C-DRONE GUIDE · 4 SEPTEMBER 2026

Flying a drone over a road in service in France: road permit, traffic order, air rules and prices

A road authority commissioning a survey of an interchange, a civil-engineering consultancy that needs to survey a junction before design, a contractor documenting a retaining wall : the first question put to the operator is almost always the same, and it is badly framed. "Do we need permission to fly over the road?" Under French law, no such permission exists. What does get authorised is something else: occupation of the public road domain by the crew and its vehicles, and traffic on the section concerned. Two separate titles, issued by different authorities depending on whether the road is municipal, departmental, national or under concession. On top of that ground-side chain sits an independent airspace chain — height, visual line of sight, uninvolved persons — whose framework changed on 1 January 2026 with the end of France's national scenarios. Here is how the two fit together, what belongs to the road authority rather than the pilot, and the price ranges seen in 2026.

Published on 4 September 2026, reviewed on 4 September 2026 — regulations in force as of September 2026.

Two independent authorisation chains, not to be confused

A drone mission over a road engages two unrelated bodies of law, handled by different departments and on different timetables.

The ground-side chain flows from public-property law. Article L2122-1 of the French general code of public property sets the principle: no one may occupy a dependency of the public domain, or use it beyond the right of use belonging to everyone, without holding a title authorising them to do so. Article L2125-1 of the same code adds that such occupation gives rise, save for listed exceptions, to payment of a fee. The road code of public ways applies this to roads, at article L113-2: occupation of the public road domain is only authorised if it has been the subject either of a permission de voirie where it involves physical encroachment, or of a permis de stationnement in all other cases. A drone crew parking its van on a verge, setting up a take-off pad and coning off a perimeter is occupying the public road domain: it falls under this regime, exactly as scaffolding or a skip would. Where nothing is anchored or fixed into the ground, however, the occupation falls under the parking permit rather than the works permit, the latter being reserved for interventions that modify the soil or subsoil.

The airspace chain stems from the EU regulation on unmanned aircraft and from the French airspace decree of 3 December 2020, amended by the decree of 23 December 2025: 120 m ceiling, visual line of sight, zone restrictions, distances from uninvolved persons. A point often missed by project owners: that text sets no minimum distance from a road. Permission to occupy the verge therefore does not authorise the flight, and airspace compliance does not dispense with the occupation title. Both are prepared in parallel, and the slower of the two sets the intervention date.

Who issues what, depending on the road's status

The authority competent for the occupation title follows the owner or manager of the road, not the contractor's location. On a municipal road, the request goes to the town hall; on a road transferred to a metropolitan authority or an inter-municipal body, to that body's highways department; on a departmental road outside built-up areas, to the departmental council's road services; on a national road or a toll-free motorway, to the territorially competent inter-departmental roads directorate (DIR). Form cerfa n° 14023 serves as the common template for a road-works or parking permit application. Processing can take up to two months and, in most local road regulations, no answer within that period counts as a refusal: an application filed ten days before the intervention is, in practice, a lost application.

The traffic policing power follows a different split, which regularly catches project owners out. The mayor holds it within their commune under article L411-1 of the road traffic code: inside a built-up area it is therefore the mayor who signs the temporary order, including on a departmental road. Outside built-up areas, on the departmental network, it belongs to the president of the departmental council (article L411-3). On motorways, article R411-9 is explicit: the prefect exercises traffic policing on motorways, subject to powers conferred on other administrative authorities by the code. A worksite straddling a built-up-area boundary on a departmental road therefore needs two orders, one from the mayor and one from the departmental council president. The application for a traffic order uses form cerfa n° 14024.

A third document, often left out of quotes, governs crew safety: temporary signing, whose rules sit in part 8 of the interministerial instruction on road signing, issued under the amended decree of 24 November 1967. It belongs to the worksite, and therefore to the project owner or the appointed civil-engineering contractor, not to the drone operator — a point worth settling explicitly before any intervention.

Motorways and express roads: the most constrained case

A motorway is defined at article L122-1 of the French road-ways code as a road without level crossings, accessible only at purpose-built points and reserved for motor vehicles. An express road, under article L151-1, follows the same restricted-access logic. That definition has an immediate and rarely anticipated consequence: article R421-2 of the road traffic code bars pedestrians from motorways, a pedestrian walking on a motorway incurring the fine set for first-class petty offences. In other words, a remote pilot cannot take off from the hard shoulder, the verge or a central reserve of a motorway under their own steam, however airspace-compliant they may be. Access to the corridor necessarily goes through the operator.

