Wing, Alphabet’s drone delivery company, has officially launched its Houston drone delivery service.
The service covers the Houston metro area and is being done in partnership with Walmart, making Houston the first new market of 2026 in what Wing has described as its most ambitious year of growth yet. The rollout follows years of smaller-scale operations in Texas and Georgia and comes amid a broader push to turn drone delivery from novelty into everyday infrastructure.
But if you live in or around Houston, expectations matter. This isn’t a citywide rollout, and it’s not replacing grocery shopping or Amazon Prime. At least not yet.
Instead, Houston’s launch offers a useful snapshot of what drone delivery looks like when it moves beyond pilot programs and into early mainstream use.
Where drone delivery is live in Greater Houston
As of now, Wing drone delivery is available to residents living near five Walmart Supercenters across Greater Houston:
- Walmart Supercenter #522: 14215 FM 2100 Rd, Crosby
- Walmart Supercenter #768: 1313 N Fry Rd, Katy
- Walmart Supercenter #1040: 15955 FM 529 Rd, Houston
- Walmart Supercenter #3298: 255 FM 518, Kemah
- Walmart Supercenter #4538: 6060 N Fry Rd, Katy
Coverage is limited to surrounding neighborhoods near each store. If you’re outside those zones, the drones aren’t coming to your doorstep yet, though Wing does allow residents to join a waitlist for future expansion.
For those inside the service area, the use case is narrow but clear: small, urgent items delivered quickly. Think baby wipes, toothpaste, eggs, over-the-counter medicine or a missing ingredient for dinner. Wing says deliveries can arrive in as fast as 30 minutes.
This is not drone delivery for bulk shopping, alcohol runs or multi-bag grocery orders. Packages are limited to about 2.5 pounds, and the drones lower items via a tether to a small designated drop zone roughly the size of a picnic blanket. I once got Powerade delivered by drone on a hot Texas day (over in their Fort Worth service area), and it was pretty sweet!
What the Houston drone delivery experience is actually like
Wing’s drones fly at around 150 feet and can reach speeds of up to about 60 miles per hour. They don’t land. Instead, they hover and lower the package gently to the ground before flying off.
If you’ve never seen one in person, the first delivery can feel a little surreal — a quiet hum overhead, a small aircraft pausing briefly above your yard, then gone in seconds. But Wing’s data suggests the novelty wears off quickly, which is exactly what the company wants.
In existing markets like Dallas–Fort Worth and Metro Atlanta, Wing says its top 25% of customers order three times per week, and deliveries have tripled in the past six months. That’s a key signal that drone delivery, at least in certain neighborhoods, is becoming routine rather than recreational.
Houston’s geography may help. The metro’s sprawl, car dependency and frequent last-minute errands make it a strong candidate for the kind of short-distance, point-to-point delivery drones are good at.
Still, most Houstonians won’t notice this launch at all — yet.
Don’t live in Houston? This still matters
Even if you’re nowhere near Texas, Houston’s launch is important because it reflects a broader shift in how drone delivery is being deployed.
Wing and Walmart recently announced plans to expand drone delivery to 150 additional stores over the next year, with a longer-term goal of more than 270 drone delivery locations nationwide by 2027. Newly announced and expanding metro areas include Los Angeles, Miami, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Orlando, Tampa and Charlotte.
That scale matters more than flashy demos or one-off tests. Drone delivery has spent the past decade stuck in pilot purgatory, weighed down by regulatory uncertainty, public skepticism and unrealistic expectations set during the early Amazon Prime Air era.
What’s different now is density. Wing isn’t trying to build a standalone retail empire. It’s layering drone delivery on top of Walmart’s existing physical footprint, allowing it to scale incrementally city by city.
The bigger picture for drone delivery in 2026
This launch also arrives at a critical moment for the drone industry.
Commercial drone operators are still navigating major regulatory questions, including pending FAA rules around beyond visual line of sight operations and ongoing geopolitical concerns about drone manufacturing and supply chains.
But Houston shows that drone delivery doesn’t need regulatory perfection to move forward — it just needs constrained, well-defined use cases that fit within existing rules.
Drone delivery isn’t replacing traditional logistics. It’s carving out a small but valuable niche: urgent, lightweight items delivered faster than cars can manage in congested cities.
If Houston follows the pattern seen in Dallas and Atlanta, adoption will likely grow slowly, neighborhood by neighborhood, rather than exploding overnight. And that’s probably the healthiest path forward.
And if you do live in Houston or one of the other areas Wing serves? Residents can check eligibility at wing.com/walmart or through the Wing app to see whether their address falls within the current service area.
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