It includes every operational heliport the FAA registers: all 5,675 of them in the current cycle, with the closed ones filtered out. Two things it does not include. Airports are a separate class of facility, and in a good many places, Hawaii and much of Alaska among them, the helicopter flying happens from an airport rather than from a registered heliport. Unregistered private and one-off landing sites are not here either, because no national list of them exists; they are lawful, common, and arranged directly with whoever owns the ground.

Fifty-six. Of 5,675 operational heliports in the current FAA cycle, only 56 carry a public-use designation. Every other one is private use, meaning permission from the owner comes first.

Often, yes. A helicopter does not need a marked pad to land, and off-airport landings are routine in charter work. What governs it is the ground: who owns or administers it, what local ordinance says, and whether the approach and departure paths are clear. The pads on this map are the sites the FAA has on record, not the only places a helicopter can legally touch down.

In many places you can, and 1,914 of the facilities on this map are corporate or private sites. What it takes is set locally: zoning and land use rules, neighbour notification in some jurisdictions, and a state aeronautics filing where one is required. The FAA reviews the airspace through Form 7480-1 rather than granting permission to land on your own ground.

It follows the aircraft, not a single standard. The landing areas in this dataset run from about 30 feet square up past 100 feet, and 667 of them have a pad 100 feet or longer, which is the size that suits Chinook and Skycrane class work. A light single fits comfortably in far less, but the touchdown area is only part of it: the approach and departure paths matter more than the square of concrete.

No. Hospital and medical facilities are the largest single category in this dataset at 2,970 pads, but that is a fraction of the hospitals in the country. Many receive air ambulances at a nearby field or a prepared landing zone instead of an on-site pad.

It comes from the FAA National Airspace System Resource file, the cycle effective 3 September 2026. The FAA reissues that file every 28 days, so a pad added or closed since then will not appear yet. Inspection dates on individual records are the FAA’s own and are often older than the cycle.