FAA Publishes World Cup TFR Venue List, And Part 107 Authorizations Stop At The Stadium Ring

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on May 28 published the actual venue list, dates, and airspace dimensions for its FIFA World Cup 2026 flight restrictions, turning a months-old “No Drone Zone” messaging campaign into a concrete schedule that pilots can now check against their own calendars. Eleven U.S. stadiums get the largest treatment: a three-nautical-mile radius up to 3,000 feet above ground level on every match day, closed to all aircraft including drones unless air traffic control says otherwise. Twelve fan-event sites get a tighter one-nautical-mile ring up to 1,000 feet.

The numbers matter because they are no longer abstract. When I mapped the published dates against the venue table, the U.S. match slate runs from June 12 at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles through July 19 at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford. Add the fan-festival windows, several of which run continuously for two to three weeks, and large blocks of airspace over major metros go dark for most of a 38-day stretch. AT&T Stadium in Arlington alone carries nine separate Temporary Flight Restriction (TFR) dates.

This is the document DroneXL said to watch for. The penalty exposure has not changed since the earlier announcement. Civil fines reach $75,000 per violation and criminal fines top out at $100,000, with drone confiscation and federal criminal charges both on the table. What changed on May 28 is that operators can finally see which patches of sky, on which calendar days, will put them in front of an enforcement letter.

Match Venues Draw The Three-Mile Ring On Game Days

The headline restriction covers each of the 11 U.S. host stadiums with a three-nautical-mile radius up to 3,000 feet AGL, active on match days and lifting between events. That is the standard stadium TFR footprint the FAA already applies to NFL and MLB games and other large-venue events under existing national-defense-airspace rules, scaled across a tournament. The dimensions are not a World Cup invention. The scale is.

Pilots should treat these dates as a planning baseline, not gospel. The FAA states the locations are subject to change and that additional sites may be added. The operative legal document for any given day remains the TFR NOTAM, which the agency typically posts a few days ahead at tfr.faa.gov with the exact lateral and vertical bounds. The published table tells you when to expect a closure. The NOTAM tells you its precise shape.

Fan Festivals Get A Smaller Ring But Far Longer Windows

The second tier is where the duration becomes the story. Fan-event sites carry a one-nautical-mile radius up to 1,000 feet AGL, smaller than the stadium ring, but several stay active for weeks rather than hours. Lemon Hill Park in Philadelphia and the East Downtown District in Houston both show near-continuous coverage from June 11 through July 19. Bayfront Park in Miami runs June 13 to July 5. These are not match-day-only closures.

For a commercial operator with a rooftop inspection contract in downtown Houston or a real-estate shoot near Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, a multi-week one-mile no-fly bubble is a real scheduling constraint, not a one-night inconvenience. The FAA also notes that further restrictions will apply at team hotels and base camps, along with training facilities, with that list published separately. Those locations are not in the two tables above.

A Part 107 Certificate Buys No Exemption Inside An Active TFR

Certification does not open a door here. A Part 107 remote pilot certificate, a LAANC authorization, or a recreational flyer’s blanket permission means nothing inside an active World Cup TFR, because a temporary flight restriction overrides standing airspace approvals for its duration. A grid authorization that normally clears you for a Class B shelf does not survive contact with an overlapping stadium ring during a match window.

This is the point most likely to trip up the professionals who assume their paperwork protects them. It does not. The restriction text applies to everyone absent specific air traffic control authorization, and takeoff or landing from private property inside the ring is covered too. The pilots with the most to lose are the certificated ones, because a willful TFR breach by someone who holds a Part 107 invites certificate action on top of the fine.

DETER Turns A Single TFR Clip Into A Fast-Track Case

Enforcement speed is the genuinely new variable this summer. The FAA confirmed that its Drone Expedited and Targeted Enforcement Response (DETER) program will support World Cup enforcement, compressing the path from a logged violation to a notice of violation that lands by FedEx. DroneXL covered DETER’s Federal Register filing at 91 FR 20578 in April.

DETER itself does not apply to TFR violations, which the program explicitly excludes as serious offenses, so a stadium-ring breach will not get the reduced-penalty fast lane. What DETER does is clear the agency’s enforcement queue of routine careless-operation cases so investigators have bandwidth for the serious ones. Federal law enforcement also retains authority to use mitigation tools to move an unauthorized drone out of restricted airspace while preserving evidence, the legal hook that lets the FBI seize a drone on the spot. DroneXL’s reporting on the agency’s 2025 enforcement sweep showed fines that year ranged from $1,771 to $36,770, with eight pilots losing or having certificates suspended.

DroneXL’s Take

On May 4, I wrote that the next real test of this whole apparatus would arrive the week of June 6, when normal NOTAM timing would force the FAA to put actual airspace boundaries on the books. The agency moved earlier than that. This May 28 table is the document I said to watch for, and it answers one of the two questions I raised then. Fan-festival boundaries did get published with meaningful lead time, nearly two weeks before the earliest fan site activates on June 9. Legitimate commercial operators now have something concrete to plan around. Credit where due.

The other question I flagged is now sharper, not resolved. Back in January, DroneXL reported that Massachusetts public-safety planners were still working out the geographic gap between Boston and Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, roughly 30 miles apart, and the unsettled location of the state’s FIFA FanFest. Look at the May 28 tables. Boston’s City Hall Plaza is listed as a fan-event site from June 11 to 26. Gillette Stadium is listed as a match venue. The 30 miles of suburban airspace between them, where a fan might actually launch a drone to film the drive south, sits in neither restriction. That gap is exactly what the state flagged, and the published TFRs do not close it.

Here is the open question I cannot answer from the documents. The FAA’s own 2025 enforcement data shows nearly every fined operator was unregistered and uncertificated, the population least likely to read a TFR table or a NOTAM. Publishing a precise schedule is a gift to the compliant Part 107 pilot who was never the problem, and close to irrelevant to the backpack hobbyist outside SoFi who has never heard of tfr.faa.gov. Whether the detection-and-seizure layer actually catches that second pilot, or whether the published schedule mostly reassures the people who were already going to comply, is the thing to watch once matches start on June 12. The enforcement plumbing is real. Whether it reaches the right targets is still unproven.

Sources: Federal Aviation Administration, FAA FIFA World Cup 2026 Safety Plan.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.