Amazon Says Drone Deliveries Are Coming to Nearly 500 Cities by Year End

Amazon announced Wednesday it plans to expand Prime Air drone delivery to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of 2026, a sixfold increase from its current footprint of 11 locations, according to the company's own blog post.

New markets include Chicago, Atlanta, Syracuse, Cleveland and Boise. Amazon says more locations are coming later this year but hasn't named them.

Amazon has badly missed its own timelines before. Jeff Bezos unveiled the first Prime Air prototype on 60 Minutes in December 2013, telling a skeptical Charlie Rose the service could launch within four or five years, according to GeekWire. That would have been 2018. It's 2026.

What actually works right now

Amazon currently flies drones out of 11 sites, each covering roughly 175 square miles, according to Engadget and GeekWire. The MK30 drone can carry packages up to five pounds that fit in a large shoebox, hovers a few feet off the ground, and releases the package rather than landing, according to Reuters reporting published by Yahoo Finance.

Most deliveries take about 60 minutes, not the 30 minutes Amazon likes to advertise, per CNBC and multiple other outlets. Prime members get free drone delivery on orders over $50. Below that, pricing differs slightly across sources: Engadget and Yahoo Finance cite a $3 fee for Prime members and $5 for non-members, while Fortune and GeekWire report $2.99 and $4.99. Either way, it's a few bucks, and non-members pay more.

Amazon has made "hundreds of thousands" of drone deliveries in 2026, the company said, according to CNBC. That sounds like a lot until you compare it to the roughly 20 million packages Amazon delivers daily in the U.S. by traditional means, a figure from market research firm ShipMatrix cited by Fortune. Drone delivery, for now, is a rounding error.

Prime Air VP David Carbon told staff in March that the unit was targeting 1 million deliveries this year and called Prime Air "the highest demand drone delivery service in the industry," according to an internal recording obtained by CNBC. Whether Amazon hits that number by December is unresolved.

The crash record

TechSpot compiled a rough timeline of the program's safety stumbles: two test crashes in Oregon in early 2025 tied to altitude-sensor problems, two MK30 drones crashing into the same construction crane in Arizona later that year causing a fire, and a drone severing an overhead internet cable in Texas the following month, prompting an FAA investigation. Prime Air is also under investigation in the UK after a drone crashed in a garden, per TechSpot.

Amazon hasn't disputed these incidents in the sources reviewed, and no outlet reports the FAA has grounded the program nationally as a result.

The pushback that's fair to take seriously

Residents in some markets have real, specific concerns. At a Nampa, Idaho planning and zoning meeting in May, residents pressed Amazon executive Sam Bailey for roughly an hour on noise, safety and even bird safety, according to Reuters via Yahoo Finance. The board ultimately approved the rollout unanimously, but the concerns were substantive: how loud is this thing, what happens when it fails, and what does constant drone traffic do to a quiet suburban street.

Bailey's response, that the drone is audible for about 20 seconds while descending and departing, at a noise level below a lawnmower, is a reasonable industry answer. But it's Amazon's own characterization of its own product, not an independent acoustic study cited in these reports. Property value concerns raised in some markets, flagged by CNBC, remain unresolved and unquantified in the reporting so far.

Amazon has said privacy fears about drone cameras are unfounded because the cameras exist only for navigation, per Yahoo Finance. That's Amazon's claim. No independent audit of that claim appears in these sources.

Competition and context

Amazon isn't alone. Alphabet's Wing has crossed 1 million commercial drone deliveries and operates in 20 U.S. markets through partners like Walmart and DoorDash, according to CNBC. Drone startup Zipline has made 2 million deliveries across four continents. Walmart is also expanding same-day delivery aggressively, and Home Depot just rolled out nationwide express delivery from local stores, according to FreightWaves.

The bigger picture, per FreightWaves: Amazon says it delivered more than 40% of items same-day or overnight globally in the first half of 2026, up from the same period last year. Drones are one piece of a much larger speed war Amazon is fighting against Walmart and everyone else.

What's unresolved

Amazon hasn't said how many drones will operate in each new market or how many deliveries per day it expects, according to Fortune. The Memphis launch, previously targeted for June, has been delayed, according to a FreightWaves source who attended local government briefings. There's no confirmed timeline for Seattle, Amazon's own hometown, per GeekWire.

Each new city still requires local zoning approval, meaning the 500-city target depends on Amazon winning over city councils one at a time, the way it did in Nampa. Not every town will vote unanimously.