Is SQL Server 2025 Standard Developer Edition Licensed for Automated Restore Testing?

First, this is a technical forum, and your question is of a legal nature. I will try to give an answer, but please bear in mind that any answer you get here is not authoritative. That is, if you are license-audited, and you refer to a forum thread, the license auditors may not take that as an excuse if they find that you are under-licensed. Thus, for something you can refer to, you would need something in writing from your local Microsoft representative.

The document you can check out is the SQL Server Licensing Guide. That is the link for the guide for SQL 2022, but I don't think there has been any major changes for SQL 2025. The scenario you describe does not seem to be described as such in the guide. However, it discusses the concept of a passive replica in failover scenarios and lists failover-clustering, availability groups and log shipping. In these cases, you can have a passive replica where you can perform certain actions such as DBCC and backups, provided that you have a subscription model or Software Assurance. Thus, a possible interpretation is that you don't need a license for this machine where you validate the backups if you have SA, but if you have a plain license, you need to get another plain license.

From people who work more with these than I do myself, I have learnt that Software Assurance is a good thing.

again this is a forum answer, and not binding. I would assume, that because the restore is to validate production data, it’s a production process vs a development or QA process, and the server needs a license. You could restore on the production server itself.