Washington Commercial Drone Fees Jump 10x to $150 After Jet Tax Repeal

Washington state will charge commercial drone operators $150 per aircraft per year starting January 1, 2027, ten times the $15 they pay today. The increase sits inside ESHB 2711, the transportation package Gov. Bob Ferguson signed March 31, which repealed Washington’s 10% luxury tax on private aircraft over $500,000 before it took effect.

The $150 is two line items. The annual state registration fee for every aircraft doubles from $15 to $30. A separate $120 aircraft excise tax, which drones have never paid, now applies to them.

As of August 24, DroneXL had found no drone outlet or trade group that has covered it; the Washington State Standard gave it one sentence in March. The change surfaced this week in an email thread among Washington operators that reached DroneXL, from a UAS program lead hoping a colleague could tell him he was reading the statute wrong. He was reading it right.

Washington’s Drone Charges Rise From $15 to $150 on January 1, 2027

Under RCW 47.68.250 as amended, the annual state aircraft registration fee rises from $15 to $30 on January 1, 2027, and RCW 82.48.030 adds a $120 excise tax line for commercial unpiloted aircraft systems. A Washington-based commercial drone will owe $150 a year, then $153 in 2028.

The registration statute covers every aircraft operated or based in the state during a calendar year, names commercial unpiloted aircraft systems explicitly, and exempts drones flown only for hobby or recreation. Government aircraft, nonresident aircraft in the state fewer than 90 days, academic research flown under the recreational rule and aircraft held for sale are exempt too, per the statute and WSDOT’s page. The statute puts the fee in January, collected with the excise tax; WSDOT’s drone page says annual drone registration begins April 1.

The excise statute’s table of aircraft types currently lists nine categories, from a $20 sailplane to a $125 turbojet, and no drones; a separate weight-based table covers commuter air carriers. The 2027 table adds a tenth row, “Commercial unpiloted aircraft systems,” with a Part 1 amount of $0, a Part 2 amount of $120, and a total of $120. From January 1, 2028, the registration fee and every excise amount get a 2% annual increase rounded to the nearest dollar, so 2028 comes to $31 plus $122.

RCW 82.48.020 makes a violation of the excise chapter a misdemeanor, and registering an aircraft out of state to dodge the tax a gross misdemeanor.

For comparison, the Federal Aviation Administration registers a Part 107 drone for $5, good for three years. WSDOT’s own commercial drone registration page, last updated May 1, a month after the governor signed the bill, still says $15 per drone and does not mention 2027 or the excise tax.

The Drone Tax Rides Inside Washington’s Luxury Jet Tax Repeal

ESHB 2711 repealed the 10% luxury tax on noncommercial aircraft above $500,000 one day before it was due to take effect. The transportation package, originally sponsored by Rep. Jake Fey, raised the aviation fuel tax 7 cents a gallon in its place. It put commercial drones on the excise schedule.

The luxury tax came out of the 2025 session in SB 5801, and the business aviation lobby spent a year fighting it. The National Business Aviation Association and the Pacific Northwest Business Aviation Association built a coalition of aircraft owners and airport interests, and on the day Ferguson signed the repeal NBAA put out a release calling the outcome a win for jobs and local investment. The release describes what replaced the jet tax as the fuel tax increase and “a moderate increase to aircraft registration fees.” It does not use the word drone.

The state’s reason is on the record, briefly. Sen. Marko Liias, the Edmonds Democrat who sponsored the jet tax in 2025 and led its repeal this year, told the Washington State Standard in February that “we want every part of the transportation system contributing,” and that the fuel tax and registration increases would replace some of the lost revenue. The Department of Revenue had put the jet tax at $4 million to $5 million a year, per the Standard. Nothing in that account or in the bill reports explains why a drone’s share of every part is $120.

The drone tax got exactly one public hearing. It first appeared in SB 6352, the Senate’s transportation revenue bill, which Liias and Sen. Curtis King introduced on February 16 and the Senate Transportation Committee heard three days later, on February 19. The hearing record lists about twenty witnesses: Liias himself, the Port of Seattle, Delta and Alaska Airlines, the Pacific Northwest Business Aviation Association, AOPA, transit and labor groups, RV dealers and city officials. None testified against. No drone operator and no drone trade group appears.

