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C-DRONE GUIDE · 31 AUGUST 2026

Drones Over Cities: What the 23 December 2025 Order Changes for Flying Above Public Space

Until 31 December 2025, a drone photographer, a corporate videographer or an inspection firm wanting to fly over a street, a square or a building facade in a city centre ran into a simple, rigid rule: in the Open category, flying over public space in a built-up area was banned, full stop. The only way round it was the specific category — a declared STS-01 scenario or a case-by-case DSAC authorisation, with the weeks of lead time and the cost of preparing a file that entails — for a mission that, technically, often carried no particular risk. The order of 23 December 2025, in force since 1 January 2026, finally opens that possibility to professional operators, under precise conditions. Here is what actually changes, for which drones, what still has to be declared, and the effect on the price of an urban mission.

Published on 31 August 2026, reviewed on 3 September 2026 — regulations in force as of September 2026.

What was banned, and what the order of 23 December 2025 changes

The reference text for drone airspace use in France is the order of 3 December 2020 on the use of airspace by unmanned aircraft, known as the « Airspace Order ». Its original version set a clear-cut rule: in the Open category, no flight above public space in a built-up area was authorised, whatever the drone's sub-category. An operator wanting to film a facade from the street, cover a corporate event on a public square or inspect a roof visible from the pavement had to either stay above accessible private land — a yard, a garden, a fenced plot — or switch to the specific category, with the lead time and the cost of preparing a file that entails.

The order of 23 December 2025, published in the Official Journal in late December and amending that same 2020 text, changes this rule for professional operators only. Since it took effect on 1 January 2026, an operator declared as a UAS operator — with a SIRET business number, registered on AlphaTango — can fly in the Open category above public space in a built-up area, provided the flight stays within the sub-categories and conditions the text sets out. This is the first opening of this kind since the EU civil drone regulation came into force in 2021, on a point professional federations had been calling for years, as a source of complexity disproportionate to the actual risk of most urban missions. The same simplification drive also, from 1 January 2026, ends the old national scenarios S-1, S-2 and S-3, replaced by the European standard scenarios STS-01 and STS-02 in the specific category. (Source: Légifrance, order of 23 December 2025 amending the order of 3 December 2020 on the use of airspace by unmanned aircraft, JORFTEXT000053166739.)

Which drones qualify: A1, A2, and the de facto exclusion of A3

The new text does not reopen public space in built-up areas to just any drone. It targets the A1 and A2 sub-categories of the Open category, meaning aircraft carrying a C0, C1 or C2 class mark — the latter under conditions — under delegated regulation (EU) 2019/945: the lightest, best-instrumented aircraft on the consumer and professional market, often fitted with obstacle-detection and speed-limiting systems. A C3 or C4 class drone, falling under sub-category A3, stays outside the scheme: by design, that sub-category requires a distance of at least 150 m from residential, commercial, industrial or recreational areas, a constraint incompatible with flying over a city centre. Our guide to the open versus specific drone category covers these thresholds by sub-category.

That same limit also excludes, in practice, so-called « legacy » drones bought before 2024 without a class mark, already pushed into sub-category A3 above 250 g by the end of the S-1/S-2/S-3 transitional regimes on 1 January 2026 — a topic covered in our guide to the professional drone without a C class in 2026. In practice, an operator wanting to benefit from the urban opening has to fly a recent, correctly classed aircraft, not the older model that has proven itself for five years but that CE marking never caught up with.

Restricting the opening to the lightest classes is not arbitrary: it follows the same ground-risk logic that underpins the EU regulation itself. A study by S. Primatesta, A. Rizzo and A. la Cour-Harbo, published in 2020 in the Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, proposes a ground-risk map for urban environments combining population density, building sheltering effect and failure probability — and shows that this risk depends above all on the aircraft's mass and kinetic energy in a fall, far more than on its mission (see the study on Google Scholar). A C0 under 250 g or a C1 under 900 g carries, at equal impact energy, a residual risk far below that of a 25 kg C3 — which is exactly why the regulator itself treats these categories differently rather than opening built-up areas to every Open-category drone.

The declaration that remains mandatory: SIRET, AlphaTango, populated zones

The opening created by the order of 23 December 2025 is not deregulation: it stays strictly reserved for professional use, and a prior declaration remains necessary for a flight over a populated zone — a built-up area shown on aeronautical charts, or land within 50 m of its edge. That declaration is filed via AlphaTango, on Cerfa form no. 15476, with a notice period set by the text: the operator has to plan the mission several working days ahead of the flight, not book it the day before for the next day. A hobby pilot, by contrast, stays outside the scheme: flying over public space in a built-up area remains banned outside a declared professional framework, barring a specific prefectural authorisation.

The text also leaves untouched the rules that stay, otherwise, unchanged: night flights still fall under a separate framework (position lights, dedicated training), restricted zones — an aerodrome's control zone, sensitive sites, nature reserves — remain subject to their own restrictions, checkable on the Géoportail drone zone map, and professional third-party liability insurance stays, as for any commercial flight, a de facto condition before accepting a mission in a city. The 1 January 2026 opening simplifies one specific point — the very principle of flying over public space in the Open category — without waiving the usual preparation an urban mission requires.

What it changes for an urban mission: use cases and price

The practical effect is felt first in lead time and administrative preparation cost. A photography or aerial video mission in a city centre — brand imagery, a corporate shoot, coverage of an event on a public square, footage for a property transaction, or a facade inspection visible from the street — that previously required an STS-01 scenario or a case-by-case DSAC authorisation can now, if the drone and the flight meet the text's conditions, be organised in the Open category: no safety file to get approved beforehand, just the populated-zone declaration to file within the required notice period. On a one-off mission, that lighter load shows up directly in the price quoted to the client: fewer hours of regulatory engineering billed, and a booking lead time cut to a few working days rather than several weeks.

This administrative simplification does not remove the need to manage public acceptance of the flight, a sensitive point distinct from regulatory compliance. A survey by M. Stolz, A. Papenfuß, F. Dunkel and E. Linhuber, published in 2024 in the journal Drones under the title « Harmonized Skies: A Survey on Drone Acceptance across Europe », questioned nearly 3,000 people across six European countries: overall attitudes towards drones were fairly positive, but acceptance depends heavily on the use case — public-interest and civil missions are better accepted than private or commercial ones — and privacy and safety concerns stay high across the whole sample (see the study on Google Scholar). In practice, legally flying over a shopping street or a public square does not remove the need to inform nearby residents of a planned shoot, blur recognisable faces in deliverables meant for public communication, or seek the town hall's consent to temporarily occupy public space on the ground during the mission. To organise a shoot or an inspection in a built-up area under this new framework, request a quote stating the exact location, the preferred date and the type of drone planned: we check the mission's eligibility before scheduling it.

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