Can I legally fly a drone over my job site in Puerto Rico?

Nine checks decide whether a drone flight over a job site in Puerto Rico is legal today: the pilot, the aircraft, Remote ID, the airspace, the altitude and line of sight, the people below, the land below, the property owner's written consent, and how images of identifiable individuals are kept and shared.¶

Seven of the nine are federal and apply to any pilot from any state. Checks one through three a working pilot has already met and keeps current; four through seven get answered again at every site, on every date. The last two come from a Puerto Rico statute, Law 68-2021, amended by Law 62 of 16 July 2025. Those two are the ones a pilot arriving from the mainland has usually never read. This page covers them in full, in the words of the statute, and points to the rest of the library for the other seven.¶

The checks are listed in the order they bite. Eight changes with the parcel and the date. Nine changes how the whole archive is built, which is why it gets answered before the first flight instead of after.¶

1. Pilot. The person at the controls is a Part 107 remote pilot, or is flying under the direct supervision of one who can take immediate control (14 CFR 107.12).
2. Aircraft. The aircraft is registered with the FAA and the registration is current. Registration runs three years and nobody sends a reminder (14 CFR 107.13; 48.100(c)).
3. Remote ID. The aircraft broadcasts Remote ID, and the broadcast stays on for the whole flight (14 CFR 89.110).
4. Airspace. Where the site sits inside Class B, C or D airspace, or within the lateral limits of a Class E surface area designated for an airport, authorization is in hand before takeoff. Where the airport participates in LAANC, that is the fast route; where it does not, the request goes through DroneZone on a much longer clock (14 CFR 107.41).
5. Altitude and sight. 400 feet above ground level, or 400 feet above the top of a structure while within 400 feet of it. The pilot or a visual observer keeps the aircraft in sight with unaided eyes; the camera, FPV and zoom count for nothing here (14 CFR 107.51(b); 107.31).
6. People below. Operating over a human being requires that the person be directly participating in the operation, or be under a covered structure or inside a stationary vehicle that can provide reasonable protection from a falling aircraft, or that the operation meet one of the Subpart D categories. A waiver is the other route (14 CFR 107.39; 107.205(g)).
7. Land below. Federal land underneath carries its own rules — the national wildlife refuges of Puerto Rico, wilderness inside the national forest, and national park units. Taking off and landing count as operating there. The rules and their sources are in the protected-land piece of this library.
8. Consent. Signed written consent from the owner of each specific private property the flight will record (Ley 68-2021, Art. 3).
9. Images of people. A written decision, taken with a lawyer before the first flight, on retaining and sharing images of identifiable individuals (Ley 68-2021, Art. 3, second sentence).

Law 68-2021 prohibits using a drone, absent a search warrant, to conduct surveillance of, collect evidence or information about, or photograph or electronically record specific persons or private properties without their consent.¶

Read what the sentence leaves out. There is no element about whether the property could be seen from the road. There is no element about a reasonable expectation of privacy either; that phrase lives in the Act's long title — "en propiedades privadas o donde se tenga una expectativa razonable de intimidad" — and in its statement of motives, not in the operative prohibition. The one word the sentence hands a working operator is consentimiento — consent.¶

Article 2 reaches private companies twice. Paragraph (b) defines personas to mean natural or juridical persons, so a corporation is a person for the whole Act. Paragraph (c) then arrives by an odd route: it defines entidad o agencia estatal, a term that sounds like government, to include public and private organizations and offices. Either way a private contractor is inside the Act through all three articles at once: Article 3 prohibits the conduct, Article 5 makes it an offense, and Article 6 makes it a lawsuit.¶

One line in the definitions will be the first thing a lawyer asks about, so it belongs on the page. Article 2(a) says the term excludes systems used in the creation of maps. That clause sits in the definition, not in the list of exceptions, so if it applied the whole Act would fall away — the offense and the civil action with it. The Act does not define creación de mapas, and nothing has interpreted it. Whether a given flight fits is a question a judge answers after the flight. The signed consent answers the same question before takeoff, which is why consent is the item on the checklist.¶

