Amazon's drone delivery service expands to nearly 500 US cities by year's end

Amazon is dramatically expanding Prime Air, its drone delivery service, with plans to reach nearly 500 U.S. cities by the end of 2026 — roughly six times its current coverage. The expansion adds 11 new launch locations across the seven states where Prime Air already operates: Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, and Texas.

New sites include Tolleson, Arizona; Ruskin, Florida; Kansas City, Kansas; Papillion, Nebraska; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Hazel Park and Pontiac, Michigan; and Richmond, San Antonio, Richardson, and Waco in Texas. Amazon says additional launches are planned in Georgia, Ohio, Illinois, Idaho, and New York as the service continues to scale through the rest of the year.

What the service actually offers

Prime Air delivers packages weighing 5 pounds or less in as fast as 30 minutes. Pricing is free for Prime members on orders over $50, $2.99 for smaller Prime orders, and $4.99 for non-Prime customers. Amazon says the service has delivered hundreds of thousands of packages by drone in 2026 alone — a substantial jump from the pilot-scale operations Prime Air ran in its earliest markets.

Regulatory and safety framework

The expansion operates under FAA Part 135 certification, the same regulatory category that governs commercial air carriers, which permits Amazon to operate drone flights beyond visual line of sight — a prerequisite for delivery at meaningful scale. Amazon's drones use a detect-and-avoid system built on onboard cameras and sensors to identify and route around obstacles, other aircraft, and people in real time. The company says the drones remain operational in light rain and across a range of temperatures, addressing one of the more persistent criticisms of early drone delivery pilots: that they were grounded by ordinary weather.

Why the timing matters

Drone delivery has spent years as a demonstration technology — technically impressive but commercially marginal. A sixfold jump in city coverage within a single year signals that Amazon believes it has cleared the technical and regulatory hurdles that kept the service constrained to a handful of pilot markets. It also puts Amazon further ahead of rivals like Walmart and Alphabet's Wing in the race to make drone delivery a mainstream, not niche, logistics option — particularly for the low-weight, time-sensitive orders where a 30-minute delivery window is a genuine differentiator over standard same-day shipping.

As reported by TechCrunch, the expansion announcement came on August 19, 2026, positioning Prime Air as one of Amazon's fastest-scaling logistics initiatives this year.