Editor’s note: This article is a deep dive into the FCC’s Report and Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (FCC 26-64), adopted Sept. 30, 2026, and released Oct. 1, along with the Commission’s Sept. 30 open meeting, post-meeting press conference and commissioners’ written statements.
The FCC voted 2-1 on Wednesday to declare that spectrum licenses no longer turn privately built towers into “major Federal actions” under the National Environmental Policy Act, taking most sites that don’t require Antenna Structure Registration out of NEPA review. Chairman Brendan Carr pitched it as billions in savings. The Commission’s own regulatory impact analysis, buried at the back of the order, puts the NEPA savings at about $33 million a year — and the bigger fight, over Section 106 historic and tribal review, is already teed up.
“With today’s action, we finish the job here at the FCC,” Carr said at the Commission’s Sept. 30 open meeting. “We confirm that the FCC’s NEPA regulations do not apply to private wireless infrastructure decisions made by private companies. This one reform will make a big difference.”
He brought examples. In Arizona, Carr said in his written statement, “A crew had to wait more than four years for NEPA clearance to build a 100-foot structure — not in any sort of sensitive area but on top of previously disturbed dirt near a gas station and public storage facility.”
The North Carolina case was stranger. “In another case involving a monopole in North Carolina, NEPA was weaponized as part of a family feud,” Carr wrote. “The whole saga ended up consuming nearly half a decade and burned through thousands of pages of pleadings, the submission of an environmental assessment along with multiple amendments, and even a consultation with the Fish & Wildlife Service. After it was all said and done, the FCC found that the tower would have no significant impact.” His verdict: “It was all just needless cost and needless delay in service of environmental larping.”
Carr and Commissioner Olivia Trusty voted for the Report and Order in WT Docket No. 25-217. Commissioner Anna Gomez dissented from it but joined a unanimous vote on the accompanying Further Notice on historic preservation. The order, FCC 26-64, was released Oct. 1. Asked after the meeting whether anything substantive had changed from the draft circulated Sept. 9, Wireless Telecommunications Bureau Chief Joel Taubenblatt said there were “no changes to major bottom lines,” and the released text bears that out: the definitions, carve-outs, deadlines and cost figures are unchanged.
Why 200 feet is now the number that matters
The old rules presumed, without analysis, that FCC licensing made deployments federal actions, then excused most of them unless a site hit one of the familiar checklist triggers — wilderness, listed species, historic properties, floodplains, wetlands, residential white lighting, RF exposure. The new rules ask the threshold question first, and answer it for most of the industry: deployments tied to geographic area, site-based, unlicensed and licensed-by-rule spectrum, plus satellite earth stations, are not major Federal actions unless they require ASR. Space operations are out entirely.
Part of the Commission’s reasoning is that carriers often don’t own the towers they use: the order finds that “the majority of towers are owned or operated by independent tower companies rather than Commission licensees,” citing Wireless Estimator’s Top 100 Tower Companies list.
ASR generally applies to structures over 200 feet or near airports, and those stay in the FCC’s environmental notification process under its separate authority over hazards to air navigation. That process gets lighter too. Local public notice is eliminated, leaving 30 days of national notice on the FCC’s website. The comment period on a submitted Environmental Assessment drops from 30 days to 20. Third-party petitions must offer “specific, detailed evidence” of a likely significant effect, are capped at five pages plus 15 of support, and must be resolved within 90 days. Lighting changes trigger new notice only if they add red steady-burning lights. ASR applicants claiming a categorical exclusion must now certify that none of the extraordinary circumstances apply. New or substantially modified towers over 450 feet still need an Environmental Assessment because of migratory birds.
Those procedural changes won’t arrive with the headline change. Under the order’s ordering clause, only the new major Federal action definition and its carve-outs take effect 30 days after Federal Register publication. Everything else — the notice, petition, timeline, page-limit and emergency provisions — waits for Office of Management and Budget approval under the Paperwork Reduction Act and a Wireless Bureau announcement. The ASR changes then take effect 30 days after the Bureau says its ASR system has been updated.
Private money matters as well. Under the order, FCC funding counts toward a federal action only if it is “expressly directed towards and conditioned on the construction of the particular communications facility,” which leaves out support from existing programs for underserved areas.
