Track Part 107 currency and every drone's registration

1. What does commercial drone compliance require?

Flying a drone for any purpose other than limited recreation — surveying a site, inspecting a roof, shooting a listing, mapping a field, running a utility corridor — puts you under 14 CFR Part 107, the FAA's small unmanned aircraft rule. Two things have to be true simultaneously, and they attach to two different objects. The person at the controls must hold a Remote Pilot Certificate and be within their knowledge recency. The aircraft in the air must be registered with the FAA and, in nearly all cases, compliant with the Remote ID rule.

Remindax helps you track each pilot's recency date and each drone's registration renewal, and reminds the right people before either falls due. It doesn't provide training, register drones, issue certificates, plan missions, or manage flights — those all happen through the FAA and its systems.

1.1 The pieces to keep in order

• →The Remote Pilot Certificate. Obtained by passing the initial aeronautical knowledge exam and applying through IACRA, or — for existing Part 61 pilots with a current flight review — by completing an online course instead. It is issued once. Nothing on it runs out, and there is no renewal application to file.
• →Aeronautical knowledge recency (14 CFR 107.65). A rolling 24-calendar-month look-back. It is satisfied by any one of three things: the initial knowledge test, the free online recurrent training, or — for a Part 61 certificate holder with a current flight review — a different free course. This is the date that decides whether the certificate can be used.
• →Aircraft registration, per drone. Under Part 107 each aircraft is registered separately through FAADroneZone, currently five dollars, valid three years, and must display its FAA-issued identifier on the exterior. Registration ends if the aircraft is sold, so ownership changes reset it.
• →Remote ID, and any airspace permissions. The Remote ID rule applies to drones that are required to be registered, so under Part 107 it follows the registration. Controlled-airspace authorizations and Part 107 waivers carry their own validity periods on top.

Requirements, fees, course numbers and systems change. Confirm current rules and deadlines directly with the FAA at the sources in section 11. This is general information, not aviation or legal advice, and nothing here is a substitute for the regulations themselves.

2. Does a Part 107 certificate expire?

So the honest answer to the question in this heading is: the certificate does not expire, and asking whether it does is the wrong question. The useful question is when did this pilot last complete a qualifying knowledge activity, because that answer plus twenty-four calendar months is the only date in the whole arrangement that can stop a job. Everything else about the credential is permanent and therefore, from a tracking point of view, uninteresting.

It does not help that this single deadline travels under three different names. Operators and insurers call it remote pilot currency. The regulation calls it aeronautical knowledge recency, and never uses the word currency at all. And the thing most people actually put in a diary is the Part 107 24-month training date — the day the course was last completed. All three refer to the same obligation, which is a small vocabulary problem with a real consequence: teams search for it under one label, file it under a second, and discuss it in meetings under a third, and a date that is called three things in one company is a date that can go missing in plain sight.

One more piece of precision that catches people. The rule says twenty-four calendar months, not twenty-four months. Complete your recurrent training on the eighth of March and you are covered through the last day of March two years later, not through the eighth. That is slightly more generous than most people assume, and it is also slightly harder to compute in your head, which is exactly the kind of small arithmetic that gets rounded the wrong way when somebody is trying to work out on a Friday afternoon whether a pilot can fly on Monday.

3. Why tracking Part 107 currency and registrations matters

Four properties combine here, and each one defeats a different habit that would otherwise keep you safe:

The second of those is worth sitting with, because it is unusual. Most compliance deadlines have an interested party on the other end who will tell you. A water utility writes to you about an untested assembly. A state licensing board emails before a renewal. A registration authority sends a notice. Even the deadlines nobody warns you about are usually lookupable — there is a portal, a register, a public record where your own status is written down and you can go and read it.

Part 107 recency has neither. There is no notice, and there is no public place where a drone-services company can look up the recency status of the six pilots on its payroll. That information exists in individual FAASTeam accounts belonging to individual people, and the only reliable way an operation knows when a pilot's twenty-four months run out is that somebody wrote the date down when the pilot completed the course. If nobody did, the information is genuinely gone, and reconstructing it means asking each pilot to go and look.

4. Who needs to track Part 107 currency

Anyone who puts a drone in the air for something other than fun carries this — and the more pilots and airframes involved, the less likely it is that any one person can name every date:

Drone-services businesses

The full version of the problem: several pilots, a shelf of aircraft, and clients who will ask for evidence before a crew leaves the yard.

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Surveying, mapping & inspection

Where the deliverable is evidence, and the client's procurement team increasingly asks for proof of the pilot's standing before it will accept the data.

Construction & utilities

In-house programs where flying is one duty among many, so the recency date belongs to somebody whose actual job title has nothing to do with aviation.

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Media, real estate & agriculture

Often one or two pilots and a couple of aircraft, which is precisely the size at which nobody builds a system and everybody relies on remembering.

UAS program & safety managers

The person who owns the answer when somebody asks whether the flight going out on Tuesday is legal — and who needs both columns in front of them to give it.

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Flight departments adding drones

Where some pilots hold a Part 61 certificate and satisfy the recency rule by a different route entirely — so two people in the same room owe two different things.

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That last card deserves a sentence of its own, because it is the sharpest illustration of why this cannot be handled as a single company-wide policy. A pilot with no other aviation background satisfies the recency rule with one specific free online course. A colleague who also holds a Part 61 certificate and is current on their flight review satisfies it with a different free online course — and their eligibility for that route is itself contingent on a flight review that has its own twenty-four-month clock. Same rule, same deadline interval, two different obligations sitting on two people who do the same work. For the wider view of credentials that behave like this across a workforce, see certification tracking software.

