On 1 October every city and town in Connecticut loses the right to buy a drone made by a Chinese or Russian company. So does any contractor spending their money. It is one of twelve state restrictions now in force on public agencies buying Chinese-made drones; trade coverage of the “DJI ban” usually counts six.
The federal American Security Drone Act has bound anyone spending federal money since 22 December 2025. A county sheriff buying with county money answers to state law instead. FlightBrief read the twelve state instruments this week for a reference table published today.
Florida acted first, in 2021. Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi followed in 2023. Utah and Nevada took effect on 1 January 2025. Kansas, Connecticut and Nebraska passed laws in 2025, and Ohio and New Hampshire signed theirs in 2026.
Texas, which the trade press counts, has no drone statute at all. What it has is the governor’s prohibited technologies list, which names DJI and Autel and bars them from state-owned devices. Whether that reaches a city police department is unresolved.
Five definitions of Chinese
No two of the laws agree on what they are banning. Tennessee’s 2023 statute keys to the Section 889 list in the 2019 defense bill. That list names Huawei, ZTE, Hytera, Hikvision and Dahua. It does not name DJI, so a Tennessee county that buys a DJI aircraft with county money does not breach it.
A broader procurement law on foreign adversary companies took effect in July; whether it reaches a drone, its text does not say. Nevada’s regulation keys to the Pentagon’s Section 1260H list of Chinese military companies, where DJI has sat since October 2022.
Arkansas, Utah and Connecticut use a “covered foreign entity” test. That means anyone on the Commerce Department’s screening lists, anyone domiciled in or controlled by China or Russia, or an affiliate of one. Kansas looks past the airframe to its critical components, the parts that record, store or move data. It asks whether they were produced in one of six countries of concern; Taiwan is expressly excluded.
Mississippi bars anything assembled anywhere with “more than a negligible amount” of Chinese parts, software or raw materials. Since 1 January 2025 it has also required every drone its agencies buy to come from a US-incorporated, majority-American-owned manufacturer.
Nebraska went the other way and publishes an approved list rather than a banned one. Its Secure Drone Purchasing Act told the Division of Aeronautics to produce a List of Secure Drones Authorized for Purchase by 1 January 2026 and to update it every six months. From 1 January 2027 state agencies may buy nothing else. Counties and cities are asked to comply “to the extent practicable”, which is a preference, not a prohibition.
When the aircraft have to stop flying
Buying is one question and flying is another, and the laws split on it. Florida grounded its agencies’ non-compliant fleets on 1 January 2023, after a year of discontinuation plans. Mississippi banned operation as well as purchase from 1 July 2023, then exempted aircraft bought before 2025 in an amendment the following year. Tennessee, Nevada, Kansas and Nebraska bar purchase only. An agency may keep flying what it already owns.
Arkansas gives its agencies until 1 May 2027 to stop operating covered aircraft, four years after its law passed. Connecticut staggered everything. Its state police stopped buying on 1 October 2025 and stop flying on 1 October 2027. Municipalities stop buying this 1 October and stop flying on 1 October 2028.
A police chief or fire chief may waive the ban for exigent circumstances, counter-drone work or a criminal investigation until the end of 2034. The waiver needs a certified written statement to the state within seven days, and the statement is open to public records requests. Ohio’s provision, signed in July, gives public entities four years before it bites.
Three of the twelve texts could not be retrieved from their state servers this week: Nevada’s adopted regulation, Ohio’s enrolled bill and New Hampshire’s. The table carries those rows from the agency notices and signing records, marked as such.
What did not pass
The count would be higher if every bill had become law. Arizona’s legislature passed a ban on state contracts with China-based companies in 2025, which drone-industry lobbyists read as reaching drone purchases. Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed it on 25 June. The “overbroad bill would dramatically increase costs to taxpayers when purchasing goods and services”, she wrote.
A Georgia Senate committee tabled that state’s bill on 18 March. James Westbrook, legislative chair of the Emergency Management Association of Georgia, had told it the cheapest Pentagon-approved aircraft cost about $15,000 and that replacing county fleets would be unfunded. Indiana passed a foreign-adversary technology law in 2026 whose definition of a technology product expressly “does not include an unmanned aerial system”. Texas’s HB 41, with a grace period to 2031, died in committee, and the legislature has no regular session until 2027.
After Connecticut’s deadline the next is Nebraska’s, on 1 January 2027, when its state agencies may buy only what the Division of Aeronautics has cleared. Arkansas’s agencies have until 1 May that year to stop flying what they bought before the ban.
