Somewhere early in studying, most people download the full text of 14 CFR Part 107, scroll through dozens of pages of statutory language, and quietly panic. Then they ask the obvious question: do I actually have to read all of this?

The short answer is no — and the more useful answer is that reading it cover to cover is simultaneously too much and not enough. Too much, because the test draws on a fraction of the regulation. Not enough, because a large share of what you’ll be asked isn’t in Part 107 at all.

I learned the second half the hard way, and I’ll explain how.

Start with the document that actually defines the scope

The FAA publishes the Airman Certification Standards (ACS) for the Remote Pilot certificate. It is the list of what you can be tested on, organized into five areas of operation:

• Regulations
• Airspace and requirements
• Weather
• Loading and performance
• Operations

That document, not the regulation, is the map. It’s short, it’s free, and it’s the first thing you should read — because it tells you that four of the five areas are largely not about the text of Part 107. Weather isn’t in Part 107. Chart reading isn’t in Part 107. Aeromedical factors and decision-making aren’t in Part 107.

If you’ve been treating “study for the Part 107” as “read 14 CFR Part 107,” the ACS is the document that corrects that assumption in about ten minutes.

The weighting changed in September 2025, and the ACS table is now obsolete

One caveat about that document. In its August 2025 Airman Testing Community Advisory the FAA declared the weighting table published in the ACS obsolete, and pointed applicants to PSI’s Applicant Information Bulletin instead. Effective 29 September 2025 the split is Regulations 48%, Airspace 20%, Operations 25%, Weather 5%, and Loading and Performance 2%.

The old table put Operations highest at 35–45% and Regulations lowest at 15–25%. The two have swapped places. The ACS itself is still posted on the FAA’s site, which is presumably why most study material still quotes the old figures — so check which set of numbers any study plan you follow is built on. The topics themselves did not change, and neither did the two-hour limit. What changed is the proportions.

I wrote this up in more detail, along with a second change arriving in October, for The Drone Girl: The Part 107 test changed twice. Here’s what you actually need to study now.

What I found when I audited my own question bank

I wrote a practice bank of several hundred questions to the ACS areas, and tagged each one with the source it came from. My intention was to make every explanation verifiable — if an explanation names a section, you can open that section and check my work.

Then I had the tags independently audited, and the result was humbling: on a 50-question sample, more than half of the questions I had tagged with a Part 107 section were actually testing a rule established somewhere else. Not wrong answers — the answers held up — but wrong attributions. I had been reaching for a 107 section because the topic felt like Part 107 territory, when the actual authority was the AIM, the Aeronautical Chart User’s Guide, or an FAA handbook.

Some concrete examples of what I’d mis-attributed:

• What a rotating airport beacon signifies. I’d tagged 107.51(c). That section sets the three-statute-mile visibility minimum; it says nothing about beacons. The meaning of a beacon comes from the AIM.
• How to read a Maximum Elevation Figure on a sectional. Tagged to a 107 section. It’s in the Chart User’s Guide.
• What a Military Operations Area is and how to treat it. The AIM, not Part 107.
• How cold degrades battery performance. AC 107-2A and manufacturer data, not the regulation.
• Crew resource management and decision-making. The FAA study guide.

I’m telling you this partly because it’s a correction to an earlier version of this page, which cited specific counts I no longer stand behind. But mostly because the finding itself is the most useful thing on this page:

Even someone deliberately trying to source everything to Part 107 couldn’t do it, because the material genuinely isn’t there. That’s not a flaw in my tagging so much as a fact about the exam. A large portion of what you’ll be tested on lives in documents that are not the regulation.

Where the material actually lives

Beyond the text of Part 107, expect to draw on:

• The FAA Remote Pilot Study Guide (FAA-G-8082-22) — weather theory, aeromedical factors, night vision, decision-making
• The Aeronautical Chart User’s Guide — sectional symbols, airspace depiction, MEF, obstruction charting
• AC 107-2A — the FAA’s plain-language guidance on Part 107, and a source in its own right
• The AIM — airport operations, beacons, special use airspace, communications
• The Aviation Weather Handbook (FAA-H-8083-28B) — weather products and reports. Note that AC 00-45H, which older study guides still cite, was cancelled in December 2022
• 14 CFR Parts 48, 89, and 91 — registration, Remote ID, general operating rules

Read Part 107 perfectly and you’d still be unprepared for a sectional chart question, a METAR, a hypoxia question, or an autokinesis question.

