Regulation update

Drone Inspection Codes in 2026: What's Current, What's Changing, and What to Verify Before You Sign a Vendor

Eight governing bodies touch a single drone inspection job. Here is the actual edition or rule year in force for each one, what moved recently, and the specific questions a procurement team should put to a vendor before award.

By Inspection Vendor Index Editorial Team · Published 2026-07-11 · Updated 2026-07-11

Related category: Drone (UAV) Inspection Service Providers

Why one drone flight answers to eight different rulebooks

A single drone inspection of a storage tank or a cell tower sits under more overlapping authority than most industrial services categories on this directory. The FAA governs the aircraft, the airspace and the pilot. ASTM International's Committee F38 develops the technical standards the FAA leans on when it writes sUAS rules. ASNT governs how the human who reviews the imagery gets certified as a nondestructive testing (NDT) technician. API and ASME govern the asset-integrity codes that actually require the inspection in the first place (pressure vessels, piping, storage tanks, pipeline personnel). ASPRS governs the accuracy math behind any mapping or photogrammetry deliverable. TIA governs the structural standard for the tower being climbed, or now, flown. EPA governs the small but fast-growing slice of this category built around methane and emissions monitoring. None of these bodies coordinate their release calendars with each other. That is the practical problem for a buyer: a vendor can be honestly compliant with the FAA and still be quoting an accuracy spec against a mapping standard that was superseded two editions ago, or running NDT techs certified under a 2015 recommended practice that has since been revised twice. The sections below give the actual edition or rule year in force as of mid-2026, verified against primary or trade-press sources, not a generic "stay compliant" checklist.

FAA: Part 107 still governs the flight, Remote ID is fully enforced, and Part 108 is close but not final

Part 107 remains the operative rule for visual-line-of-sight commercial drone operations and is what almost every vendor in this category flies under today. Remote ID is no longer a future requirement: the FAA ended its discretionary enforcement period and Remote ID has been fully enforced since March 16, 2024, per the FAA's own newsroom notice. A vendor's aircraft must either broadcast Remote ID natively, carry an FAA-approved broadcast module, or fly inside an FAA-Recognized Identification Area. The live story is Part 108, the beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) rule that would replace today's case-by-case waiver process with a standing regulatory pathway. The FAA published the Part 108 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in the Federal Register on August 7, 2025 (Docket No. FAA-2025-1908; Federal Register document No. 2025-14992). The initial 60-day comment period closed October 6, 2025 with more than 3,000 public comments logged, and the FAA reopened a narrower comment window on January 28, 2026 focused specifically on electronic conspicuity and detect-and-avoid requirements. A final rule has not published as of this writing; industry trackers following the administration's rulemaking timeline are watching for a final rule in the first half of 2026, but that is an expectation, not a confirmed date, and buyers should verify current status directly against the Federal Register docket before relying on it. Notably, the proposed rule would raise the eligible aircraft weight for routine BVLOS work to 110 pounds, up from the 55-pound ceiling that governs most current Part 107 waivers, which matters for any vendor pitching long-linear BVLOS work (pipeline right-of-way, transmission corridors) rather than single-asset site visits. What to verify: ask whether the vendor's BVLOS capability today rests on an individual FAA waiver (still valid, but waiver-specific in scope) versus a claim of future Part 108 readiness (not yet available to anyone, since the rule isn't final). A vendor who conflates the two is telling you they haven't read the docket.

ASTM F38 and ASNT: the standards behind the aircraft and the person reading the footage

ASTM Committee F38 on Unmanned Aircraft Systems holds jurisdiction over roughly three dozen published standards covering design, performance, and quality-acceptance testing for UAS, compiled in Annual Book of ASTM Standards Volume 15.09. ASTM has also been named by the FAA as one of the standards-development organizations building the technical standards intended to underpin small-UAS rulemaking, and F38 opened a new working group on global airborne operational risk assessment in January 2025, plus a newly approved F38.04 subcommittee on UAS infrastructure (launch and recovery sites, charging, data links). None of this is a photo-quality or inspection-deliverable standard as such; it is aircraft- and airspace-level engineering standards work, useful context for vendor due diligence but not something a procurement team audits line by line. The standard that actually governs the person interpreting the drone imagery for a defect call is ASNT's SNT-TC-1A, the recommended practice for personnel qualification and certification in nondestructive testing. The current edition is SNT-TC-1A (2024), and ASNT issued a formal addendum to that edition that took effect in May 2025 (with an Appendix C flagging further changes slated for the 2028 edition). Drone-based visual inspection is generally treated as an extension of the existing Visual Testing (VT) NDT method rather than a separate certified discipline, so the relevant question for a buyer is not "is your drone certified" (drones are not NDT-certified entities) but "is the technician who calls defects off your footage VT-certified under a current SNT-TC-1A edition, and by whom." ASNT has also published technical material specifically on UAV use in NDT (its NDT Library carries pieces such as "Advancing Drone Use Beyond Visual Inspection"), signaling the discipline is actively adapting existing VT qualification pathways to aerial platforms rather than waiting on a wholesale rewrite.

