156,000 Kansans live under covenants. Their Legislature passed nothing about it
156,000 Kansans live under covenants. Their Legislature passed nothing about it
2026-09-10 · Kansas · Legislation
Kansas has roughly 2,000 community associations. The 2026 session, which ran from January 12 to April 10, produced no statute that changed how any of them are governed. That is the summary of the Community Associations Institute's Kansas end-of-session report, and the numbers in it are the clearest picture available of how large this sector has become in a state that regulates it hardly at all.1
The count
CAI puts it at approximately 156,000 Kansans living in 62,100 homes within nearly 2,000 community associations statewide.
Set against a state of about 2.9 million people, that is a little over five percent of Kansans, and it is concentrated: the great majority of those associations sit in Johnson County, Sedgwick County and the Kansas City metro rather than spread evenly across 105 counties. In the newer Johnson County suburbs the local share is far higher than the statewide figure suggests.
The session, as the sector saw it
The report notes that “Kansas operates on a biennial legislative cycle, meaning legislation introduced in odd-numbered years carries over to the even-numbered years of the biennium” — which is why bills from 2025 were still alive in 2026 and why their failure at sine die was final rather than provisional.
Two bills were tracked. HB 2343, the No-Impact Home-Based Business Fairness Act, which CAI supported and which would have let no-impact home businesses operate while leaving associations able to prohibit them by covenant amendment: died in the Senate. SB 144, the rooftop solar covenant bill, on which CAI sought amendments to exclude attached units and preserve existing restrictions: died in committee.
The report also records how the session ended, in a sentence that explains a good deal about the Kansas calendar: “The final days of the legislative session were largely devoted to consideration of gubernatorial veto overrides.”
What a zero-change session actually costs
Nothing, in the short run. A Kansas board's obligations on 11 September 2026 are what they were a year earlier: the Kansas Uniform Common Interest Owners Bill of Rights Act for communities of twelve or more residential units created under it, the Apartment Ownership Act or the Townhouse Ownership Act where a declaration submitted the property to one of them, the Kansas general corporation code, and the declaration itself.
The longer-run cost shows up as accumulated distance between the statute and the sector. Kansas adopted its Bill of Rights framework effective January 1, 2011, from a 2008 uniform act. Fifteen years later it has never been amended. Over that period the sector added rooftop solar, electric vehicle charging, short-term rental platforms, drone-based roof inspection, remote and hybrid board meetings, and an insurance market that reprices annually. The Act addresses none of them, and no Kansas court has been asked to apply it to most of them.
What fills the gap
Three things, and in any given dispute one of them is doing the work.
The declaration. In Kansas this is the primary instrument for almost everything the statute does not reach. Where it is silent, the association usually has no authority — because K.S.A. 58-4617(f) allows rules affecting residential use only to implement a declaration provision or to address conduct that violates it or harms other owners' use and enjoyment.2
Corporate law. K.S.A. 58-4622 provides that the law of corporations applies except where inconsistent with the Act, so a Kansas association's meeting, notice, records and director-duty obligations run partly through Chapter 17 and partly through Chapter 58 at the same time.
The courts. With no regulator, K.S.A. 58-4621 is the only enforcement mechanism, and it carries fee-shifting in the court's discretion.3
What to do with the number
Use it in owner communication. Boards are regularly asked why the state does not simply settle a disputed question. The honest answer is that Kansas has never legislated on it, and this year did not either. Owners who understand that the declaration is the operative law behave differently in a covenant dispute than owners who assume a statute is waiting to be invoked.
Treat the 12-unit threshold as a real dividing line. A large share of those 2,000 associations are small. Communities below twelve residential units fall outside the Bill of Rights Act entirely and rely on the older property-type acts and the common law of covenants. Boards of small Kansas associations that have been reading the Act's notice, quorum and records provisions as binding on them may be applying a statute that does not reach them.
What to watch next
Watch the count itself. The De Soto growth corridor and continued platting in Johnson County and around Wichita are adding new associations each year, and the number of Kansans living under covenants is rising in a state whose statute has been static since 2011. That divergence is the story to follow.
Related Kansas HOA Topics
- Kansas 2026 End of Session report, Community Associations Institute ↩
- K.S.A. 58-4617, Rules; adoption procedures; notice — Kansas Office of Revisor of Statutes ↩
- K.S.A. 58-4621, Enforcement of rights — Kansas Office of Revisor of Statutes ↩
- KLRD memorandum on UCIOBORA and homeowners associations (corrected), full text ↩
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