diff --git a/DESCRIPTION b/DESCRIPTION
index e337ebf80b..4a5f66914e 100644
--- a/DESCRIPTION
+++ b/DESCRIPTION
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 Package: knitr
 Type: Package
 Title: A General-Purpose Package for Dynamic Report Generation in R
-Version: 1.20.16
+Version: 1.20.17
 Authors@R: c(
     person("Yihui", "Xie", role = c("aut", "cre"), email = "xie@yihui.name", comment = c(ORCID = "0000-0003-0645-5666")),
     person("Adam", "Vogt", role = "ctb"),
diff --git a/NEWS.md b/NEWS.md
index 6d587e2806..05e1d64132 100644
--- a/NEWS.md
+++ b/NEWS.md
@@ -26,6 +26,8 @@
 
 - MP4 generated by `hook_ffmpeg()` does not work in Safari (thanks, @brianzhang01, #1586).
 
+- The chunk option `fig.env` does not work for PDF output from R Markdown (thanks, @RSchwinn, #1620).
+
 ## MINOR CHANGES
 
 - `spin()` will close each individual code chunk if multiple code chunks appear consecutively (previously it only closes the last code chunk in this case) (thanks, @avehtari, #1590).
diff --git a/R/hooks-md.R b/R/hooks-md.R
index 03fe834e29..31b41fef28 100644
--- a/R/hooks-md.R
+++ b/R/hooks-md.R
@@ -9,7 +9,7 @@ hook_plot_md = function(x, options) {
   office_output = to %in% c('docx', 'pptx', 'rtf', 'odt')
   if (!is.null(options$out.width) || !is.null(options$out.height) ||
       !is.null(options$out.extra) || options$fig.align != 'default' ||
-      !is.null(options$fig.subcap)) {
+      !is.null(options$fig.subcap) || options$fig.env != 'figure') {
     if (is_latex_output()) {
       # Pandoc < 1.13 does not support \caption[]{} so suppress short caption
       if (is.null(options$fig.scap)) options$fig.scap = NA