Walmart tops 1 million drone deliveries as service expands
Walmart said it crossed 1 million drone deliveries, with 66 stores now serving four states and five metro markets in about 23 minutes.
Walmart’s drone push has moved past the novelty stage and into store operations. The company said on May 29 that it had completed more than 1 million drone deliveries to hundreds of thousands of customers, a scale that puts the service into the daily rhythm of 66 stores across four states and five metro markets.
For hourly associates and managers, the important part is not the headline number alone. Walmart said the average drone delivery takes 23 minutes, and more than 200,000 of those drops have happened in Texas. That speed changes the pressure points inside a store: pickup and staging teams have less room for delay, inventory accuracy matters more, and customer issue resolution gets tighter when an order is expected to leave the store and land at a home in less than half an hour.
The service now carries the kind of basic items that tend to drive repeat demand, including bananas, snacks, printer ink and cold medicine. That is a sign the program has shifted from an early experiment into a real part of Walmart’s same-day network, one that can pull on store shelves the moment a customer wants convenience. When that happens, an out-of-stock item, a missed pick or a bad on-hand count is no longer just a backroom problem. It can become a late delivery, a customer complaint and a service recovery issue in the same afternoon.
Walmart’s drone effort started with a 2020 announcement with Zipline, which the company described as a first-of-its-kind U.S. drone delivery operation. At the time, Walmart said Zipline could serve customers within a 50-mile radius of the store. Commercial Walmart-Zipline deliveries in the U.S. began in Pea Ridge, Arkansas, in November 2021.
The company later worked with DroneUp, but ended that partnership in early 2025. Wing and Zipline are now Walmart’s drone partners. On June 5, 2025, Walmart and Wing said they would expand service to 150 additional stores and aim for 270 drone delivery locations by 2027, with the potential to reach more than 40 million Americans. Walmart and Wing launched drone delivery in Houston in January 2026, using the city’s size and sprawl as another test of whether the model can scale beyond pilot programs.
The new milestone shows Walmart is building a faster last mile across store-fulfilled delivery, autonomous options and drones. For stores that participate, the effect will be measured on the floor: more time-sensitive orders, more demand for clean inventory data and a sharper line between efficient fulfillment and added workload.
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