API and ASME: the asset-integrity codes the drone data has to satisfy

For oil and gas, refining and storage-terminal buyers, the codes that actually drive the inspection scope are API 510, API 570 and API 653, and all three have moved recently. API 510 (Pressure Vessel Inspection Code) is on its 11th edition, published October 2022, with Errata 1 (2023) and Errata 2 (2025) since issued. API 570 (Piping Inspection Code) is on its 5th edition, published February 2024, the most recently updated of the three. API 653 (Tank Inspection, Repair, Alteration and Reconstruction) is still on its 5th edition from November 2014, but has accumulated Addendum 1 (2018), Addendum 2 (2020), Addendum 3 (2023), Addendum 4 (2025) and two Errata (2020, 2025), so "5th edition" alone does not tell you which addendum a vendor's inspector is actually working from. These codes are inspection-method agnostic: they define what has to be inspected and on what interval, and accept drone-captured visual inspection as one acceptable way of performing an external visual inspection, but they do not certify a drone service provider directly. The credential that matters is the individual API 510/570/653 inspector certification held by the person signing off the report, not a company-level API accreditation for the drone flights themselves. On the pressure-equipment and pipeline side, ASME moved twice in 2025. The ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code (BPVC) 2025 edition released July 1, 2025 and became the mandatory reference as of January 1, 2026, per ASME's own publication notice; certificate holders are required to hold on-site proof-of-purchase of the applicable sections. Separately, ASME B31Q (Pipeline Personnel Qualification) moved to its 7th edition, approved by ANSI on January 15, 2025 and fully in effect by September 2025, adding a new covered task (0637, Vacuum Box Inspection of Tank Welds) and clarifying that a qualified individual must be physically present when overseeing an unqualified one, a detail that matters if a vendor pairs a certified pipeline inspector with drone-operating field techs who are not themselves OQ-qualified.

ASPRS, TIA and EPA: the standards buyers most often skip checking

ASPRS governs the accuracy claims behind any drone mapping, orthomosaic or point-cloud deliverable. The current Positional Accuracy Standards for Digital Geospatial Data is Edition 2, first published August 23, 2023 and revised to version 2 on June 24, 2024, which corrected several accuracy measures and added addenda covering lidar, photogrammetry, UAS and oblique imagery specifically. Edition 2 also dropped the older 95%-confidence-level accuracy metric in favor of RMSE-based statistical measures. If a vendor's proposal quotes a horizontal or vertical accuracy figure without naming an ASPRS edition and version, that number cannot be checked against anything, and older vendor boilerplate still citing the pre-2023 accuracy framework should be a flag. TIA-222 is the structural standard for the antenna-supporting towers this category's tower-inspection vendors fly. The current published revision is TIA-222-I, approved by ANSI on September 25, 2023 and in effect since January 1, 2024, superseding TIA-222-H (2017). Revision I was updated to align with ASCE 7-22 and the 2024 International Building Code, revising wind, seismic, topography and fatigue load provisions, and industry summaries of the revision, including American Tower's own published guidance, state that drones and other unmanned aircraft systems have been added as an acceptable method for structural condition-assessment data collection. A separate TIA ad hoc subcommittee under the TR-14 engineering committee has been developing more detailed drone-specific inspection procedures and ground-control-point accuracy methods since 2018, work expected to feed a future revision, so the exact field procedure a vendor follows for drone-based tower condition assessments can still vary between providers. The useful question for a buyer is which specific TIA-222-I provision, not the superseded TIA-222-H, the vendor's condition assessment is scoped against, and whether the vendor can show its methodology accounts for the current load and drone-data-collection language rather than a decade-old edition. EPA is the fastest-moving body in this entire stack, and buyers using drones for methane or leak-detection-and-repair (LDAR) compliance need to track it closer to monthly than annually right now. The governing methane rules are NSPS Subpart OOOOb (new, modified or reconstructed oil and gas sources after December 6, 2022) and Emission Guidelines Subpart OOOOc (existing sources), which include a super-emitter program letting certified third parties use remote sensing, including drone-mounted optical gas imaging (OGI), to detect and report emissions events at or above 100 kg/hour. At least one autonomous drone OGI system has been EPA-approved as an Alternative Test Method under Subparts OOOOa and OOOOb, per trade reporting in late 2025. At the same time, the rule itself has been in active flux: on March 12, 2025 the EPA administrator announced reconsideration of the underlying Clean Air Act oil-and-gas regulations and Subpart W reporting requirements; on March 14, 2025 Congress used the Congressional Review Act to disapprove the associated methane-fee (Waste Emissions Charge) rule; and in July 2025 EPA issued an interim final rule extending several OOOOb/c compliance deadlines by 18 months, including timelines for state plans and the super-emitter program. A buyer procuring drone-based methane monitoring for compliance purposes should confirm with counsel which deadline set currently applies to their facility class before assuming last year's compliance calendar still holds.

