Kansas voided city tenant-screening rules. Rental covenants were never in scope
Kansas voided city tenant-screening rules. Rental covenants were never in scope
2026-09-10 · Kansas · Legislation
Kansas cities can no longer tell a landlord to accept a housing voucher, cap a security deposit, or limit the use of credit, eviction or criminal history in screening. Senate Bill 391 passed the 2026 Legislature, was vetoed by Governor Laura Kelly, and became law over that veto. Ordinances already on the books were not grandfathered; they were voided.1
The four prohibitions
Section 1(a) provides that “no city or county shall adopt or enforce any ordinance or resolution that” does any of four things.2
It may not prohibit a landlord from refusing to lease “because such person's source of income to pay rent…consists, in whole or in part, of a financial payment or consideration from or through the housing choice voucher program, or any successor program…or any other housing assistance program in which participation by a landlord is voluntary.”
It may not restrict “a landlord's ability to use or consider income-qualifying methods, credit scores, credit reports, eviction history, property damage history or criminal history or to request such information…according to such landlord's customarily applied criteria.”
It may not limit “the amount of a security deposit a landlord may require,” and it may not require landlords “to grant an automatic right of first refusal to tenants.”
Subsection (b) supplies the retroactive edge: “Any ordinance or resolution prohibited by subsection (a) that was adopted prior to July 1, 2026, shall be null and void.”
Who is bound
“No city or county.” That is the whole scope. The act does not use the word covenant, declaration, association or common interest community, and it does not amend the Kansas Uniform Common Interest Owners Bill of Rights Act.
Where a Kansas association actually meets this statute
In one place, and it is not the one boards expect. SB 391 does not touch an association's authority to restrict leasing. Where it lands is on associations that are themselves landlords, and on the assumptions built into rental-approval provisions in Kansas declarations.
If the association leases units it owns, the constraint on its screening criteria is now federal and state fair-housing law and nothing else. The relevant floor in Kansas is the Kansas act against discrimination and the federal Fair Housing Act, neither of which SB 391 disturbs. A local source-of-income protection that had applied on top of those is gone.
If the declaration includes a tenant-approval process, look hard at its criteria. Some Kansas declarations empower a board to approve or reject a proposed tenant. Those provisions were always constrained by fair-housing law, and they still are — criminal-history screening in particular remains an area where a facially neutral blanket rule can produce a disparate-impact problem. SB 391 removed a municipal restraint on private landlords. It gave associations no new latitude, because it never spoke to them.
The pattern this completes
Three separate 2026 Kansas enactments constrain what a city may do to housing and say nothing about what a declaration may do. SB 418 preempted zoning discretion and expressly preserved covenants. HB 2603 preempted fence regulation and expressly excluded associations from the definition of the regulated entity. SB 391 preempts tenant-screening ordinances and simply does not mention associations.
For a Kansas homeowner, the practical result is that the rules governing their property are increasingly set by a private document recorded decades ago rather than by a body they can vote out. That is a fair description of the state's direction, and it is the context in which the two bills that would have constrained associations — the solar covenant bill and the home-based business bill — both died without a floor vote in the same session.
A board's options
Check whether your city had one of these ordinances. If it did, it is void, and any association process that referenced compliance with it now references nothing. That is a document-review item, not a policy debate.
Do not tighten leasing rules on the strength of this statute. A rental restriction adopted as a rule rather than a declaration amendment must still satisfy K.S.A. 58-4617(f), which permits rules affecting residential use only to implement a declaration provision or to address conduct that violates the declaration or harms other owners' use and enjoyment.3 SB 391 does not supply the missing declaration language.
What to watch next
Watch for a challenge to the retroactive voiding in subsection (b). Kansas cities that adopted source-of-income protections have had them nullified by statute rather than repealed by their own councils, and home-rule arguments under Article 12 of the Kansas Constitution are the obvious response. Nothing has been filed that we could identify.
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