The European Union Aviation Safety Agency has put concrete regulatory text behind the 100-gram registration threshold that Brussels floated in February, and the proposal would pull nearly every camera drone in Europe into mandatory registration, operator training, and Remote ID. The draft, circulated to industry under the designation NPA 2026-103, proposes amending the two regulations that govern drone flight across the bloc, Delegated Regulation 2019/945 and Implementing Regulation 2019/947. EASA discussed the text with drone industry stakeholders at a workshop at its Cologne headquarters this month before deciding which feedback to fold into the next draft.

If adopted, the rules would lower the weight at which mandatory training and registration kick in from 250 grams to 100 grams. That captures the lightweight end of the consumer market, including sub-250-gram models from the DJI Mini and DJI Neo lines that pilots buy specifically to avoid paperwork. I have watched this threshold debate run for years, and the 250-gram line has been the single most important number in consumer drone design. Moving it to 100 grams rewrites the rulebook for an entire class of aircraft that manufacturers engineered around the old limit.

The proposal is early. It is the opening move in a multi-year process, not a law, and the timeline stretches well into the next decade.

NPA 2026-103 lowers the registration and training line to 100 grams

EASA’s headline proposal drops the threshold for mandatory training and registration to drones weighing more than 100 grams, down from the current 250-gram line in the Open category. Today, operators flying drones under 250 grams generally skip training, though most still have to register if the drone carries a camera. The new rule would close that gap for the lightest aircraft.

Pilots flying camera drones between 100 and 250 grams would have to complete a basic online theory course. That sweeps in popular models from the DJI Mini, DJI Neo, and the newer DJI Lito series, the exact category of small, capable aircraft that has driven recreational drone sales for the past several years. The course is a knowledge test rather than a heavy compliance burden, but it converts a buy-and-fly purchase into a registered, trained activity.

Europe would not be the first to draw the line here. The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority became the first major Western aviation regulator to drop the threshold from 250 to 100 grams, a change that took effect on January 1, 2026 and forced an estimated half a million British pilots into the system. We covered the rollout as UK drone owners faced an online theory test before takeoff over the holidays. Brussels is now proposing to follow Britain across the same line.

Japan has lived with a low weight line for years, and DJI has already shown it will build hardware to fit one. When Japan’s Aeronautical Act exempted aircraft under 200 grams, DJI released a Japan-only Mavic Mini in 2019 with a smaller 1,100 mAh battery that brought takeoff weight down to 199 grams, against the 249 grams everywhere else. A DJI representative confirmed at the time that the variant existed specifically to clear the regulatory cutoff. Japan has since tightened that line further toward 100 grams. The lesson for Europe is that a hard weight threshold reshapes what manufacturers ship into a market, and the lightest, most accessible drones are the ones that get re-engineered or pulled.

Remote ID would become mandatory for almost every drone over 100 grams

EASA also wants to make Direct Remote ID mandatory for all drones heavier than 100 grams, extending a requirement that currently applies only above 250 grams. Brussels would also block any Remote ID-equipped drone from taking off unless a valid operator registration number has first been entered into the aircraft. The two changes work together to tie every flight to a registered person.

Remote ID functions as a digital license plate for drones. Using a compatible receiver, law enforcement, emergency responders, and members of the public can pull identification and location data broadcast by the aircraft. EASA argues that extending the requirement would improve transparency in low-level airspace and make drones easier to identify during incidents. Mandatory ADS-L, which would also make drones electronically visible to other airspace users, is not part of the current proposals.

The registration-number lockout is the part operators should read twice. A drone that refuses to arm until the operator ID is loaded is a meaningful shift in how the aircraft itself enforces compliance. It moves enforcement from a police officer with a receiver to the firmware on the drone.

The proposal also loosens rules for professional Specific category operations

NPA 2026-103 is not only about tightening the consumer end. The same document includes measures to reduce the administrative load on professional operators, who EASA acknowledges face individual authorization processes for thousands of Specific category operations that carry relatively low real-world risk. The agency says that workload is unnecessary for both operators and national aviation authorities.

To fix it, EASA intends to expand the use of Standard Scenarios, particularly for operations within the SAIL II risk level, so more flights can proceed on an operational declaration rather than a prior authorization. The agency also wants to shift part of the safety assessment from operators to manufacturers. Where a drone and its operational concept have already been assessed against predefined standards, the operator may no longer need to conduct a full Specific Operations Risk Assessment, the SORA process, on their own.