The bill that became law never carried the drone line through a hearing of its own. ESHB 2711, the House vehicle, repealed the jet tax and changed no aircraft fee or excise through its House committee hearings on February 23 and 25 or its Senate hearing on March 2. The Senate committee’s report lists the aircraft fee and excise increases among the effects of the amendment it adopted on March 4, two days after that hearing. The Senate passed the amended bill 33-15 on March 11 and the House concurred 54-42 the same day.

The final bill report gives the drone change one sentence: “Commercial unpiloted aircraft systems are made subject to the annual aircraft excise tax.” None of the bill reports on either bill explains why the number is $120.

Manned aircraft took a hit as well. A single-engine piston plane’s excise rises from $50 to $120, so its total state bill goes from $65 to $150, a 2.3x increase. A commercial drone’s goes from $15 to $150. The 7-cent fuel tax doesn’t touch a battery-electric drone.

Washington Sends 90% of the Drone Money to Sustainable Aviation Fuel

From 2027, half of each $30 registration fee and all of the $120 drone excise tax go to Washington’s sustainable aviation fuel account, which Commerce spends on research, environmental review, and infrastructure for producing jet fuel substitutes. Of an operator’s $150, $135 funds that account and $15 funds airports.

That account was the jet tax’s destination in the first place. The Senate committee report’s background section notes that revenue from the luxury aircraft tax was to be deposited into the sustainable aviation fuel account, so when the tax was repealed, the fee and excise increases were pointed at the same pot. Amended RCW 47.68.250 splits registration fees 50-50 between the aeronautics account, which pays for state airport grants and the cost of collecting the tax, and the fuel account. The 7-cent fuel tax feeds a separate new account for sustainable aviation fuel infrastructure at airports. RCW 82.48.080 sends every dollar in the excise table’s Part 1 column to airports and every dollar in Part 2 to the fuel account. Drones sit at $0 in Part 1 and $120 in Part 2.

RCW 43.31.645, created in 2025, lets the Department of Commerce spend that account on work supporting the production of sustainable aviation fuel. Nothing in it mentions drones or the UAS coordinator program the original $15 fee was created to fund. The electric aircraft in Washington’s fleet will be paying for the fuel they don’t burn.

WSDOT Asked the Legislature for Fleet Discounts in 2022 and Got a Tenfold Increase

WSDOT’s November 2022 fee review, ordered by the legislature, recommended keeping the $15 registration fee. It proposed tiered discounts down to $10 per drone for fleets of 51 or more. This year the legislature multiplied the per-drone cost by ten without adopting any tier.

SHB 1379, passed in 2021, created the state UAS coordinator inside WSDOT Aviation, opened commercial drone registration on April 1, 2022, and ordered WSDOT to review the fee by December 1, 2022.

That report is the only public accounting of the drone program DroneXL found. Between April 1 and October 27, 2022, 251 commercial drones were registered by 130 entities, 95 of them registering a single aircraft. Collections came to $3,765. The coordinator program cost $280,000 for the biennium, and WSDOT wrote that “the funds currently collected do not cover the expenses associated with the program.” Its fix was patience and a fleet discount, on the theory that a growing industry would close the gap.

The report never says how many commercial drones Washington actually has. The 2021 bill analysis put FAA non-hobbyist registrations with a Washington address at more than 14,000 in 2020. Against the 251 drones the state registered in the program’s first seven months, and if the FAA figure held, that is a compliance rate under 2%. WSDOT told the legislature it cannot reach the operators it needs to enroll because the FAA database does not share registered owner data with states, the same blackout DroneXL documented last month.

At 2022 registration levels, the new excise tax raises about $30,000 a year. The coordinator program, budgeted at $280,000 for the 2021-23 biennium, costs more than four times that.

