Zipline crossed two million lifetime deliveries in January. Wing is adding 150 more Walmart stores. Amazon’s Prime Air now flies in seven US metros and, since May, drops parcels in England too. Drone delivery finally has real numbers behind it in 2026 — and the FAA rule meant to govern all of it still isn’t finished.
This piece originally ran in early 2025, and the industry has moved fast enough that almost every figure in it went stale. A couple were flat-out wrong, including two of ours. So here is the corrected state of play, with sources, as of June 2026.
Zipline hit 2 million deliveries and a $7.6 billion valuation
Start with the company that operates at scale. On January 21, Zipline announced it had passed two million commercial deliveries, raised more than $600 million, and would expand to Houston and Phoenix in early 2026 with more metros to follow. The second million took under two years. The first took nearly a decade, most of it flying blood and vaccines to clinics in Rwanda and Ghana, which is still the least glamorous and most defensible business in this entire category.
A correction worth making plainly: an earlier version of this article said Zipline had delivered “over 60 million products.” That number doesn’t appear in Zipline’s own materials. The figure the company actually reports is deliveries completed, and as of January it stands at two million — which Zipline says is more than every other drone delivery operator combined.
The US is where the curve is bending now. Zipline says its American delivery volume grew roughly 15% week over week for seven straight months, driven by retail partners including Walmart in Dallas-Fort Worth. The Robot Report puts the company’s post-raise valuation at $7.6 billion, far above anyone else flying packages.
Wing will fly from more than 270 Walmart stores by 2027
Alphabet’s Wing spent years as the quiet one, and 2026 is when it stopped being quiet. In January, Wing announced an expansion to 150 additional Walmart stores, which TechCrunch reports will bring the total above 270 once the rollout finishes in 2027, adding Los Angeles, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Miami to a network that already covers Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta. Wing’s own math says the finished footprint puts drone delivery within reach of about 10% of the US population.
Houston went live on January 15. The usage data is the genuinely interesting part: Wing told TechCrunch its top 25% of customers order three times a week, and the most-delivered items aren’t gadgets. They’re eggs, ground beef, fresh produce, and Takis. Where drone delivery works, it works as a grocery top-up service, not a flying Apple Store.
The DoorDash partnership is scaling in parallel. Since 2022 the two companies have run drone delivery in southwest Virginia, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Charlotte, and in April they doubled the Charlotte footprint with new sites in Matthews and Indian Trail, putting more than 60,000 households in range, per DoorDash. If you live in a covered area, drones simply show up as an option inside the normal DoorDash app. No separate signup, no waitlist theater.
Amazon flies in seven metros, charges $4.99, and quit Italy
Prime Air had the strangest eighteen months of the three. The active map now covers Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth, Waco, San Antonio, Tampa, Detroit and, since February 9, Kansas City, according to local station KSHB. Neither College Station nor Lockeford, the two original test markets this article once described, appears on that list anymore. Deliveries cost $4.99 for Prime members and $9.99 for everyone else, capped at five pounds within 7.5 miles, daylight hours only. Baton Rouge is slated for this summer with 12 to 20 drones, Chicago’s south suburbs are being prepped, and Amazon has confirmed it’s scouting metro Atlanta.
The MK30 doing the work is an 80-pound hexacopter cruising at roughly 73 mph between 200 and 300 feet. It’s a serious aircraft with serious-aircraft problems: on February 4, one came down on an apartment complex in Richardson, Texas, less than two months after that market launched. No injuries, minor building damage, per Flying, and it happened five days before the Kansas City launch event. Amazon kept the schedule.
Internationally, the picture split. Amazon began UK drone flights from its Darlington fulfillment centre this spring, its first Prime Air operation outside the US, and drone outlet DroneXL reports the Civil Aviation Authority trial runs through the end of 2026, capped at 10 flights per hour and 100 deliveries per day. Italy went the opposite direction: in December 2025, Amazon told Reuters it had stopped its commercial drone plans there entirely, a year after successful tests in San Salvo. The company still talks about 500 million drone deliveries annually by 2030. Seven metros plus one capped trial in County Durham is a very long way from that.
How the big three compare in mid-2026
| Operator | Headline 2026 number | Newest markets | How it reaches customers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zipline | 2M+ lifetime deliveries; $7.6B valuation | Houston, Phoenix (launching 2026) | Retail and health partners incl. Walmart |
| Wing | 270+ Walmart stores planned by 2027 | Houston, LA, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Miami | Walmart and DoorDash apps |
| Amazon Prime Air | 7 US metros; $4.99 per delivery (Prime) | Kansas City, Baton Rouge, Darlington (UK) | Prime Air-eligible items on Amazon |
Part 108 is still a proposal, not a rule
Now the correction that matters most. The earlier version of this article claimed the FAA’s beyond-visual-line-of-sight framework “became effective in 2024.” It didn’t. No such rule existed in 2024, and none exists today.
What actually happened: the FAA published the Part 108 notice of proposed rulemaking on August 7, 2025. The comment period closed October 6 with more than 3,000 responses, per law firm DLA Piper, and the agency reopened it for two weeks in January 2026 to ask seven follow-up questions about ADS-B and detect-and-avoid systems. A White House executive order pointed at a final rule around spring 2026. As of mid-June, it hasn’t been published.
So every delivery described above happens under the old machinery: case-by-case exemptions and Part 135 air-carrier certificates negotiated company by company. Part 108 would replace that with a standard certification path for BVLOS flight covering aircraft up to 1,320 pounds, plus a companion Part 146 for the data services that keep drones separated in shared airspace. Until it lands, scale stays gated on FAA paperwork. That’s why the only names on this list are the ones with the deepest legal teams.
How to try drone delivery yourself before the rule lands
If you’re in Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, Houston, Charlotte, or southwest Virginia, open the Walmart or DoorDash app and check whether drone delivery appears for your address. That’s the lowest-friction way in. Amazon customers in its seven metros can filter for Prime Air-eligible items and decide whether the $4.99 beats driving. Order something light and boring, eggs rather than electronics, and watch the winch work from your own yard.
And if watching an 80-pound hexacopter overhead makes you want a camera in the sky yourself, start with our guide to long-range photography drones or the DJI Mini 5 Pro vs Mini 4 Pro comparison. Sub-250g consumer drones live under a different rulebook, and they’ll stay flyable whatever Part 108 ends up saying. The next date that matters is whenever the final rule hits the Federal Register; when it does, expect every company above to announce new cities within the week.
Source: Zipline, TechCrunch, Amazon, FAA
