Amazon Is Taking Prime Air to Nearly 500 US Cities by Year-End — a 6x Expansion of Drone Delivery

Amazon will expand Prime Air drone delivery to nearly 500 US cities and towns by the end of 2026 — roughly six times its current footprint. The service today operates in seven states: Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, and Texas. Eleven new launch sites are rolling out imminently, including Kansas City, Baton Rouge, San Antonio, Waco, and the Detroit suburbs of Hazel Park and Pontiac, with the Chicago, Atlanta, Cleveland, Syracuse, and Boise metro areas queued up next.

The mechanics: drones carry items weighing 5 pounds or less and deliver in as little as 30 minutes. Prime members get free drone delivery on orders over $50, pay $2.99 below that threshold, and non-Prime customers pay $4.99. Amazon says it has already delivered hundreds of thousands of packages by drone this year.

After a decade of Prime Air being a running joke — Jeff Bezos first promised drone delivery on 60 Minutes in 2013 — the regulatory picture finally caught up with the ambition. Amazon holds FAA Part 135 air carrier certification, and its drones fly beyond visual line of sight using an onboard detect-and-avoid system, navigating with cameras and sensors rather than human spotters. That’s the unlock that makes 500 cities possible; supervised flights with ground observers never scale past pilot programs.

The expansion is notably unbothered by setbacks. Amazon is returning to Tolleson, Arizona — the site of an October 2025 incident where a drone collided with a crane. Regulators reviewed it; the program continues. That’s what a maturing operation looks like: incidents get investigated instead of killing the roadmap.

The 5-pound limit sounds restrictive until you look at what people actually order. Amazon has previously said the majority of its packages fall under that weight. Medications, phone chargers, batteries, cosmetics — the high-urgency, low-weight tail of e-commerce is exactly where a 30-minute delivery window changes buying behavior. It’s also where Amazon collides head-on with Walmart, which touts its own 30-minute drone deliveries and has been expanding through partners like Zipline and Wing across the Sun Belt.

The economics of flying a $2.99 delivery remain unproven at scale. But with 500 cities on the map and BVLOS authorization in hand, this stopped being a demo this week. Drone delivery is now an operating logistics network — and Amazon owns the biggest one in the country.

Sources

• TechCrunch