A Clean Entity Screen Is Not a Covered List Clearance

If your vendor bench has been screened against the FCC's consolidated prohibited entities list and came back clean, that result is not a Covered List clearance on any router, inverter, robotic device or drone you buy. It answers a different question.

The Commission published the list to its own site on September 2, 2026 and announced it in DA 26-962, ET Docket No. 24-136, released September 9, 2026. It is a searchable page, and the public notice says what it is for: the list "combines all of the prohibited entities listed under section 2.902 of the Commission's rules ... to help equipment authorization applicants and testing facilities verify whether an entity qualifies as a 'Prohibited Entity.'" Entities.

What is in the file

As of the compiled date stamped on every row, September 8, 2026, the list runs 3,820 rows. Six of them carry the Commission's own category label FCC Covered List (section 1.50002): Dahua, Hikvision, Huawei, Hytera, Pacific Network Corp and ZTE. Another 3,808 sit under the statutory source list at section 2.902(2), pulled from the BIS Entity List, the DHS UFLPA Entity List and the other government lists section 2.902 names.

Across all 3,820 entity names, the word router does not appear. Neither does inverter, neither does uncrewed, neither does the phrase "produced in a foreign country."

An entity list has no row for a location rule

Four of the five entries added to the Covered List since December 2025 are keyed to where a thing was produced rather than to who produced it:

UAS and UAS critical components produced in a foreign country, added December 22, 2025.
Routers produced in a foreign country, March 23, 2026.
Foreign-produced power inverters, July 28, 2026, modified by DA 26-870 on August 20, 2026.
Foreign-produced advanced robotic devices, July 28, 2026.

The fifth is keyed to producers. It carries the communications and video surveillance equipment and services listed in section 1709(a)(1) of the FY25 NDAA, and it reaches DJI and Autel by producer, along with their subsidiaries, affiliates, partners, joint ventures and technology-licensing counterparties.

So the absence is structural. A consolidated list of entities has nowhere to put a rule about manufacturing location. The page is doing what it was built to do; the misreading is the defect.

The Commission drew the same line in a rule

FCC 26-50's Third Report and Order published as a final rule at 91 FR 57798 on September 11, 2026, effective October 13, 2026. On the new bar for logic-bearing hardware components at section 2.903(b)(2), the Commission wrote the distinction into the rule text:

"The prohibition applies only to logic-bearing hardware components produced by entities subject to producer/provider-based Covered List determinations; it does not apply to production location-based Covered List entries (e.g., UAS, UAS critical components, or routers produced in a foreign country) unless the producing entity is independently identified on the Covered List."

Producer-based and location-based are two separate determinations in the Commission's own drafting. An entity roster reaches one of them.

Reading the page without being misled by it

The filter is where this closes on a buyer. A search for DJI returns one row, sourced to the BIS Entity List and labeled under the statutory source list. Autel appears once the same way, as Shenzhen Daotong Intelligent Aviation Technology Co., Ltd. Both names sit on the page, so a name search finds them; the page's Covered List filter returns neither. An empty result under that filter is not a finding.

Two further properties of the file belong in any screening procedure built on it:

Hikvision occupies two rows. "Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Company Limited" sits under the Covered List category, and "Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co., Ltd." sits under three other source lists. One company, two spellings of the corporate suffix, unmerged.
The country column carries China on 1,102 rows and CN on 192, so filtering by country undercounts China by roughly 15 percent.

The Commission said as much itself. Users "are still responsible for verifying the accuracy of the consolidated list," and the list "does not contain all affiliates and subsidiaries not currently captured by the prohibited entities lists of the original agency responsible for each list."

Where the screening result has to land

Equipment on the Covered List cannot obtain an equipment authorization under section 2.903(a). An application to modify already-certified equipment has to include "a written and signed certification expressly stating that, as of the filing date, the equipment subject to the permissive change is not prohibited from receiving an equipment authorization pursuant to section 2.903." That is section 2.1043(b)(2)(i)(B), with the parallel obligation on original applications at section 2.911. The certification is about the equipment. The page answers about entities.

A clean entity screen is half the file. That half is compiled to September 8, 2026 and speaks to no later day. The other half is a production-location determination on the specific unit as delivered, measured against the domestic end product test at 48 CFR 25.101(a), for every router, inverter, robotic device and drone on the bench. That document either sits in your file or it does not, and the day a customer or an agency asks which of the two questions you answered is a bad day to find out.