Arkansas Drone Laws (2026): Privacy, Hunting & Shoot-Down Rules

Arkansas has no authority over where a drone may fly; the FAA controls that airspace nationally. What Arkansas regulates is conduct, and since 2025 that includes a dedicated criminal and civil privacy law aimed squarely at drone-captured images, layered on top of an older voyeurism statute that already named drones by name.

This guide is part of our Drone Laws by State series, which also covers how state law intersects with surveillance camera laws more broadly.

Jurisdiction scope: This article addresses Arkansas state law on private drone surveillance, the state's video voyeurism statute, hunting regulations, and the federal baseline that applies in every state. It does not address a civilian's right to record police, which is covered separately in our guide to recording laws.

Does the FAA or Arkansas control where a drone can fly?

The Federal Aviation Administration is the exclusive regulator of the airspace itself. Under 14 CFR Part 107, a commercial or non-recreational drone operator must hold a Remote Pilot Certificate, register the aircraft, fly at or below 400 feet, and stay within visual line of sight; recreational flyers register and follow a similar, separate framework under 49 U.S.C. Section 44809. Arkansas has no power to add its own altitude limits, registration rules, or pilot licensing on top of that federal scheme. What Arkansas can and does regulate is what a person does with a drone once it is airborne over Arkansas soil: whether they are spying on a neighbor, capturing images of private property, or interfering with wildlife.

Arkansas's 2025 drone privacy law: the Arkansas Privacy Act

Signed by the governor on April 14, 2025, and known as Act 597, the Arkansas Privacy Act rewrote Arkansas Code Section 5-60-103 and added three new sections addressing what a person may lawfully do with a drone-captured image. Under Section 5-60-103(e), a person commits unlawful use of an unmanned aircraft system related to images if they purposely use a drone to capture an image of an individual or private property with the purpose of conducting surveillance on the person or property in that image. A first offense is a Class C misdemeanor. A separate, newly created Section 5-60-126 makes it a Class C misdemeanor merely to possess such an unlawfully captured image, and a Class B misdemeanor to disclose, display, distribute, or otherwise use it, with each image treated as a separate offense. The law defines "image" broadly to include not just video and photographs but sound, thermal, infrared, and other electromagnetic data captured about a person or their property.

Act 597 also created a civil remedy at Arkansas Code Section 16-118-119. An owner or tenant of private real property who was surveilled or photographed on that property in violation of Section 5-60-103, under circumstances giving them a reasonable expectation of privacy, can sue to enjoin the conduct and recover $5,000 in statutory damages for all images captured in a single episode, or $10,000 for a single episode of unlawful disclosure or distribution, plus court costs and attorney's fees. If the person who captured the image disclosed it with malice, meaning a specific intent to cause substantial harm, the property owner can instead pursue actual damages. A lawsuit must be filed within two years of the capture or disclosure.

The law is not absolute. A new Chapter 118 of Title 27, at Arkansas Code Section 27-118-101, lists roughly two dozen circumstances in which capturing an image by drone remains lawful in Arkansas even without the subject's consent, including images of one's own property, utility and pipeline inspection, licensed real estate marketing where no person is identifiable, agricultural and wildlife research conducted through a university or the Arkansas State Game and Fish Commission, insurance investigation, and a range of law enforcement uses covering crime scenes, missing-person searches, high-risk tactical operations, and images captured under a valid search warrant.

Does police need a warrant to fly a drone over Arkansas property?

Arkansas has no separate, freestanding statute requiring a warrant before every law enforcement drone flight, unlike states such as Illinois or Minnesota. Instead, the lawful-use list in Section 27-118-101 gives police several ways to lawfully capture images by drone: pursuant to a valid search warrant executed by specified agencies, in immediate pursuit of a suspect, at a crime scene, in a missing-person search, during a high-risk tactical operation, or in a declared emergency, none of which independently requires a warrant. Outside of those enumerated categories, an Arkansas resident's claim that police unlawfully surveilled them by drone falls back on ordinary Fourth Amendment analysis. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that aerial observation of a yard from public airspace by a manned aircraft, without a warrant, generally does not violate the Fourth Amendment. See California v. Ciraolo, 476 U.S. 207 (1986) (fixed-wing flyover at 1,000 feet); Florida v. Riley, 488 U.S. 445 (1989) (helicopter at 400 feet). Neither case involved a drone, and lower courts have not settled whether the same reasoning extends to a small drone hovering much closer to a home, so an Arkansas resident's factual circumstances matter more than any bright-line rule.

Trespass, nuisance, and hunting with a drone

Outside the privacy statute, ordinary Arkansas trespass and nuisance law can still apply to a drone that repeatedly loiters low over a neighbor's land or interferes with the use and enjoyment of the property, though Arkansas courts have not squarely decided how far a landowner's rights extend into the airspace above their land for drone purposes. Arkansas also regulates drones through its wildlife code. Arkansas Game and Fish Commission Code 05.07, "Hunting Wildlife From Aircraft Prohibited," makes it unlawful, as a Class 2 violation, to hunt, drive, herd, or harass wildlife from or with an aircraft. The rule predates widespread civilian drone use and does not name drones specifically, but the Commission applies it to a drone used to scout, locate, or push game toward a hunter, the same approach taken by neighboring states that have adopted drone-specific hunting bans.

The federal shoot-down rule: destroying a drone is a felony

A persistent misconception is that a landowner may legally shoot down a drone flying over their own property. Federal law says otherwise. The FAA classifies drones as aircraft within the National Airspace System, which means 18 U.S.C. Section 32, the federal Aircraft Sabotage Act, applies to them: willfully damaging, destroying, or disabling a drone is a federal felony carrying up to 20 years in prison, regardless of whose property the drone is over, because the federal government, not the landowner, controls the airspace. In practice, federal prosecutors rarely bring a full Section 32 charge over a neighbor's hobby drone; the widely publicized 2015 "Kentucky Drone Slayer" case, in which a Hillview, Kentucky, man shot down a neighbor's drone and had state criminal-mischief charges dismissed by a local judge, is often cited as evidence that shooting down a drone is low-risk. It is not. The drone owner's related federal civil suit, Boggs v. Meredith, was dismissed in 2017 for lack of federal jurisdiction without any court ever ruling on whether the shoot-down itself was lawful, and no state, including Arkansas, has passed a law authorizing landowners to disable a drone over their own property.