5. What happens when Part 107 currency or a registration lapses

Nothing happens. That is the entire difficulty. There is no moment of failure to notice, no equipment that stops working, no document that changes. The drone still powers up. The certificate still sits in the wallet. The pilot still knows how to fly, and flies exactly as competently on the first day out of recency as on the last day in it. What has changed is a legal permission, and legal permissions are invisible.

Fly a paid job in that state and you are operating outside the rule, with consequences that land somewhere other than the flight itself: it is an enforcement exposure for the operator, a contractual problem for the client who required a compliant crew, and a live question for any insurer whose policy assumed a properly certificated and current remote pilot in command. And because construction, utility and inspection clients increasingly ask for evidence before work begins, the commercially likelier outcome is duller than an enforcement action — the crew simply does not get the assignment.

Almost nobody arrives here by deciding to skip the training. It is free, it is online, and it takes an afternoon. They arrive by one of four routes, none of which feels like a lapse at the time.

The date nobody wrote down. A pilot completed their recurrent training, got a completion record in their own FAASTeam account, and told no one. Two years later there is no company record of when that was, because there never was one. This is the most common version by a wide margin, and it is the one that most rewards tracking, because the fix costs a single field in a register and the alternative is asking a pilot to go and dig through an account they last logged into in 2024.

The pilot who arrived already lapsed. A contractor or new hire produces a Remote Pilot Certificate at onboarding, and it is genuine, and it is filed, and everyone is satisfied. Nobody asks the second question, because the certificate does not invite it. The operation has now taken on an exposure it believes it has documented.

The drone that quietly went out of registration. Three years is long enough that the aircraft has changed hands internally, been reassigned between crews, or spent a season in a case. Registration is also ended by a sale — so a second-hand airframe bought from another operator arrives unregistered no matter how recently its previous owner renewed, and a drone you sold on is no longer your compliance problem but is very much somebody's.

The aircraft nobody thought counted. A small drone under 250 grams, bought for a specific job because it was convenient, flown commercially, and never registered — on the widely-held and entirely reasonable belief that the weight exemption applied. It did not, and by extension the Remote ID obligation that follows registration did not lapse either; it simply was never met.

Set against that, the tracking problem is small. Every route above is closed by the same two facts held in the same place: for each pilot, the date of the last qualifying knowledge activity; for each aircraft, the date its registration expires and the operation type it was registered under. Neither requires aviation expertise. They require that the information exist somewhere other than in an individual's browser history.

6. How Remindax keeps every pilot current and every drone registered

The shape of the problem is two registers that share no structure — people on one side, airframes on the other, and a job that needs one of each. Four pieces address exactly that:

7. Why spreadsheets fail for Part 107 tracking

A spreadsheet fails here in a specific and slightly unusual way, which is worth naming because it explains why the sheet keeps looking fine. The first column somebody creates is "Part 107 certificate number," and it is a perfectly good column: every pilot has one, it never changes, and it is genuinely the right thing to record. The sheet then presents a complete, tidy, entirely accurate picture of a fact that cannot stop a single job. The column that matters — the date of the last qualifying knowledge activity — is the one nobody thinks to add, because the certificate felt like the answer.

Where the date does get recorded, the arithmetic goes wrong quietly. Twenty-four calendar months is not twenty-four months, so a formula that adds two years to a completion date is off by up to thirty days, in the direction that makes you look compliant when you are not. Meanwhile the drone tab needs the opposite rule: renewals run three years from the previous expiry, not from the day of renewal, so a sheet that recalculates from the renewal date drifts the fleet's dates later and later until they are simply wrong. One tab needs a rolling look-back and the other needs a fixed anchor, and nothing about a spreadsheet makes you notice that you have used the same formula for both.

And it cannot do the thing that actually protects the operation, which is arrive uninvited. A date in a cell is inert. It does not know that a pilot's recency runs out three weeks before the survey they are already scheduled on, that the drone assigned to that job was registered under the wrong operation type, or that the person who maintained the sheet left in the spring. An automated register holds both clocks with their own correct arithmetic, keeps them attached to the person and the airframe rather than to a row, and tells the right people early enough that a free afternoon course is all it takes.

8. Key takeaways

• ✓Commercial drone flying in the U.S. runs under 14 CFR Part 107, which requires a Remote Pilot Certificate and current aeronautical knowledge recency — two different things attached to the same person.
• ✓The certificate is issued once and does not lapse. Under 14 CFR 107.65 what governs paid flying is a qualifying knowledge activity within the previous 24 calendar months — and that date appears nowhere on the certificate.
• ✓Recency can be satisfied by three different routes, including a separate course for pilots who also hold a Part 61 certificate with a current flight review — so colleagues doing identical work can owe different things.
• ✓Under Part 107 every drone is registered individually for three years, and the 250-gram exemption is recreational-only — weight does not exempt a commercial aircraft, and a recreational registration cannot be converted.
• ✓Nobody notifies you when either clock runs out, and there is no register where an employer can look up a pilot's recency — so the date has to be recorded by the operation or it is not recorded at all.
• ✓Tracking every pilot's 24-month recency and every drone's three-year registration together is what keeps a commercial operation legal, because a job needs one of each and either alone stops it.