Which drone can carry the heaviest payload?

The short answer

If "heaviest payload drone" means a machine you can order, take delivery of, and fly on a real commercial mission this year, the honest winner is the DJI FlyCart 30. Its published spec sheet lists a 30 kg maximum payload in dual-battery mode (16 km range fully loaded, 28 km empty, top speed 20 m/s), and a 40 kg maximum in single-battery mode with range roughly halved. Those numbers come straight off DJI's product page (dji.com/flycart-30), and unlike most of the "heaviest drone" contenders below, the FlyCart is on price lists at hundreds of dealers, not a one-off engineering demonstrator.

That is a deliberately narrow reading of the question, and the rest of this page explains why. There are drones with much bigger nameplate payloads: the Griff Aviation 300 is often cited at 500 lb (227 kg), Elroy Air's Chaparral VTOL cargo aircraft is designed for a similar class, and pre-production hybrid-electric cargo airframes push past that again. But nameplate payload alone is a misleading answer to a buyer's question, because "can it carry X kg" and "can you actually get one, insure it, fly it under the current Part 107 or equivalent regime, and put X kg through it every day" are different questions with different winners.

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The commercial winner: DJI FlyCart 30

The FlyCart 30 sits in a class of one right now among mass-produced logistics drones. Its closest DJI stablemate for lift is the agricultural Agras T50, which carries a 40 kg spread tank (or 40 L spray tank at ~40 kg liquid) per DJI's Agras T50 spec sheet. That machine is not a cargo drone: it is optimized for low-altitude, straight-line spray passes over crops, with a very short mission time and no external winch. If you count agricultural payload, the T50 nudges past the FlyCart, but nobody uses a T50 to move a box across a valley, and its lift number is a tank volume, not a slung load. That is the same category confusion that would let you claim a garden hose is a firetruck.

DJI's own successor pipeline is inching upward. The DJI Matrice 4 Series and Matrice 400 are inspection and mapping platforms, not lifters (payloads measured in kilos, not tens of kilos). The FlyCart 30 remains DJI's cargo answer, and unlike the Agras it is being flown for medical resupply, mountain construction, and offshore ship-to-shore transfers, with a swappable cargo box and a 20-metre winch as the two shipping payload options.

At the FlyCart's price band (roughly $17,000 to $22,000 in Chinese dealer listings, no verified US published purchase price given the ongoing DJI import restrictions), no other on-catalog Western or Chinese drone gets you 30 kg of usable slung payload with dual-battery redundancy and a real support channel. That is why it wins the pragmatic reading of the question.

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The runners-up (the "you can actually buy it" tier)

Below the FlyCart, the honest commercial ranking looks like this.

• DJI Agras T50: 40 kg spread tank / 40 L spray tank (dji.com/agras-t50), pilot certification and operator restrictions differ from cargo (agricultural exemptions apply in most jurisdictions). Category caveat above.
• JOUAV CW-80E: JOUAV publishes a 50 kg maximum payload for the CW-80E hybrid-VTOL fixed-wing, with an 8-hour endurance figure (jouav.com/products/cw-80e). This is a surveying and border-patrol airframe, not a slung-load cargo mover, and the payload figure is internal (sensors and fuel), not carried externally.
• Amazon Prime Air MK30: about 5 lb (~2.3 kg) per Amazon's own FAA filings and the aboutamazon.com program page. Small payload by design (a single order in a padded envelope), but noteworthy for being one of very few US drones with a BVLOS waiver at scale.
• Flytrex Sky2: 3 kg per Flytrex's spec (flytrex.com); operates under an FAA Part 135 air-carrier certificate in Texas and North Carolina.
• Wingcopter 198: 5 kg per Wingcopter's product page (wingcopter.com/wingcopter-198). Fixed-wing VTOL medical logistics, used across African and European corridors.

The reason a 30 kg drone tops this list and not a 200 kg one is that the "commercial delivery drone" market as of mid-2026 is optimized around single parcels, medical vials, and light industrial spares. There is almost no willing buyer for slung 100 kg loads today outside oil-and-gas, wildfire, and military resupply, so no vendor has scaled production of a machine to serve them.

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What "beats" it, and why those don't count

Now the honest disclosure. If you strip out the words "actually buy" and "actually fly", several drones dwarf the FlyCart on paper.

