Workers' Compensation Rates in Kansas (2026)

State Overview

Kansas requires all employers to carry workers' comp coverage. Rates are near the national average.

How to find a Kansas workers' comp class code from a job description

There is no Kansas workers' comp class code for a job title. NCCI files the classifications used in Kansas, and the NCCI rules are what an auditor applies, and what gets classified is the employer's business — not the separate employments, occupations or operations inside it. "Machinist", "CNC operator", "general construction labor" and "data entry" are therefore work that sits inside whichever classification describes the business, not values you can look up on their own.

NCCI publishes Kansas's classifications in the Basic Manual for Workers Compensation and Employers Liability Insurance for Kansas (no edition year — what governs in Kansas is whatever is on file with the Commissioner of Insurance at the time. K.S.A. 40-955(a) makes every insurer file every manual of classifications, rules and rates it proposes to use, and lets an insurer satisfy that obligation by authorizing the commissioner to accept the filing made on its behalf by a licensed rating organization. K.S.A. 40-955(c) then singles workers compensation out from the rest of commercial lines by making its loss cost filings prior-approval — they require the commissioner's approval before use and are deemed approved only if the commissioner has not disapproved them within thirty days of receipt — and K.S.A. 40-954(g) makes use of a filed rating plan mandatory once filed, applied uniformly for eligible risks. K.A.R. 40-3-59(a)(1) names the organization behind all of it by function rather than by title, as the advisory organization the commissioner licenses for the reporting of the claims and experience data that administer the workers compensation experience rating system). To confirm the classification for a specific business, use K.S.A. 40-955, the Kansas filing statute — the public Kansas document that says where the classification manual can actually be read, because it makes a filing and its supporting information open to public inspection once it has been filed with the commissioner, and the Attorney General's opinion on that statute records that the department holds its rate filings electronically for the public to reach at a dedicated computer terminal in its office, published by the Kansas Office of Revisor of Statutes rather than by NCCI — that is the filed authority for Kansas, and a code quoted from another state's manual is not. Kansas writes the classification argument into statute and gives it to the employer, not only to the carrier. K.S.A. 40-960 requires every rating organization, and every insurer that makes its own rates, to furnish all pertinent information about a rate to any insured affected by it within a reasonable time of a written request, and to provide a reasonable means inside Kansas for anyone aggrieved by the application of its rating system to be heard, in person or by an authorized representative, on a written request to review how that rating system was applied to their own insurance. If the request is neither granted nor rejected within thirty days, the employer may proceed as though it had been rejected; any party affected by the decision then has thirty days from written notice of it to appeal to the Commissioner of Insurance, who after a hearing may affirm or reverse. Do not reach for K.S.A. 40-959 by mistake: that appeal belongs to a member of or a subscriber to the rating organization — a carrier — over a proposed change to the organization's own filings, and not to an employer over its own classification.

Kansas is unusually explicit that the classification manual is a public record, and unusually careful about handing you a copy of it. K.S.A. 40-955(a) makes a filing and its supporting information open to public inspection after it is filed, except where that information is a trade secret or copyrighted — and the manual is NCCI's copyrighted work, so it is the copyright half of that carve-out which bites. Kansas Attorney General Opinion No. 2010-17, written in July 2010 for the Insurance Department's own general counsel, settles how far it reaches: the department may, but is not required to, refuse to provide copies of copyrighted material, and if it does refuse, the burden is on the department to establish that the records requested are protected by copyright — while it cannot refuse on trade-secret grounds at all, because the Kansas Open Records Act contains no trade-secret exception. Two further things a multi-state employer tends to get wrong here. Size does not buy you out of the filed manual: K.S.A. 40-955(i) exempts several categories of special and large commercial risks from the filing requirement, but the subsection opens with "Except for workers compensation and employer's liability line", and subsection (k) says again that the large-risk exemption does not apply to workers compensation — so a Kansas employer with a six-figure comp premium is rated off the same filed classifications as a small one. And the Insurance Department is not the agency most people land on first: its workers' compensation pages cover the Workers Compensation Fund it administers for second-injury and insolvent-employer claims, together with the loss cost multiplier each licensed carrier has on file with it, while the claims and benefits system belongs to the Kansas Department of Labor's Division of Workers Compensation. Classification and rating are the Insurance Department's half.

K.S.A. 40-955, the Kansas filing statute — the public Kansas document that says where the classification manual can actually be read, because it makes a filing and its supporting information open to public inspection once it has been filed with the commissioner, and the Attorney General's opinion on that statute records that the department holds its rate filings electronically for the public to reach at a dedicated computer terminal in its office (official Kansas lookup)

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Related Guides for Kansas Employers

• The Complete Guide to Workers' Comp Costs in 2026

  National benchmarks, the 2026 state rate-change table, and how to budget your premium.

• Compare Workers' Comp Rates by State

  Rank all states for the same class code or compare Kansas rates side by side with up to two other states.

• Workers' Comp Premium Calculator

  Estimate annual premium from your Kansas class-code rate, payroll, and experience modification factor.

• Workers' Comp Class Codes Explained

  How NCCI assigns a code to each job and why it creates a 10–25× swing in your rate.

• NCCI Class Code Lookup & Directory

  Search workers' comp class codes by keyword to find the four-digit NCCI (or Kansas bureau) code for your business — then see how it is rated above.

• Experience Modification Rate (EMR) Explained

  How your claims history becomes a multiplier that raises or lowers your Kansas premium.

• 5 Proven Ways to Lower Your Workers' Comp Premium

  Tactics any small business can use to reduce cost at next renewal — from classification audits to return-to-work programs.

• How Rates Are Calculated: NCCI vs Independent States

  Whether Kansas uses NCCI or an independent bureau — and why the difference changes how your premium is set.