The numbers Carr didn’t lead with
“Today’s vote and related reforms are expected to save over $2 billion in compliance costs while zeroing out over $7 billion in economic harm over the next ten years,” Carr said. Those figures come from a NERA Economic Consulting study filed by CTIA, which the FCC’s Sept. 30 news release calls “industry projections,” and they cover both the NEPA and historic preservation rules. The historic preservation rules haven’t changed. The FCC’s own Sept. 9 fact sheet blurred that line, attributing “over $2 billion in permitting costs” to “the Commission’s legacy NEPA rules” alone.
The released order puts the two sets of numbers side by side. In paragraph 80, it cites the industry’s $2.2 billion in compliance costs and $7.5 billion in economic losses, then states its own estimate in the next sentence.
The Commission’s own regulatory impact analysis, in Appendix E of the order, puts annual savings at roughly $33 million across its three categories. Nearly all of it — $32.2 million — comes from no longer requiring routine NEPA assessments, at an average of $2,374 per macro site. It puts the present value of all the NEPA changes over 2026 through 2030 at $157.4 million to $169.5 million, and calls that conservative because it doesn’t count the value of faster deployment. Even annualized, the gap is wide: the industry figure works out to about $220 million a year across both sets of rules, against the FCC’s roughly $33 million for NEPA. Carr also put it in smaller terms, saying the change “will translate into millions of dollars in savings each year from forgone environmental assessments and other paperwork requirements.”
The same appendix shows where the “more than 14,800 wireless deployments” figure comes from: an estimated 13,262 macro sites plus 1,617 small cell sites a year, which add up to 14,879. The macro number rests on WIA’s counts of new macro sites — 35,300 in 2023, 3,250 in 2024 and 6,800 in 2025. The FCC labels the 2023 figure “a statistical outlier” but averages it in anyway. Without it, the average is closer to 5,000 new macro sites a year, and the analysis’s estimate that 88 percent of new macro sites avoid ASR shrinks with it.
The appendix also shows how rarely the full process was triggered below the ASR line. From 2023 through 2025, 116 towers required an Environmental Assessment, and only 21 of them — about seven a year — didn’t need registration. And when one was filed, the FCC moved quickly: the order says 27 Findings of No Significant Impact issued between July 2024 and January 2025 averaged 12 days after a complete assessment came in, and that most longer delays trace to missing information from applicants.
Read plainly, the reform’s value for most sub-200-foot sites lies in eliminating the routine checklist and the exposure to the occasional multi-year fight, not in avoiding a steady stream of Environmental Assessments.
Section 106 is the next fight
RF exposure limits and Endangered Species Act obligations still apply regardless of NEPA status. So does Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, including tribal notification under the Nationwide Programmatic Agreements. For many sub-200-foot builds, that was already the longer pole in the tent.
The Further Notice shows where the Commission is heading. The FCC has treated geographic area licenses as Section 106 “undertakings” because of the “limited approval authority” in Section 1.1312 of its NEPA rules, which required environmental review to be finished before a tower went up. The Report and Order removes that authority. The Further Notice then asks whether the order’s actions “merit reconsideration of the determination that Commission spectrum licensing activities are subject to NHPA review.” The rule the old position rested on is on its way out.
The Further Notice also asks about batching submissions, bringing noncompliant towers into compliance for collocation, and the 45-day tribal review process. On that last point, the FCC says its staff made about 20,539 follow-up phone calls to tribes between July 2018 and January 2026, including 1,669 in 2025, and asks whether the call step is needed. Comments are due 30 days after Federal Register publication, replies 45 days after.
Gomez wants reform, just not this much
“While the need for streamlining review processes is clear, we cannot abdicate our responsibility with regard to our licensees,” Gomez said. She dissented, she said, “because I believe our proposed NEPA rules allow our interpretation of MFAs to swallow the rule.” She thanked Carr for edits to the item, and at the press conference she made clear her quarrel was with scope. “There are a lot of horror stories about delays and costs,” she said. “I really do think that we could use some reform.” The goal, she said, should be to “make sure that what we do really targets possible harms to the environment.”
Trusty said that “in some cases, environmental reviews have added as much as five years to the completion timeline for a broadband build.” Her written statement footnotes that figure to the NERA study filed by CTIA.
Industry cheers, and the courts wait
“America’s communications infrastructure workforce is ready to build, and for years the pace of federal environmental review has slowed that work down,” said Todd Schlekeway, president and CEO of NATE: The Communications Infrastructure Contractors Association. “The Commission’s order fixes that by aligning its NEPA rules with the amended statute and clarifying which actions actually warrant federal review. NATE member contractor firms and small businesses absorb the cost of every unnecessary delay, and this decision gives them the certainty they need to plan, hire, and get crews in the field.” WIA President and CEO Patrick Halley called it “an important step” toward “smart-build principles.”
