Austria and Latvia top a 31-country drone-rule index. Finland just misses the cut.

A new cross-market scorecard puts Austria and Latvia tied at the top with 83.6, ranking 31 national drone rulebooks on how well-documented and operator-friendly they are. Poland, Germany, and Ireland round out the next tier, and 30 of the 31 markets met the evidence-and-coverage bar to be ranked at all.

Finland sits one rung below as a provisional entry, having narrowly missed one threshold measure. The country whose operator built the index does not yet clear its own bar.

The ranking is the Drone Regulation Index 2026, published by Finnish commercial-drone operator Flyby Guys. Alongside it, the company has launched Drone Assistant, a plain-English rules lookup that returns answers with citations to the underlying sources: national aviation authorities, the European Union's EASA regional rules, technical guidance, and location-specific airspace data. Launch coverage came from DroneDJ, sUAS News, and Unmanned Airspace.

The platform returns citations to those aviation-authority sources; it does not grant flight authorization and is not a substitute for that guidance, and it is built to flag when there is not enough evidence to answer a question rather than guess.

The leaderboard measures how well-mapped each country's rules are, not how safe its airspace is. For operators working across borders, that documentation gap is the daily friction the index now puts a number on.