On the tolled network, that operator is the concession company, which occupies the motorway public domain under its concession contract and sets the terms for third-party access: an operating slot, usually at night, escort by a patrol officer, a signing vehicle, a prior safety briefing. Traffic policing, meanwhile, stays with the prefect. On a toll-free motorway or an urban expressway, the DIR holds the operator role. Either way the practical consequence is identical: closing a lane or a section is not a service the pilot can order, it is an operating decision belonging to the road authority and scheduled within its own intervention calendar.

One historical benchmark helps gauge the level of caution expected: until 31 December 2025, the national standard scenarios set by the decree of 3 December 2020 required, at paragraph 3.6.7 of their annex, that the aircraft not operate at a horizontal distance of less than 30 metres from a motorway or an express road, unless that road is closed to traffic — with no possibility of waiving it through mere coordination, unlike the neighbouring rule for railways covered in our guide to flying a drone near a railway line. Those national S1, S2 and S3 scenarios can no longer be used since 1 January 2026, replaced by the European standard scenarios STS-01 and STS-02: the 30 m distance no longer appears as such in the applicable texts. It nonetheless remains a useful operational benchmark, and a specific-category operational authorisation may perfectly well reintroduce it among its conditions.

Road users are uninvolved persons

This is the point that, in practice, shapes the flight plan far more than the occupation title does. The European regulation reasons in terms of distances from uninvolved persons, and EASA's guidance material on that definition (GM1 Article 2(18)) is entirely explicit: an uninvolved person is not only someone directly exposed; it may also be a person inside a bus or a car who is indirectly exposed. EASA expressly takes the example of the driver of a car overflown by a drone, who must be treated as an uninvolved person — the stated reason being that a drone flying close to a vehicle may distract its driver and cause a crash.

In concrete terms, a queue of moving vehicles is a queue of uninvolved persons. In sub-category A3, overflying uninvolved persons is prohibited and a 150 m distance from residential, commercial, industrial or recreational areas applies. In sub-category A2, lateral distance must at least equal flight height (the 1:1 rule) and never drop below 30 m from an uninvolved person, reduced to 5 m with low-speed mode engaged. On a road carrying steady traffic, these rules almost always lead to one of three set-ups: flying over the corridor but clear of the running lanes, obtaining an actual closure of the section from the road authority — a closure turns road users into absent persons rather than uninvolved ones —, or moving to the specific category with a dedicated risk assessment. Inside built-up areas, add the prior declaration to the prefecture on form cerfa 15476*04 with ten working days' notice, described in our guide to flying over public space in French cities since the December 2025 decree.

This framing is not specific to France. The review published in 2020 by Fatma Outay, Hanan Abdullah Mengash and Muhammad Adnan in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice surveys drone use in road safety, traffic monitoring and highway asset management, and identifies the regulation of flight above moving road users as one of the main brakes on operational deployment, alongside privacy and endurance issues (see the study on Google Scholar). On the worksite side, the study by Chendong Zhu, Junqing Zhu, Tianxiang Bu and Xiaofei Gao published in 2022 in Sensors shows that drone imagery can automatically identify risk factors on a road worksite under live traffic — one more reason road authorities accept these missions, provided they fit within their own safety organisation (see the study on Google Scholar).

Method and 2026 prices

A mission over a road in service runs in a stable order. Six to eight weeks ahead: identify the actual manager of the section — the land registry is not enough, a road that looks municipal may be a departmental road running through town — then file form cerfa 14023 with that manager. Four weeks ahead: apply for a temporary traffic order using form cerfa 14024 from the competent policing authority, distinguishing the sections inside and outside built-up areas. In parallel: check airspace zones on the national Géoportail drone map, choose the sub-category or build a specific-category file, and file the prefectural declaration if the section lies inside a built-up area. The day before: confirm the slot and the signing arrangements with the road authority. On the day: joint briefing, a flight plan that holds the distances from running lanes, and immediate suspension if a traffic incident occurs.

Ranges observed in France in 2026, excl. VAT:

These amounts cover the flight, data processing and the report. They do not include any public-domain occupation fee owed to the road authority, nor the supply and installation of temporary signing, which belong to the worksite. Once the authorisations are in place, the deliverables feed the uses covered in our guides to municipal road pavement condition surveys by drone, bridge and civil-structure inspection and road signage and equipment inventories; for an audiovisual shoot on public roads, the additional town-hall step is described in our guide to drone filming permits on the public domain. The regulatory information on this page reflects the rules in force in September 2026; exact terms, lead times and fees vary between local road regulations and should be checked with the relevant road authority. This page is not legal advice. For a mission on the road network, request a quote stating the road's status, the chainage and the deadline.

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