That approach carries into proposed new and updated standard scenarios for BVLOS operations, including flights close to infrastructure and obstacles in atypical airspace, and operations involving large agricultural drones with a maximum take-off mass up to 750 kilograms (1,653 pounds). That ceiling is not arbitrary. It matches the upper weight boundary of EASA’s CS-LURS airworthiness code for light unmanned rotorcraft, which lets regulators write declarative scenarios for heavy-lift aircraft without pushing them into the much stricter Certified category. The goal is to enable those flights without a full SORA assessment every time, which could also reduce how often national aviation authorities need to get involved.

The proposal traces back to the Commission’s February counter-drone package

NPA 2026-103 puts engineering detail behind recommendations the European Commission published on February 11, 2026, as part of its Action Plan on Drone and Counter-Drone Security. That plan set out a broad drone and counter-drone agenda, and Brussels framed it as a response to operational experience, technological change, and new safety and enforcement challenges. We covered the action plan when it landed and flagged that the 100-gram registration threshold was buried inside counter-drone language rather than presented as the consumer-affecting rule change it actually is.

The push for stricter rules drew momentum from the wave of alleged drone sightings near airports and other sensitive sites across Europe at the end of 2025. Munich Airport shut down twice in two days, Copenhagen and Oslo closed for hours, and Belgium took repeated airport closures in November. Those incidents fed political and public demand for more oversight and transparency in low-level airspace, even though the rules now on the table reach far beyond the kind of operator behind those incursions.

The same connection that already reshaped EASA’s certification work is now visible in the regulations themselves. When EASA updated its list of 66 EU-approved drones in February, the agency confirmed it was revising the entire Cx classification framework because of the action plan’s 100-gram and geofencing demands. NPA 2026-103 is where that revision starts to take written form.

Cross-border harmonization remains the industry’s long-standing complaint

The proposal also clarifies national conditions and geographic zones for drones, an area the industry has pushed on for years. A common European framework exists on paper, yet operators running cross-border work still hit real differences between member states on exemptions and added national requirements. Germany mandates liability insurance, Italy requires a visible QR code with the operator registration number, and France enforces its own zone restrictions, to name three.

None of this is close to final. NPA 2026-103 opens a multi-year process during which the rules will be refined in consultation with member states and industry stakeholders. UAV DACH, the European association for unmanned aviation, said its deputy chairman took part in the Cologne workshop and that EASA plans to publish an addendum to NPA 2026-103 in July addressing the U-space Regulation 2021/664 specifically. Under the current timeline, the first changes could take effect from mid-2028, and the revised framework is not expected to be fully operational before 2031 at the earliest.

DroneXL’s Take

This is the second half of a story we called in February, and it is landing exactly where we said it would. When the Commission published its counter-drone action plan, the press release was all about detection, jammers, and a drone wall. The actual consumer-affecting change, dropping registration to 100 grams, was tucked into the security framing where most coverage missed it. NPA 2026-103 is that quiet line item turning into regulatory text, and now it carries training and a Remote ID arming lockout with it.

Here is the problem I keep coming back to. The justification for all of this is the airport chaos of late 2025, and registration does nothing about that. No state-sponsored operator launching military reconnaissance drones from a Russian shadow fleet tanker 70 nautical miles offshore is going to enter a valid operator ID before takeoff. We have documented repeatedly that many of those sightings were misidentified planes and stars in the first place, and the genuine threats were precisely the operators who will never register. What a 100-gram threshold actually does is build a database of law-abiding hobbyists so authorities can sort the compliant from the non-compliant. The reckless and the hostile are, by definition, already outside that system.

I want to be fair to the parts of this that are good. The Specific category simplification is genuinely useful. Shifting SORA work onto manufacturers, expanding Standard Scenarios for SAIL II, and writing real BVLOS scenarios for infrastructure inspection and large agricultural drones is exactly the kind of proportionate, risk-based rulemaking the industry has asked for. If EASA delivered only that half of NPA 2026-103, this would be a good day for European drone operators. The professional side gets lighter while the recreational side gets heavier, and the heavier side is being justified by a threat it cannot touch.

The good news is that nothing here is settled. This is the opening draft of a process that runs to 2031, the workshop feedback is still being absorbed, and a July addendum on U-space is already coming. The UK has already crossed this line, so European hobbyists can see precisely what compliance looks like, and the British sky did not become measurably safer for it. Watch whether the major civil aviation industry groups challenge the 100-gram threshold directly during the consultation or treat it as a done deal. That choice, more than any single line in the draft, will decide whether the registration debate is still a live fight or already over.

Sources: European Commission Action Plan on Drone and Counter-Drone Security (COM(2026) 81 final, 11 February 2026); UAV DACH workshop report.

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