Opposition in the record came from attorneys general in 15 states and the District of Columbia, the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers, the National Congress of American Indians, individual tribes, bird conservation groups and astronomers. The last time the FCC pulled wireless sites out of review, in 2018, the D.C. Circuit vacated the small cell portion in 2019 in United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians v. FCC, faulting the Commission’s public interest justification. The final order goes further than the draft did on that point. It moves its answer to Keetoowah out of a footnote and into the body of the order, and adds an express finding that the new framework serves the public interest. It also includes a severability clause so that if a court strikes one piece, the rest stands.
What it means on the ground
Until the new definition takes effect, 30 days after Federal Register publication, the existing process stands. After that, a privately financed sub-200-foot site drops the NEPA checklist but still runs Section 106, still notifies tribes, still checks species and habitat, and still documents RF compliance.
Carr’s Arizona example was a 100-foot structure that waited more than four years beside a gas station. Under the new rules, a build like it won’t need NEPA clearance at all. Whether it will clear Section 106 any faster is the question the FCC just put out for comment.
| Item | Under the new rules | Takes effect |
| WHAT CHANGES | ||
| Sites tied to geographic area, site-based, unlicensed or licensed-by-rule spectrum that don’t require ASR | Not a major Federal action; outside NEPA | 30 days after Federal Register publication |
| Satellite earth stations that don’t require ASR | Not a major Federal action; outside NEPA | 30 days after Federal Register publication |
| Launch, deployment and operation of space stations | Not a major Federal action; outside NEPA | 30 days after Federal Register publication |
| FCC funding | Counts toward a federal action only if directed to and conditioned on building the specific facility | 30 days after Federal Register publication |
| Historic properties and Indian religious sites as NEPA triggers | Removed from the NEPA checklist; handled through Section 106 instead | After OMB approval and Bureau notice |
| Bureau’s power to order an EA on its own motion | Eliminated | After OMB approval and Bureau notice |
| ASR applicants claiming a categorical exclusion | Must certify no extraordinary circumstances apply; keep records 6 years | After OMB approval; then 30 days after Bureau notice of ASR system update |
| Local public notice for ASR applications | Eliminated; 30 days of national notice on FCC website remains | After OMB approval; then 30 days after Bureau notice of ASR system update |
| Comment period on a submitted EA | Reduced from 30 days to 20 | After OMB approval; then 30 days after Bureau notice of ASR system update |
| Lighting changes on ASR towers | New notice only when adding red steady-burning lights; on towers over 450 feet, an EA only when adding steady red lights | After OMB approval; then 30 days after Bureau notice of ASR system update |
| Third-party petitions | Specific, detailed evidence required; 5 pages plus 15 of support; resolved within 90 days | After OMB approval and Bureau notice |
| Staff review of EAs | Deficiency notice within 30 days and decision within 60 days of public notice; one-year outer deadline | After OMB approval and Bureau notice |
| EA length | 75 pages, excluding citations and appendices | After OMB approval and Bureau notice |
| Environmental Impact Statements | Prepared by applicant; 150 pages (300 if complex); two-year deadline | After OMB approval and Bureau notice |
| Other agencies’ categorical exclusions | FCC may adopt them | After OMB approval and Bureau notice |
| Emergencies | Shortened EA: purpose and need, effects, mitigation, alternatives | After OMB approval and Bureau notice |
| WHAT STAYS THE SAME | ||
| Towers over 200 feet or near airports (ASR) | Remain subject to FCC environmental notification and review | Already in effect |
| New or substantially modified towers over 450 feet | Still require an EA because of migratory birds | Already in effect |
| Section 106 historic preservation review | No material change; Nationwide Programmatic Agreements remain | Already in effect |
| Tribal notification and 45-day review | Unchanged; under review in the Further Notice | Already in effect |
| RF exposure limits | Apply whether or not a site is a major Federal action | Already in effect |
| Endangered Species Act | Applies to actions the FCC authorizes, regardless of NEPA status | Already in effect |
Source: FCC Report and Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, FCC 26-64, WT Docket No. 25-217, released Oct. 1, 2026, including the final rule text in Appendix A and the effective-date provisions in paragraphs 206 and 221. OMB = Office of Management and Budget review under the Paperwork Reduction Act.
