FAA Hangar Use Policy for Airport Sponsors

A hangar on a federally obligated airport is for aircraft. The FAA tolerates incidental storage; it expects the sponsor to have a program that watches the line — and to be able to show it.

Airport sponsors that accept federal grants take on obligations, and hangar use is one the FAA looks at. Here is what its hangar-use policy says, what a sponsor should be able to produce when asked, and how the accounting standard treats regulated hangar leases.

Not legal or accounting advice. Your counsel, your FAA Airports District Office and your auditor decide what complies.

What counts as aeronautical use

The FAA's Policy on the Non-Aeronautical Use of Airport Hangars (81 FR 38906, effective July 1, 2017) sets the line:

• A hangar is for aeronautical use.
• Incidental non-aeronautical items are tolerated if they do not interfere with that use — that is, they do not impede aircraft movement or access, displace aeronautical contents, or run a non-aeronautical business.
• Building an aircraft counts. Non-commercial construction of an amateur-built or kit-built aircraft is aeronautical use.

The policy is read together with FAA Order 5190.6C and Grant Assurance 22 (economic nondiscrimination).

What the sponsor should be able to show

The policy expects sponsors to have a program to routinely monitor hangar use and prevent unapproved non-aeronautical use, and FAA inspectors may ask for that program and for evidence that hangars are limited to aeronautical use (§§ VI.b, VI.e).

The policy names no inspection method and no interval. How often you inspect or ask tenants to attest is your program to define — what matters is that it exists, is applied the same way to every tenant, and leaves a record.

The same logic applies to the hangar waitlist: a written policy applied identically to everyone, and a record of every join, offer, decline and removal, is what a sponsor can stand behind if a tenant complains.

GASB 87: regulated hangar leases

For governmental sponsors, GASB Statement No. 87 has a carve-out for regulated leases — aviation leases between an airport and aeronautical users that meet the criteria of ¶ 43. For those, the lessor:

• applies none of the lessor recognition and measurement provisions (no lease receivable, no deferred inflow);
• recognises inflows (revenue) based on the payment provisions of the lease contract;
• discloses a general description of the agreements, the assets under preferential or exclusive use, the inflows recognised, and a schedule of expected future minimum payments for each of the next five years and in five-year increments thereafter (¶ 60).

Whether a given lease meets the ¶ 43 criteria is the sponsor's and its auditor's call.

Where Proprietio fits

Hangar management software runs the waitlist by the rules you write and logs every change in a tamper-evident chain you can export, keeps hangar-use inspections and attestations on the cadence you set, and builds the GASB 87 schedule of future minimum payments from your hangar leases — a starting point for your auditor.

Sources

• FAA Policy on the Non-Aeronautical Use of Airport Hangars, 81 FR 38906: federalregister.gov
• GASB Statement No. 87, ¶¶ 42–43 and ¶ 60: gasb.org

Read on 2026-10-20.