The 67th edition of the IATA Dangerous Goods Regulations took effect on 1 January 2026 and governs air consignments through to the end of the year. For anyone doing IATA DGR classification on a regular basis, this is the annual moment where stored determinations quietly become questionable.
This edition is a refinement year rather than a structural one. That is genuinely good news, and it is also the kind of year where changes get missed because nobody is expecting them. Here is what moved.
What changed for IATA DGR classification in the 67th edition
Two new hybrid vehicle shipping names
The dangerous goods list gained two proper shipping names under UN3166:
- Vehicle, flammable gas powered, hybrid
- Vehicle, flammable liquid powered, hybrid
Previously, hybrids sat awkwardly against entries written for single-powertrain vehicles, leaving operators to decide which described a vehicle carrying both a combustion engine and a substantial traction battery. The new names remove that ambiguity.
Relevant if you ship vehicles, powertrain assemblies or anything classified under the vehicle entries. Not relevant to most parcel shippers — but worth knowing, because the direction of travel is toward more specific entries for combined-hazard articles, and battery-plus-fuel products are increasingly common.
In-flight power outlet guidance
New guidance advises that passengers should not use in-flight power outlets during taxi, take-off and landing. The reasoning is straightforward: those are the phases where cabin crew are seated and least able to respond quickly to a device going into thermal runaway.
This is a cabin safety measure rather than a cargo packing change, so it does not alter how you classify or pack a consignment. It is a useful signal though. Regulators and carriers continue to treat lithium cells as the live risk in aviation, and the 2025 incident data supports that: the FAA verified 93 lithium battery events aboard aircraft during 2025, of which 80 were on passenger aircraft and 13 on cargo aircraft.
State and operator variations reformatted
The 67th edition standardises formatting and wording across state and operator variations, with changes touching dangerous goods in excepted and limited quantities, dry ice and hazardous waste.
It is tempting to skip a change described as formatting. Don't. Variations are where a consignment that satisfies the base regulation gets refused anyway, and a reworded variation is exactly the kind of thing a team reads once, three editions ago, and never revisits.
| Area | Change | Who should act |
|---|---|---|
| UN3166 vehicle entries | Two new hybrid proper shipping names | Vehicle and powertrain shippers |
| In-flight power outlets | New passenger guidance for taxi, take-off, landing | Airlines and cabin operations |
| State and operator variations | Standardised format and wording | Anyone shipping across multiple states or carriers |
| Excepted and limited quantities | Variation wording touched | E-commerce shippers relying on LQ relief |
| Dry ice | Variation wording touched | Cold-chain and food shippers |
| PI965–PI970 | No structural change | No action, but re-verify stored determinations |
What did not change, and why that matters
The lithium battery packing instructions kept their structure. PI965 for cells and batteries shipped alone, PI966 for packed with equipment, PI967 for contained in equipment, and the lithium metal equivalents at PI968 to PI970. The watt-hour thresholds and the state-of-charge cap for UN3480 stand.
If you ship batteries, that is a quiet year — and quiet years are where complacency accumulates. The classification you did in 2024 may still be correct, or it may have drifted for reasons that have nothing to do with the edition: a supplier changed cell chemistry, a product moved from packed-with to contained-in, a variant added capacity that crossed 100 Wh.
The limited quantity and excepted quantity provisions also held their structure, which matters to e-commerce more than most changes would, because a large share of consumer hazmat is designed specifically to sit inside those reliefs. No structural change means no repack programme this year — but it does not mean the reliefs still apply to a product whose pack size or formulation moved in the meantime.
An edition change is a prompt to re-verify, not the only reason a determination goes stale. Most of the classifications that stop being true do so because the product moved, not because the rule did.
Classify7 ruleset team, on why monitored SKUs re-run on both edition changes and product changes
Why variations matter more than the edition
Here is the uncomfortable truth about IATA DGR classification: for most parcel shippers, the base regulation is rarely the binding constraint. The variations are.
A state variation is an additional restriction imposed by a country — applying to consignments originating there, transiting or terminating. An operator variation is imposed by an individual airline. Both can be, and frequently are, stricter than the DGR itself.
The consequence is that a consignment can satisfy every criterion in the regulation and still be refused, because the carrier flying it publishes a variation that excludes it. And unlike the annual edition, variations are revised on no fixed schedule.
So the practical order of checks for an air consignment is:
- Classify against the current DGR edition — UN number, class, packing group, packing instruction.
- Check the state variations for origin, transit and destination.
- Check the operator variation for the airline actually carrying it.
- Check the forwarder or integrator's own tariff on top of all three.
Teams that stop after step one are doing the hardest part of the work and then missing the part that decides whether the parcel flies. Our comparison of dangerous cargo classification across carriers covers step four for the major US integrators.
What to actually do about it
A short, honest checklist for a parcel or e-commerce shipper working to IATA DGR classification this year:
- Confirm you are working from the 67th edition. If your reference material or your software still cites the 66th, your criteria are a year old.
- Check for addenda. IATA issues them between editions and they carry the same weight as the published text.
- Re-read the variations for your lanes. Reformatted text is still text you have not read in this form.
- Re-run stored classifications. Particularly anything relying on limited quantity relief or shipping dry ice, both of which had variation wording touched.
- Record the edition against each determination. Without it, next January you will be in exactly this position with no way to scope the work.
- Classifying against a superseded edition because the reference on the shelf is last year's.
- Reading the base regulation and ignoring the operator variation for the airline actually carrying the goods.
- Treating "no structural change to lithium" as "no need to look at battery SKUs".
- Storing determinations with no ruleset version, making the annual re-check unscopeable.
- Missing a mid-year addendum because the edition itself was checked in January and never again.
Keeping IATA DGR classification current without an annual scramble
The structural fix is to pin every determination to a versioned ruleset, then re-run when the version moves. Classify7 does this with monitored SKUs: subscribe a SKU, and when the applicable edition changes, the IATA DGR classification re-runs and you get a webhook telling you what moved and what did not.
That turns the January edition change from a catalogue-wide audit into a short list of SKUs where the answer actually differs. For the underlying battery rules, see PI965, PI966 and PI967 explained. For the road-side equivalent of this annual cycle, see our guide to the 49 CFR Hazardous Materials Table. The edition itself is available from IATA.
