Contributed by Mark Santos, founder of Mark Studios

Ask who hires drone operators, and you'll usually get a confident percentage - some share of commercial pilots working in real estate, or some share of agencies contracting their flying out. The most direct public source is the FAA's Survey of UAS Operators, which it has run every year since 2021.

The survey is worth reading closely because it answers a narrower question than the one it's usually quoted for. Here's what the two most recent reports found, who they asked, and what the numbers can and can't support, whether you fly for clients or hire people who do.

Who the Survey Asks

The FAA emails the survey to people on its two drone registries: the Part 107 registry and the recreational registry. Answers are self-reported. The survey exists because operators aren't required to record or report their flights.

For calendar year 2024, the FAA sent 97,857 invitations, 43,223 of them to Part 107 registrants, and 22 percent of that Part 107 group responded. Part 107 respondents who reported at least one nonrecreational flight were classed as "core Part 107" operators: 56 percent of them, or 4,559 people.

The CY 2025 report changed the design. The FAA tripled the sample cell size, split operators by how many aircraft they have registered, and sent around 320,000 invitations. Just under 70,000 people responded, and 13,901 Part 107 respondents qualified as core operators.

Two things follow from that. The people answering are operators, not their clients, so the survey tells you where operators say they work rather than who pays them or how much. And because the design changed, 2024 and 2025 figures don't measure quite the same thing. The FAA says plainly that its 2024 and 2025 flight estimates are not directly comparable.

Real Estate and Construction Lead in Both Years

The survey asks core operators to rate their activity in a list of industries on a five-point scale, then counts everyone who picked "somewhat active", "active" or "very active".

In the CY 2024 report, real estate and construction were the most common, "with over 500 operators indicating that they are 'somewhat active' or more active in this area." Media and telecommunications ranked third.

The CY 2025 report shows the same top two, with construction now slightly ahead: 2,930 core operators reported activity in construction and 2,773 in real estate. Media and telecommunications were third again. Healthcare was last in both years.

For operators, that shows where other operators report working, which also shows where the competition is.

What Those Counts Can't Tell You

This is where the survey usually gets stretched.

They're counts, not shares. Operators could report activity in more than one industry, and the FAA published the results as a chart of counts. The CY 2025 report states one share in its text: 20.8 percent of all core Part 107 operators reported activity in agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting. But the agriculture bar on the chart sits below 2,000, and 2,000 is under 15 percent of 13,901. The report doesn't explain the gap, and that's the point: without a published denominator, any share you compute from these bars is a guess. When we traced popular drone statistics back to their original documents for our drone video statistics page, "X percent of commercial drone operators work in real estate" was one of the figures credited to this survey that the survey doesn't contain.

They don't show growth. Real estate went from "over 500" in the CY 2024 report to 2,773 in CY 2025, but the number of core operators answering also went from 4,559 to 13,901 under a new sample design. The FAA doesn't present that jump as growth, and anyone quoting it shouldn't either.

They measure activity, not revenue. The FAA itself calls the industry question "a subjective scale question." Neither report says how much of an operator's work or income comes from each industry.

They don't count buyers. Neither report tells you how many real estate agents, builders or developers hire a drone operator. That would require surveying the people doing the hiring, and this isn't one.

Public Safety Mostly Flies its Own

Emergency response is the one group for which the FAA's reports publish a hiring figure.

In the CY 2024 report, 382 Part 107 registrants said they fly for a police department, fire department, or search and rescue agency, and that their organization has its own unmanned aircraft system. Those organizations reported an average of 7.0 operators or remote pilots in their program, "with only 3.5 percent hiring private UAS operators and/or remote pilots." Search and rescue was the most common mission, reported by 89 percent.

Read the definition before you quote that number. Every organization in the group already had its own drones, because that's how the FAA identified the group. So 3.5 percent describes agencies with in-house programs that also bring in private pilots. It says nothing about agencies without their own drones.

In the CY 2025 report, 1,046 respondents fell into the same group. They reported an average of eight pilots per program, 40.6 percent said they share their program with another organization, and over 90 percent used drones for search and rescue. The 2025 report doesn't publish a hiring figure, so the CY 2024 number is still the most recent one in the FAA's survey reports.

If you're an operator thinking about pitching public safety work, the evidence is narrow, but it points one way: agencies that already fly mostly staff their programs themselves.

A Certificate Isn't a Business

For anyone hiring, the size of the pilot pool is easy to overstate. The FAA had issued 493,396 Remote Pilot certifications by the end of 2025, according to its Aerospace Forecast for fiscal years 2026 to 2046. That's a count of certifications issued, not of people doing paid work. In the CY 2025 survey, 26.6 percent of Part 107 respondents flew only recreationally, and another 7.5 percent didn't fly at all.

How to Quote the Survey Honestly

  • Quote counts as counts, and name the report year.
  • Say who answered: registered operators, reporting on themselves.
  • Don't compute percentages the FAA didn't publish.
  • Don't present the change from CY 2024 to CY 2025 as growth.
  • Quote the 3.5 percent and define it: emergency response organizations that already had their own drones.

Used that way, the survey answers one question well: where do operators say they work? It answers "who hires them?" for only one group, and for that group the answer is mostly themselves.

About the Author

Mark Santos, founder of Mark Studios, has edited video since age 10 on his own YouTube channel and began selling his editing on Fiverr in 2020. The studio has completed 8,000+ orders for 4,500+ clients. It edits drone and aerial footage for clients anywhere and films in Palm Beach County, Florida.