Kansas AG: anyone can charge a homeowner to handle their storm claim
Kansas AG: anyone can charge a homeowner to handle their storm claim
2026-09-10 · Kansas · Regulation
In a state that paid out $879 million in storm claims in a single year, Kansas does not license the people who knock on a homeowner's door offering to negotiate their claim for a fee. The Attorney General said so in writing on September 18, 2025, in an opinion the Insurance Commissioner herself requested.1
The question and the answer
Commissioner Vicki Schmidt asked “whether the Public Adjusters Licensing Act prohibits residential public adjusting, or whether this practice is unregulated by the Act.” Attorney General Kris W. Kobach and Assistant Solicitor General Adam T. Steinhilber answered in a synopsis worth quoting in full:
“The Public Adjusters Licensing Act defines public adjusting only in the context of helping to settle first-party claims under commercial lines insurance contracts. Because the Act has a narrow focus and does not prohibit public adjusting for claims under other types of insurance contracts, the Act neither regulates nor prohibits public adjusting for claims arising under residential lines insurance contracts.”1
Why the statute reads that way
The definition at K.S.A. 40-5502(l) covers an individual who, for compensation, “aids or acts on behalf of an insured in negotiating for, or effecting the settlement of, a claim for loss or damage covered by and limited to commercial lines insurance contracts.” Every branch of the definition ends in the same phrase.
The opinion refuses to read a prohibition into that silence: “There is no corresponding prohibition against, nor any references to, public adjusting outside commercial lines insurance contracts. There also is not any provision or indication that the Legislature intended to prohibit public adjusting for all types of claims except for first-party claims under commercial lines insurance contracts. Accordingly, it would be inappropriate to read such a prohibition into the Act.”
The two limits that remain
The opinion closes by naming what still applies: “public adjusting outside the Act is not wholly unrestrained. Public adjusting, whether under the Act or not, cannot cross over into the unauthorized practice of law, and public adjusters are subject to liability under the Kansas Consumer Protection Act if they engage in unlawful conduct toward consumers.”
Those are after-the-fact remedies. Neither requires anyone to hold a licence before knocking on a door.
The line that runs through a Kansas community association
This opinion cuts a Kansas condominium or townhouse community into two regulatory halves, and the dividing line is which policy is being adjusted.
The association's master policy is ordinarily a commercial lines contract. Someone adjusting a claim on it for a fee is inside the Act and must be licensed under K.S.A. 40-5503. A board can and should ask to see that licence, and can verify it with the Kansas Department of Insurance.
An individual unit owner's HO-6 or a homeowner's HO-3 is residential lines. Someone adjusting that claim for a fee needs nothing at all. No licence, no bond, no continuing education, no fee cap, no contract-form requirement, no cancellation period — because none of the Act's duties and restrictions attach to a person the Act does not define as a public adjuster.
In practice the same person often solicits both, in the same neighbourhood, after the same hailstorm.
What a board can do about it
Tell owners the two halves are different. This is the single most useful thing an association can communicate after a storm, and it costs nothing. Owners reasonably assume that a person offering a regulated-sounding service is regulated. In Kansas, on their own policy, that assumption is wrong as a matter of published Attorney General opinion.
Verify the licence on anything touching the master policy. The association is the insured there, the dollars are larger, and the licensing requirement is real. A board that engages an unlicensed person to adjust a master-policy claim has a problem beyond the claim itself.
Watch the unauthorized-practice line. The opinion flags it deliberately. An adjuster who interprets policy language, advises on legal rights, or takes an assignment of the claim is moving toward the practice of law, and the Kansas Legislature separately addressed post-loss assignments in the 2026 session through SB 55, which prohibits soliciting or accepting an assignment of post-loss insurance benefits.2 A solicitation that asks an owner to sign over benefits should stop the conversation.
Do not sign on behalf of owners. A manager or board member who signs a contingency-fee adjusting agreement covering individual units is contracting for people who did not authorise it and whose policies the association does not hold.
Why this landed when it did
The Commissioner did not ask this question in the abstract. Kansas paid out $879,074,368.54 on 82,498 storm claims in 2025, a 99 percent increase over 2023, and Sedgwick County alone accounted for more than $328 million of it.3 A market that size, with no licensing floor on the residential side, is the reason a regulator writes to the Attorney General.
What to watch next
Watch for a licensing bill in 2027. The opinion is a clean statement that the gap is legislative rather than interpretive — the Attorney General has said the Act cannot be read to close it — and that is usually the precondition for a Department-requested bill.
Until one passes, the position is settled and simple: on a Kansas homeowner's own policy, the person offering to handle the claim answers to no regulator before the fact.
Related Kansas HOA Topics
- Kansas Attorney General Opinion No. 2025-22 (September 18, 2025) ↩
- SB 55, prohibiting solicitation or acceptance of assignment of post-loss insurance benefits — Kansas State Legislature ↩
- Kansas storm claims topped $850 million in 2025 — KWCH, reporting Kansas Insurance Department data, March 5, 2026 ↩
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