Washington Will Charge a DJI Mini the Same $150 as a Cessna 172

The 2027 excise table sets single-engine fixed-wing aircraft, sailplanes, homebuilts, and commercial drones all at $120, and the $30 registration fee is flat per aircraft. A 249-gram DJI Mini 4 Pro flown for real estate photos will owe Washington exactly what a Cessna 172 owes: $150 a year.

A Cessna 172 is a single-engine fixed-wing aircraft, the first row of that table. The statute has no weight threshold on the drone side. Washington’s trigger is commercial use, so a sub-250-gram drone that a hobbyist can fly without FAA registration must, in commercial hands, register with the FAA under Part 107 and now pay the state the full $150.

The other states with a general commercial drone registration that DroneXL could identify charge a fraction of that. Minnesota registers commercial drones at $25 per aircraft per year under Minn. Stat. 360.55, adds a $30 annual commercial operations license for any business that sells drone services, and requires liability insurance. Utah’s rule, R914-5-3, sets $5 per aircraft per year, though UDOT’s registration page said on August 24 that the portal is not live yet and the agency is pre-registering operators until it launches. North Dakota requires no state registration for ordinary commercial drones, only a $200 applicator license for spray operations.

Ten drones in Washington cost $1,500 a year in state charges from 2027. Ten drones at a Minnesota drone service business cost $280 plus insurance. Ten in Utah cost $50.

DroneXL’s Take

Washington’s legislature had its own aviation division’s advice on drone fees in hand, did the opposite, multiplied the cost by ten, and sent the money to a jet fuel account. In June I wrote that toy drones won in Washington while working pilots kept losing. That was the federal Washington.

The state just ran the same play. The witness lists for the hearings that touched this package include an AOPA regional manager, the Pacific Northwest Business Aviation Association, two airlines and the Port of Seattle. Everyone in the room burns avgas or Jet A, and NBAA came out describing the package as a moderate registration fee increase without a word about the excise tax that makes up $120 of a drone operator’s $150. The drone industry had one chance to be heard, on a Thursday in February, three days after an omnibus revenue bill appeared with the line buried in a rate table. Nobody came. By the time the provision moved into the bill that passed, that bill’s hearings were over. I don’t blame NBAA for winning. That’s the job. I blame a legislature that let the one group that never showed up pay into the fuel account of the groups that did.

Washington had a real problem to solve. Its own aviation division told lawmakers in 2022 that $15 a drone didn’t cover the coordinator program, and nobody serious argues a program should run at a loss forever. A fee that tracked the program’s cost, with the fleet tiers WSDOT asked for, would have been defensible, and I’d have written it up as a state doing its homework.

This is the opposite. The $120 doesn’t go to the coordinator or to airports. It goes to a jet fuel account, and nobody has said how $120 was arrived at. My read is that nobody arrived at it at all: drones were parked in the table next to sailplanes and homebuilts, and the $120 those rows got is the $120 drones got. That is a spreadsheet fill-down dressed up as policy.

When I called Connecticut’s 2025 drone law one of the most ignorant in the country, the complaint was the one I have here: a bill written without any contact with the people who fly. Washington’s version is quieter and costs more.

The statute puts the fee in January and WSDOT’s drone page puts its cycle at April 1, so the first $150 bills land somewhere inside the legislature’s 2027 session, which convenes in January and runs 105 days. That leaves four months for a Washington lawmaker to file a fix, and for the thousands of operators who never registered, given 14,000 FAA registrations against a few hundred state ones, to decide whether a $150 bill backed by a misdemeanor statute finally makes the program worth noticing. Utah says its $5 portal is due this summer. Minnesota charges $25. If Washington wants to know why its registered drone fleet was 251 aircraft the last time it counted, the answer is now printed on the invoice.

Sources: Washington State Legislature, RCW 47.68.250, RCW 82.48.030, RCW 82.48.080, RCW 43.31.645, ESHB 2711 bill page, SB 6352 Senate Bill Report, ESHB 2711 Final Bill Report, House Transportation Committee Report, Senate Transportation Committee Report, WSDOT 2022 Commercial Drone Registration Fee Report, NBAA, MnDOT, UDOT, North Dakota Aeronautics Commission, Washington State Standard.