How to Find and Cite Kansas Law

K.S.A. and K.A.R. call for different habits when you're checking Kansas law. The regulations have 9,447 revoked sections against 9,279 in force, but the statutes have just 5 repealed sections.

Count the Kansas corpus by status and you get two different worlds. On the regulation side, 9,447 revoked sections sit next to 9,279 that are in force. On the statute side, 5 repealed sections sit against 24,284 in force. Same state, same week, completely different housekeeping. (Counts measured 2026-09-18.)

That gap is the whole story of working in Kansas. Search the statutes without thinking about status and you'll usually be fine. Search the regulations the same way and you're more likely than not to pull a rule that stopped operating years ago.

Who publishes what

Two offices, and they don't work the same way.

Statutes are the Kansas Statutes Annotated, cited K.S.A. The Office of Revisor of Statutes prepares and publishes them. After each regular session the Revisor issues cumulative supplements to the bound volumes, carrying everything enacted since the volumes were printed and showing what got repealed or amended along the way.

Regulations are the Kansas Administrative Regulations, cited K.A.R. The Secretary of State is the filing agency for every permanent and temporary regulation in the state. Proposed rules run in the Kansas Register at least 60 days before the hearing. Adopted rules run there too, and they take effect 15 days after publication unless the rule's own text names a later date.

The Register is the official state newspaper. Every Thursday, 52 weeks a year. New regulations, amended ones and revoked ones all pass through it before they reach the online K.A.R. Both the online K.A.R. and the Register now live on the Secretary of State's rules site. The most recent printed volume set is the 2022 one.

The number that isn't what it looks like

K.S.A. 60-513 is the two-year limitations statute. It opens with "The following actions shall be brought within two years" and then lists them, with a ten-year outer limit in subsection (b) for injuries that surface late.

Read that number wrong and you'll look in the wrong place. The 60 is the chapter. The 513 is not a section number. It's article 5, section 13, run together with nothing between them. K.S.A. 21-6101 is chapter 21, article 61, section 1. Nothing in the number tells you where the article stops and the section starts. You find out by looking it up.

The second trap is the year. When the version you need sits in a supplement rather than a bound volume, Kansas courts want the supplement in the cite, like K.S.A. 2024 Supp. 21-6101(a)(6). And when the legislature amended a section so recently that no supplement carries it yet, the state's appellate style guide has you point at the session law instead. Full form, K.S.A. 22-3504(d), as amended by L. 2019, ch. 59, § 15. Short form, K.S.A. 22-3504(d) (amended 2019). Leave the year out and you've cited a version that may not say what you think it says.

Regulations look simpler. A K.A.R. number is three parts split by hyphens. Agency, then article, then section. So 1-4-11 is agency 1, article 4, section 11.

Where the 9,447 bites

Kansas doesn't delete a revoked regulation. It leaves the number in place and records what happened in a history note at the end of the rule. That note carries the authorizing and implementing statutes, the effective date, every amendment, and the revocation if there was one.

So a revoked K.A.R. looks exactly like a live one until you read all the way down. Same numbering. Often the same body text. Same position in your search results.

So ask this about whatever you research with. Does a Kansas regulation come back with its history note attached, or only the operative text? If it's only the text, you're flipping a coin across 18,846 Kansas regulation sections, and the coin is weighted the wrong way.

Two smaller statuses are worth knowing about. 84 Kansas regulation sections are marked transferred, which means the content moved to a different number. 34 are marked rejected. Neither one is in force, and neither one announces itself.

A check you can run in half a minute

Take K.A.R. 115-4-3, a rule of agency 115.

The body reads like any working regulation. Now go to the history note at the end. It starts with the authorizing statutes, K.S.A. 32-807 and K.S.A. 1999 Supp. 32-937. That second one is the year form doing its job, pointing at a specific supplement. Then the note runs through a line of amendments, the last of them effective July 21, 2000.

Then the final entry. Revoked June 1, 2001.

Nothing above that line warns you. The rule has been off the books for more than two decades and it still occupies its number, still carries its full text, still answers to a search. That's the pattern, repeated across all 9,447 of them.

What else to watch

The history note is the status. If you lift a Kansas regulation out of a result list without the note, you've lifted a rule with no shelf life on it.

A revoked rule still matters for conduct that happened while it was in force. Citing one isn't the mistake. Citing one as current is.

On the statute side the failure mode inverts. Because repealed sections mostly don't carry a repealed marker in the published corpus (only 5 do, alongside 72 marked reserved), a K.S.A. number that returns nothing may be a repealed section rather than a typo on your end. Check the session laws before you assume you fat-fingered it.

And Kansas law is more than the two big books. The corpus also holds 229 constitution sections, 436 court rule sections, 56 attorney general opinions and 79 agency guidance documents. Four different kinds of authority, each carrying its own weight. A search that treats them as one pile will hand you an opinion where you wanted a statute.

Facts used

All counts are from the Kansas corpus in Vaquill AI's US primary law data, measured 2026-09-18, across 44,007 Kansas sections.

Priyansh Khodiyar

Co-Founder & CTO

Priyansh leads engineering and AI at Vaquill, from the matter workbench to drafting, document comparison, document matrix, and citation-verified research.