Three exceptions came with the Act in 2021: emergency or safety situations with imminent danger to life or serious bodily harm, search and rescue, and operations, exercises or missions of any United States military branch.¶

Article 4 now lists five exceptions in all, and none of them is commercial work. Press, construction, real estate, insurance work and contracted commercial work are absent from it, and so is photogrammetric documentation. For every flight outside those five, the route runs through consent, and consent is written into the prohibition in Article 3 rather than into the exceptions in Article 4. That distinction is worth carrying into a meeting: consent is not a permission the Act grants, it is the element that keeps the flight outside the prohibition in the first place.¶

The amendment of 16 July 2025 added the other two, both government programs: the CDBG-DR and CDBG-MIT programs run by the Puerto Rico Department of Housing for GeoFrame and RAD, and the area measurement and recording programs of CRIM. The CRIM exception applies where CRIM notifies the taxpayer of the action to be taken, and information obtained through the exceptions contemplated in the amendment that is used for anything other than the authorized purpose is treated as a violation of Article 5.¶

Say "Law 68 as amended" carefully. For a private operator the 2025 text is identical to the 2021 text: the definition, the prohibition, the offense and the civil action all came through untouched. What opened was a door for two government programs. Saying that precisely in a room shows you read the statute instead of the headline.¶

Two consequences run from the same flight: Article 5 makes it a misdemeanor, and Article 6 gives any person harmed by the prohibited conduct a civil action for damages plus attorney's fees and the additional costs of the suit.¶

The offense completes at the flight. Article 5 names the use of the aircraft to record specific private property without consent. Publication is not an element. Sale is not an element. Proof that anyone was harmed is not an element.¶

Attorney's fees written into the statute change the arithmetic on the civil side. Anyone harmed can bring the case without carrying its cost, which makes a small claim worth filing. A fifteen-minute flight over the wrong parcel can cost more in the other side's legal fees than the job it belonged to.¶

One drafting detail is worth knowing before a lawyer raises it. Article 5 reaches persona, o entidad. The words agencia estatal appear in Article 3 and again in Article 6, and they are missing from Article 5. A private operator stands exposed on both tracks.¶

That question goes to a lawyer before the first flight. The second sentence of Article 3 says images of identifiable individuals may not be retained or shared unless a reasonable suspicion ties the image to criminal activity, to an ongoing investigation, or to a criminal proceeding pending in the courts. As written, it does not limit itself to flights made without consent.¶

The exception the sentence names is criminal in shape: reasonable suspicion that the image holds evidence of criminal activity, or a relationship to an ongoing investigation or to a criminal proceeding pending in the courts.¶

On an active site, people are in most frames. Two questions decide how the archive gets built: whether the property owner's consent reaches the individuals working on that property, and whether faces are obscured before images are filed. Both belong in the contract, and both are cheaper to answer before the first flight than after a year of files.¶

This is the check that changes design rather than paperwork. A dated, append-only archive is what a defensible project record is built on, and the second sentence of Article 3 is the sentence that decides what goes into it.¶

The statute is Law 68-2021, amended by Law 62 of 16 July 2025, and the full text is published in the Biblioteca Virtual of the Oficina de Gerencia y Presupuesto. It runs eleven articles: Article 1 is the short title, Article 2 the definitions, Article 3 the scope of the Act, which carries the prohibition, Article 4 the exceptions, Article 5 the offense, Article 6 the civil action, Article 7 the guidance link, and Articles 8 through 11 carry repeal, precedence, severability and effective date. That same text prints the codified section beside the article headings: Articles 1 through 7 are 1 L.P.R.A. §§ 931 through 937 in order, and Articles 8, 9 and 10 appear as notes to § 931.¶