The single highest-return free resource

The Airman Knowledge Testing Supplement. It’s free from the FAA, and until October 26, 2026 it contains the exact figures and charts you will be handed at the testing center. Not similar ones — the same ones. From October 26 the test also draws chart images from current charts that are not in the supplement, so it stops being the whole picture — but the FAA has not set a date for withdrawing it, and you still get it at the test center.

Most candidates never open it, then meet those figures for the first time under a two-hour clock. An hour spent practicing on the actual supplement is worth more than several hours of general reading.

Which parts of Part 107 to read closely

You should read some of the regulation directly, and these are the sections that earn the time. Not because I can quantify their weight — I can’t, honestly, and you should distrust anyone who claims a precise breakdown of an exam whose question bank the FAA doesn’t publish — but because they govern the decisions that come up constantly in both the test and real operations:

• 107.41 — ATC authorization in Class B, C, D and surface-area Class E. The rule behind LAANC, and the one that most often determines whether a given flight is legal where you’re standing.
• 107.49 — preflight. It reaches into weather, airspace, obstacles, power, and crew briefing, which makes it the connective tissue between several exam areas.
• 107.51 — operating limitations. Altitude, speed, visibility, cloud clearance: the numbers you’re expected to know cold.
• 107.31 — visual line of sight. The default that BVLOS waivers exist to relieve.
• 107.15, 107.19 — condition for safe operation and remote PIC responsibilities. Broad, and they underpin a lot of scenario questions.
• 107.29 — night operations. Changed in 2021, and much of the older material online is still wrong about it.

Read the actual text of these. Don’t rely on someone else’s summary, including mine.

A defensible study sequence

1. The ACS. The map. Read it first.
2. AC 107-2A. The FAA explaining its own rule in plain language.
3. The sections above, in the regulation’s own words.
4. The Airman Knowledge Testing Supplement. Practice on the real figures.
5. Practice questions, continuously — not to memorize answers, but to find the gaps in the four steps above.

“Read all of Part 107” appears nowhere in that list.

The failure mode worth avoiding

There’s a reason to do enough different questions rather than drilling a small pool: memorizing a limited set teaches you the answers rather than the rules. When a question arrives worded differently from the one you memorized, the recall doesn’t transfer. Learning the rule — the actual content of 107.41, not the shape of a familiar question about it — is what survives rewording.

Which is also the honest argument for citing sources in explanations, and for getting those citations right. If an explanation names 107.49, you can open 107.49 and check it. If it names 107.49 for something that’s actually in the AIM, you’ll go looking and find nothing — which is exactly the error I had to fix in my own material.

Practice questions on this

Want to practice the whole regulations section this way? The free 90-question Regulations drill runs in your browser, and every answer names the source it comes from — so you can check any of it against the original.

Read next: 14 CFR 107.41: The Two Airspace Authorization Traps That Catch Part 107 Pilots • What 14 CFR 107.49 Actually Requires (It’s Four Checks, Not a Checklist)

Both changes, tracked: the September 2025 reweighting and the October 2026 chart-image change, with what the FAA has confirmed, what it has not, and the two questions I am still waiting on an answer to — Part 107 test updates, checked weekly. Short version: the chart change starts 26 October 2026 (corrected from 27 October in the FAA’s August 2026 advisory), and that is not the day the supplement is withdrawn — the FAA has not set that date.

← Back to the Part 107 Study Hub for the free drill and more plain-English guides to the regulations.

---

Study aid only. Not flight instruction and not legal advice. An earlier version of this page cited specific counts of how questions distributed across sections of Part 107; an independent audit found those attributions unreliable, and they have been removed rather than restated. Regulations change — always verify against current FAA publications before you fly. These are original questions written to the ACS standards from public FAA material, not FAA exam questions.