FamilyTreeDNA’s autosomal upload feature has sat unavailable since roughly June 2026, well past the July 31 return date the company originally posted. The pause isn’t a glitch. It’s the visible edge of a much bigger change: FamilyTreeDNA has quietly rebuilt its core autosomal test around a new sequencing technology that produces roughly 400 times more usable data than the microarray chips every major DNA company — including FamilyTreeDNA itself, until this year — has relied on since consumer DNA testing began. And that new technology has one hard requirement the free upload option can never satisfy: an actual physical sample.

What Actually Changed

In March 2026, FamilyTreeDNA announced that its Family Finder autosomal test had moved from microarray chip technology to Next Generation Sequencing, or NGS. Every Family Finder kit purchased since the beginning of that month has used the new method automatically, at no additional cost.¹ Dave Vance, FamilyTreeDNA’s Senior Vice President and General Manager, framed the change around two numbers: standard autosomal tests have long reported on about 0.02 percent of a person’s whole genome, while the new NGS-based test reports at high quality on about 9 percent — more than 400 times the data, from the same swab.¹

The difference comes down to how each technology reads DNA. A microarray chip works like a technician visiting a fixed list of addresses and checking what’s written at each one; a typical consumer chip checks somewhere between 400,000 and 750,000 such locations. NGS instead reads millions of DNA fragments in parallel, targeting the regions known to matter for genealogy while skipping the vast stretches of genome that are identical across nearly everyone. FamilyTreeDNA’s new test reads more than 280 million base pairs this way — still a small fraction of the full 3.1-billion-pair genome, but a genuinely different order of magnitude from what a chip test ever captured.¹

How This Compares to Whole Genome Sequencing

NGS is not the same thing as whole genome sequencing (WGS), a distinction worth understanding since some competing services, including MyHeritage’s newer DNA test, already sequence rather than chip-test their customers. Whole genome sequencing reads essentially the entire genome, including the more than 90 percent that is identical across all humans and carries no genealogical information. Because it reads everything rather than targeting specific regions, WGS typically does so at a shallower “read depth” — often scanning each location only once or twice — and relies on a statistical technique called imputation to estimate, rather than directly read, many positions.

NGS takes a narrower but deeper approach: it reads a defined set of genealogically useful regions, but reads each one repeatedly — five, ten, or more times. That repetition matters. Industry accuracy figures put a single read at roughly 93 percent confidence for a given DNA location, rising to about 99 percent at ten repeated reads.¹ A test that reads fewer places but reads each one more often can, in practice, deliver higher-confidence results for genealogy specifically than a test that reads far more of the genome only once. FamilyTreeDNA’s new approach is best understood as a middle path between the old microarray chip and full genome sequencing — substantially more data than a chip ever provided, without the cost and largely irrelevant coverage of sequencing a customer’s entire genome.

Why an Upload Can’t Get You There

This is the detail that explains the upload pause. When a person transfers DNA data from AncestryDNA, 23andMe, or MyHeritage to FamilyTreeDNA, only a data file changes hands — the physical saliva or cheek-swab sample stays with the company where the test was actually taken. FamilyTreeDNA has been direct about what that means going forward: uploaded testers “will clearly have to swab,” because no new sequencing can be performed on data that was never in FamilyTreeDNA’s lab to begin with.² The company has said it doesn’t yet know what process, if any, will eventually be offered to upload-only testers, and will announce something when it exists.²

In practical terms, the free upload pathway that has long served as many genealogists’ first, low-cost entry into a second or third DNA database now leads to a test built on technology roughly two decades old, while anyone ordering a new kit directly from FamilyTreeDNA receives the 400-times-richer version by default. That gap is a real cost, not a marketing footnote, for exactly the kind of research the DFA depends on: distant cousin matching, where more covered genome generally means more confidence in a match that a sparse chip test would have missed or mis-measured entirely.

What Existing Testers Should Actually Do

People who already have Family Finder results at FamilyTreeDNA don’t need to do anything immediately. The company has said an upgrade offer is forthcoming for existing kits, and taking a second test now would create a duplicate “twin” kit rather than a genuine upgrade — something FamilyTreeDNA has specifically asked customers not to do.¹ Deleting an existing kit to reorder is worse advice still, since it wipes out match history, tree linkages, and project memberships for the tester and everyone who has already done relationship work against that kit.¹

For anyone who has only ever uploaded a file from another company, the honest answer right now is to wait. There is no current path to the new technology short of ordering an actual Family Finder kit and providing a fresh sample.

FamilyTreeDNA has also suggested a specific priority order for anyone weighing new testing purchases: testing a parent or grandparent, if still living, should come well before testing oneself again, since older relatives carry DNA information that becomes permanently unavailable once they pass. Full and half siblings are next, since each inherited a different half of a shared parent’s DNA. Aunts, uncles, and first or second cousins round out the list of relatives worth prioritizing for anyone building out a family’s DNA coverage before that opportunity closes.¹ Anyone with an elderly or otherwise hard-to-retest relative already in FamilyTreeDNA’s system can also contact customer support directly to check whether a second, unused vial from that person’s original sample still exists in storage — FamilyTreeDNA retains a backup vial at room temperature for up to 25 years specifically for this kind of situation, which may make a fresh swab unnecessary.⁵

For Dillman Researchers

The Dillman DNA Project has long encouraged new members to test directly with FamilyTreeDNA rather than upload from elsewhere, largely because direct testing has historically produced a more complete match list. This change makes that advice considerably more consequential than before. A family group considering its first DNA contribution, or a researcher who previously uploaded a file from AncestryDNA and has been relying on that data for matching, is now working with a test that covers roughly 400 times less of the genome than what a fresh kit would return. For borderline or distant matches — exactly the kind that often confirm or rule out a suspected connection between two family groups — that gap can be the difference between a match appearing at all and one that never surfaces.

An Upgrade Worth Waiting For

FamilyTreeDNA’s own team has said plainly that they don’t yet know everything the new data will eventually make possible, and that discoveries will come as more customers’ results accumulate.¹ For a project built on confirming exactly the kind of distant, hard-to-prove relationships that separate one Dillman family group from another, that’s a reasonable trade: a temporarily paused upload feature, in exchange for a foundation of data that should make the DFA’s own DNA project meaningfully more capable of answering its open questions in the years ahead.

Sources

1. Estes, Roberta. “The New FamilyTreeDNA NGS Family Finder Test.” DNAeXplained – Genetic Genealogy. March 30, 2026. https://dna-explained.com/2026/03/30/the-new-familytreedna-ngs-family-finder-test/.
2. Estes, Roberta. “The New FamilyTreeDNA NGS Family Finder Test.” DNAeXplained – Genetic Genealogy. March 30, 2026, “Plan 4 – Uploaded From Another Vendor.” https://dna-explained.com/2026/03/30/the-new-familytreedna-ngs-family-finder-test/.
3. FamilyTreeDNA. “Autosomal DNA Uploads Are Temporarily Unavailable.” Accessed August 2026. https://www.familytreedna.com/pages/dna-uploads-temp-unavailable.
4. Rowe-Schurwanz, Katy. “How to Upload Autosomal DNA to FamilyTreeDNA.” FamilyTreeDNA Blog. April 9, 2026. https://blog.familytreedna.com/autosomal-dna-upload/.
5. FamilyTreeDNA. “DNA Testing for Ancestry & Genealogy.” Accessed August 2026. https://www.familytreedna.com/.

Note: This post was researched and written with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI). All content has been reviewed for accuracy as of August 2026. All errors are the responsibility of the author.