities include engineered wood products, processed and manufactured timber, and value-added wood product manufacturing. Native forest logging is explicitly excluded by the NRFC Act, aligning the fund with plantation and engineered timber supply chains rather than extractive forestry. The fund falls within NRFC's legislated priority area of value-add in agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. Applicants must be solely or mainly Australian-based, demonstrate ability to repay the concessional debt, and show positive public policy outcomes including contribution to housing construction capacity — one of Australia's acknowledged supply-side challenges. Both for-profit companies and eligible non-profit entities may apply.

Applications are submitted via the NRFC online proposal form at nrf.gov.au/contact-us/your-proposal, following the standard six-step due-diligence process that assesses scalable business model, IP and competitive position, management team, governance, and credit quality. The fund's small overall size relative to NRFC's general fund suggests competition will be concentrated among a limited number of sizable wood-product manufacturing investments rather than a high volume of small transactions.