That pairing matters in a room. A lawyer writes the code section in a letter, not "Article 3", so the prohibition arrives as 1 L.P.R.A. § 933 and the offense as § 935. Knowing both spellings of the same rule is the difference between answering and going quiet.¶

The Act also ordered guidance. Article 7 directs the Puerto Rico Police Bureau to include on its web page a guidance link about the Act, its purposes and its scope.¶

As of 6 September 2026 we did not find that link on the Police Bureau's home page, where other statutes are listed. Two things follow. Nobody can say the answer was posted and you missed it. And the statutory text is the source available today, so anyone quoting "what the Police say" about this Act is quoting something we could not locate.Field practice¶

The Act survived its one reported challenge, and it survived narrowly. A group that uses drones to take aerial photos of properties sued over Law 68-2021 and lost on 15 March 2023 in the Tribunal de Primera Instancia, in a ruling written as applied to that party: the judge held that this plaintiff's activities are not constitutionally protected, which press reported leaves the door open to groups whose activities are, naming photojournalists. Press reported the judgment; we did not obtain the judgment itself, and the case number is not in hand.Field practice¶

That plaintiff's work sits close to the work this page describes: aerial photography of properties, flown with a drone. The Act has been pushed once, and against that plaintiff it held. Plan against the statute as it stands.¶

In the same case, the Department of Justice accepted that whether a given flight violated a person's reasonable expectation of privacy is a determination each judge will make case by case.¶

Read that as a planning fact. No list of safe flights exists, and none is arriving soon. The one item on this page that does not depend on a judge's later view is the written permission, signed and dated, in hand before takeoff.¶

Two things are moving: a bill the House of Representatives passed on 20 April 2026 that would restrict flights over government security facilities and critical infrastructure with fines of $1,000 to $5,000, and a regulation PRITS was empowered to write in 2025. We found no PRITS regulation issued as of 6 September 2026.¶

The bill still needs the Senate and the Governor's signature. "Critical infrastructure" is a phrase that stretches — water plants, substations, highways, ports, the things that ring any large site — so a program priced beyond twelve months gets checked against the enacted text, not the headline.¶

The Public Safety Committee tempered the bill's language during the legislative process to avoid conflicts with Law 68-2021, broadening exceptions and adjusting definitions so as not to affect public or private entities that operate critical infrastructure. That is as reported; we did not read the engrossed text or track the bill past the House vote as of 6 September 2026.Field practice¶

The 2025 amendment also empowered PRITS to write the regulations it deems necessary so that every government program meets the purposes of the Act.¶

That power runs to government programs, and it still matters to a private operator. If PRITS writes definitions, that regulation becomes the first place anyone finds operational meaning for words the statute leaves open — creación de mapas among them. A rule written for the government becomes the sentence everybody quotes.¶

Consent that holds is written, signed by a person with authority over that specific property, dated before the flight, and specific about the property, the window of dates, and what happens to the images.¶

Article 3 spells out no form. The list below is our reading of what the element takes in practice, built to be read later by a lawyer rather than to be fast this morning.¶

The letter is the element that keeps the flight outside the prohibition in Article 3. It is also the only one of the nine checks that a person on the ground can hand you the morning of the flight, which is exactly why it is the one that gets skipped.¶

1. Name the property. Address or parcel identification, plus the extent of the area to be recorded.
2. Name the owner and the signer, and confirm the signer has authority over that property. Where the work spans several parcels with different owners, collect one signature per owner.
3. Date it before the first flight and give it an end date. A window you can point to is easier to defend later than an open-ended letter.
4. State what will be recorded: still images, video, and any other imaging the flight carries.
5. State who receives the images, who holds them, and where they are held.
6. Address the people on the ground. State that identifiable individuals may appear, and write in the direction you received about retaining and sharing those images. Take that clause to a lawyer before the first flight.
7. File the signed letter with the flight log for that date. It is the document a demand letter asks for first.
8. Refresh it when the property changes hands, when the area grows, or when the window closes.