Key takeaways

Part 107 and full Remote ID enforcement (since March 16, 2024) govern almost every drone inspection flown today; Part 108 (BVLOS) is a proposed rule, not yet final as of mid-2026, so treat vendor BVLOS claims as waiver-based unless proven otherwise.
API 510, 570 and 653 are technology-agnostic: drone imagery can satisfy an external visual inspection requirement, but the credential that matters is the individual's API inspector certification, not a company-level drone accreditation.
Ask which SNT-TC-1A edition (current: 2024, addendum effective May 2025) and which ASPRS Positional Accuracy Standards edition/version (current: Edition 2, v2, June 2024) a vendor's certifications and accuracy claims are actually pinned to; both have moved since 2023.
ASME moved twice in 2025: the BPVC 2025 edition became mandatory January 1, 2026, and B31Q's 7th edition (effective September 2025) added a new pipeline covered task and tightened supervision rules for unqualified personnel working alongside qualified inspectors.
EPA's methane rules (OOOOb/OOOOc) are under active reconsideration and deadline extension through 2025 and into 2026; a drone vendor's LDAR or methane-monitoring compliance claims need to be checked against the current docket, not last year's rule text.
TIA-222-I, not TIA-222-H, has governed antenna-supporting tower structures since January 1, 2024, and already treats drone/UAS data collection as an acceptable method, so ask which TIA-222-I provision a tower vendor's condition assessment is scoped against.

FAQ

Does a drone inspection vendor need to be "API certified" as a company?

No. API 510, 570 and 653 certify individual inspectors, not drone service companies or the aircraft itself. What to verify is whether the specific inspector reviewing and signing the report holds a current API certification in the relevant code, and whether the drone-based visual inspection was scoped and documented in a way that inspector is willing to stand behind under that code.

Is FAA Part 108 in effect yet, so I can hire a vendor for routine BVLOS work?

Not as of this writing. Part 108 is a proposed rule: the NPRM published August 7, 2025 under Docket No. FAA-2025-1908, the initial comment period closed October 6, 2025, and a narrower comment window on detect-and-avoid and electronic conspicuity reopened January 28, 2026. Any BVLOS work happening today is running under an individual FAA waiver, not under Part 108 itself. Confirm directly with the vendor which authority (waiver vs. eventual Part 108) covers the specific flight you're procuring.

Why does the ASPRS accuracy standard matter if I only need visual inspection photos, not a map?

If the deliverable is purely photographic defect documentation, ASPRS may not apply. It matters specifically when the scope includes an orthomosaic, 3D model, point cloud, or any deliverable with a stated horizontal or vertical accuracy figure. Edition 2 (v2, June 2024) changed how that accuracy is calculated and reported, so a vendor citing an accuracy number without naming the edition and version is not giving you a number you can independently check.

Editorial process Compiled from primary standards, codes, and regulatory sources, then adversarially fact-checked against those sources. Not written or reviewed by a licensed engineer or safety professional. Procurement education, not safety or legal advice.

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