Drone licence: UK Drone Authorisation Rules

Every row is a verbatim sentence read from the named source's own page through our fetch service on the date shown, hash-pinned to the stored read (the sha of the page's visible text; the raw page is mirrored to R2).

3 of the 29 named sources that could be read published a usable figure; 26 published none and are recorded as not published, never filled in; 1 could not be read (blocked, dead or unreachable) and count nowhere.

The headline figures (median, minimum, maximum, quartiles) are over ONE figure per source in month (a source's median where its page yielded several accepted sentences), so N counts sources, never sentences; 10 candidate sentence(s) were refused by a reviewer with the reason recorded.

The fuller derivation this dataset is chartered to grow into (not yet what the figures above are; they are each source's own published figure as read): one row per AUTHORISATION - Flyer ID, Operator ID, A2 CofC, GVC, RPC-L1/L2/L3, Operational Authorisation - against the thresholds that decide it (aircraft mass and class mark, sub-category, VLOS or BVLOS, minimum age, entry condition, period of validity), each quoted from the CAA's own qualification page or from the instrument on legislation.gov.uk, and each carrying its EFFECTIVE DATE.

The derivation nobody publishes: the checker's decision table - answer four things about the drone and the flight and get the one authorisation that applies - held as a dated series across the 1 January 2026 rule change and the 31 December 2027 withdrawal of the GVC, so the same flight can be priced under the rules that applied last year, the rules that apply now and the rules that will apply, which is exactly what a person who bought a drone before the change is asking and what no single CAA page shows.

10 candidate sentences on these pages were refused by a reviewer; each refusal and its reason is recorded in the review ledger.