TRUST vs Part 107: Which You Need, and Why Nobody Can Replace Your TRUST Certificate

Two credentials, wildly different in effort, and a great many people hold the wrong one for the flying they are actually doing.

TRUST — The Recreational UAS Safety Test — is free, takes about twenty minutes, and you cannot fail it. Part 107 is a paid, proctored exam at a testing centre. The question is not which is easier. It is which one covers what you fly for.

The dividing line is purpose, not payment

This is where nearly everyone gets it wrong, so it is worth being blunt: the test is not whether money changed hands.

The recreational exception exists for flights whose purpose is recreation — you fly because flying is the point. The moment a flight serves a business or professional purpose, it falls outside that exception, and that is true whether or not anyone paid you.

Flights that people wrongly file under "recreational":

• Photographing your own property to put it on the market
• Shooting footage for a friend's business, for free, as a favour
• Inspecting your own roof before calling a contractor about it
• Posting flight footage to a monetised channel
• Building a portfolio to get drone work later

None of those are recreation. If the flight advances a commercial or professional aim, it is Part 107 territory.

What TRUST actually is

TRUST is training with a test attached rather than a test you can flunk. You work through the material with an FAA-approved administrator, and where you answer incorrectly you are shown the correct material and asked again. You do not leave without passing, which is the design intent — the FAA wanted the knowledge delivered, not a filter.

It is free. The FAA requires administrators to provide TRUST training and testing at no cost. Anyone charging you for TRUST itself is not selling you TRUST.

It does not expire. There is no recurrent requirement, no 24-month clock, nothing to renew.

The rule that catches people out

Here is the part worth the whole article:

Nobody keeps a copy of your certificate. The FAA cannot reissue it. Test administrators do not retain a record of it. If you lose your completion certificate, your only remedy is to sit TRUST again and generate a new one.

That is an unusual arrangement and it catches people who assume there is a registry to fall back on, the way there is for a Part 107 certificate. There isn't. The moment you finish, save the PDF somewhere durable and print a copy — cloud storage plus a physical copy in the case you actually carry. Treat it as the only copy in existence, because it is.

You must have it on you when you fly, and be able to present it on request.

Side by side

	TRUST	Part 107
Covers	Recreational flying only	Commercial and professional flying
Cost	Free	Exam fee at a testing centre
Where	Online, any approved administrator	In person, FAA-approved testing centre
Can you fail?	No — you retry until correct	Yes
Minimum age	None stated for taking it	16
Expiry	Never	Recurrent training every 24 calendar months
Lost it?	Retake — no record exists	FAA holds the record; request a replacement

That last row is the asymmetry to internalise. Part 107 is administratively heavier going in and lighter to recover. TRUST is trivial going in and unrecoverable afterwards.

Registration is separate from both

Neither credential registers your aircraft. Those are different obligations on different clocks, and the registration you need depends on which regime you fly under — including the detail that a recreationally registered drone cannot be flown under Part 107 and the registration cannot be converted.

So a full recreational setup is TRUST plus a registration covering your inventory. A full commercial setup is Part 107 plus a registration per aircraft.

If you are switching from recreational to commercial

The order that avoids rework:

1. Create your IACRA profile and get an FTN — this gates everything else. See where to take the exam.
2. Study, then sit the UAG knowledge test. The five topics that trip people up is where to start.
3. File Form 8710-13, clear the TSA check, collect your temporary certificate.
4. Re-register your aircraft under Part 107. Your existing recreational registration does not carry over.
5. Keep the TRUST certificate. It costs nothing to hold and still covers you on genuinely recreational flights.

What we could not confirm

• We could not confirm a minimum age for taking TRUST from an FAA page. Registration separately requires the registrant to be 13 or older.
• We could not confirm the current list of approved TRUST administrators. It changes; use the FAA's page rather than a third-party list, including this one.
• The recreational-versus-commercial examples above are our reading of a purpose-based test, not legal advice. Edge cases — non-profits, research, hobbyist content with incidental ad revenue — are genuinely contested, and the FAA's UAS Support Center is the place to ask about yours.
• We could not confirm whether any administrator retains certificates as a courtesy. The FAA's position is that they do not keep records, so plan on that being true.

The short version

TRUST covers flying for its own sake. Part 107 covers flying that serves a business, paid or not. TRUST is free, unfailable and permanent — and completely unrecoverable, because no one anywhere keeps a copy, so save it the moment you finish. Part 107 costs more and needs recurrent training every 24 months, but the FAA holds your record.

If you are genuinely unsure which side of the line a flight sits on, that uncertainty is itself the argument for Part 107.