• Griff Aviation 300: the Norwegian firm publishes a 500 lb (~227 kg) payload figure (griffaviation.com). The airframe is real (test-flown, certified for restricted operations in Norway), but Griff ships in single-digit annual volumes to defence and industrial clients. There is no published dealer price and no visible fleet outside custom contracts. Not a shelf product.
• Elroy Air Chaparral: hybrid-electric VTOL cargo aircraft targeting a ~500 lb payload over 300 nm (elroyair.com and Elroy's FAA Special Airworthiness Certificate filings). Elroy exited stealth years ago with USAF Agility Prime and FedEx partnerships, but the Chaparral is still in flight-test as of 2026; no unit has been sold to a commercial operator for line-haul service. This is a preview of the next tier, not a current answer.
• Malloy T650 (now under BAE Systems): the T650 heavy-lift multirotor is quoted at 300 kg payload in Malloy/BAE press material. It is a defence-first program: UK Royal Navy trials, no commercial sales channel.
• Volocopter VoloDrone: 200 kg payload in Volocopter's own material (volocopter.com/volodrone). Volocopter filed for insolvency in Germany in late 2024 and its restructured entity has not resumed VoloDrone production; the platform is effectively paused.
• EHang 216-L / EH216-L cargo: 200 kg logistics variant of EHang's certified passenger airframe (ehang.com). Certified in China but no volume deliveries as a cargo drone; the passenger version is the actual product.
• Sabrewing Rhaegal: hybrid-electric cargo airframe with a nameplate 5,400 lb payload (sabrewingaircraft.com). One flying prototype, no commercial units, and the company has had multiple leadership resets.

The pattern here matters. Every drone with a nameplate payload above ~50 kg is either (a) a defence program with no commercial sales channel, (b) a pre-production flight-test article, or (c) a company that has stalled or pivoted. Picking any of them as the "answer" to a buyer's question would be like naming the Bugatti Chiron the best-selling car in the world because it has more horsepower than a Toyota Corolla.

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Gotchas and caveats

"Payload" is not one number. DJI's own FlyCart 30 spec is 30 kg dual-battery, 40 kg single-battery. The first is what you fly; the second is what you can lift if you sacrifice redundancy. For agricultural drones (T50 and its peers), "payload" means tank capacity, which is not the same as external slung capacity. For fixed-wing VTOL surveying drones (CW-80E), it means internal sensor mass. Always ask which number is being quoted.

Regulatory ceiling. In the US, the FAA's Part 107 rule caps unwaived commercial operations at 55 lb (~25 kg) total mass, which is the drone plus the payload. A FlyCart 30 with a full payload violates Part 107 by design and needs a Part 137 (agricultural), Part 135 (air carrier), or specific Section 44807 exemption to fly commercially. That paperwork is why the mid-heavy tier is so thin in the US market. In China and the EU the ceilings differ, which is why heavy-lift drone commercial deployments concentrate in Chinese mountain-corridor logistics.

The Griff / Elroy / Malloy trap. Reviewers who publish "heaviest drone" lists routinely lead with the 227 kg or 300 kg airframes because the number is dramatic. Those numbers are real airframe specs; they are also, in commercial terms, aspirations. The Chaparral and Malloy T650 will probably matter in 2028; they do not answer a 2026 buying question.

Chinese heavy-lift peers. Beyond DJI, several Chinese firms (JOUAV, XAG, EHang, Autel) publish cargo or agricultural drones with 30 to 50 kg specs. The XAG P150 (spray) and the Autel Robotics heavy-lift line are close FlyCart peers on paper. None has the same Western dealer footprint or after-sales service network, which matters more than the last 5 kg of payload for most operators.

One-off world records don't count. A student team in Iran lifted 543 kg with a custom multirotor in a 2023 demonstration, and various academic teams have flown heavier one-off airframes. These are engineering feats, not products.

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Bottom line

The DJI FlyCart 30 is the drone with the heaviest payload you can actually buy, fly, insure, and get parts for at commercial scale in 2026, at 30 kg dual-battery. The Agras T50 matches or beats it if you count agricultural tank capacity as payload. The 200 kg to 300 kg airframes (Griff 300, Elroy Chaparral, Malloy T650, Volocopter VoloDrone) are real machines with real spec sheets, but as of mid-2026 none has crossed into repeatable commercial availability, and several of the companies behind them are in some stage of restructuring or defence-only sales. When those airframes start shipping at fleet volumes, this ranking flips; today, it does not.